By Tan Sri Ramon Navaratnam

The clear announcement yesterday by the Minister of Finance Tengku Dato' Sri Zafrul of his 6R economic recovery plan is most welcome, especially at this time of concern and anxiety.

The first 4Rs–covering Resolve, Resilience, Restart, and Recovery, are presently on track and could be achieved with a stronger political will to move faster.

These aspirations will raise our hopes and expectations for better economic growth, fairer income distribution and higher human welfare for all Malaysians regardless of race.

But to fully achieve all these six goals and especially the last 2Rs–Revitalize and Reform, our present economic model must be transformed significantly!

We cannot do more of the same. We cannot carry on with business as usual. Some old norms must be radically reformed and new thinking adopted to be more successful.

Uncertainty

The global economic recession, our own impending recession and the COVID-19 crisis have all caused a great deal of uncertainty regarding our future well-being. The political turmoil currently experienced in our country has further eroded our confidence and reduced our hopes for brighter future. Hence the Finance Minister's 6R recovery plan is very welcome, as a light in the dark tunnel.

However, the 6R plan together with the 2021 Budget and the now postponed 12th Malaysia Plan cannot and should not be the repeat of old norm policies. 

The world economies, including Malaysia's, are facing socioeconomic crisis largely due to wrong policies in the past and bad implementations. Some of these weak policies and mistakes are as follows:

1. The wide and worsening unsustainable income gaps between the rich and the poor.

The new norm economic model should aim to narrow this unfair income and large wealth disparities. This would mean taxing the very rich much more in order to raise the standards of living of the poor who are struggling to make ends meet.

2. The basic needs of the rakyat have to be more adequately met in the recovery plan and especially in the new 12th Malaysia Plan. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed more starkly the large numbers of poor, hungry and homeless among us, who are embarrassingly better off. In fact, the cramped and dirty housing provided by wealthy contractors has largely caused COVID-19 to spread among us all. Surely we could do better to build more low-cost but healthy houses for the poor!

3. Budgets and five-year plans are not exclusively concerned only about economic growth and raising incomes. More importantly, budgets and five-year plans are meant to improve the quality of life for all Malaysians, Hence our human rights, our many unfulfilled social reforms and our environment have to be promoted, protected and enhanced more effectively. This can easily be achieved by adopting and seriously implementing the many United Nations proposals that we have been somewhat neglecting in the past. This includes the UN's17 Sustainable Goals that we should implement with a stronger political will.

Revitalise and Reform?

4. The 6Rs are great aspirations, but the question in most of our thinking minds is: will the new government be really able to implement the last two most important two Rs: to Revitalize and Reform?

Revitalization and reforming the economy would or should mean inter alia:

a. Restructuring our education system to make it more internationally competitive;

b. Reforming our labor policies especially in regard to employing such large numbers of foreign labor;

c. Reorganizing the public services to make them much more multiracial and multireligious to better reflect our national population composition;

d. Redefine the role and scope of the private sector. Should we depend so much on government-linked companies that squeeze out the business sector?

e. Ensure our national Institutions are more professional, honest and fair in upholding a more efficient administration that is free from politicization and corruption.

Conclusion

The government's 6R strategy is encouraging, promising and welcome and needs our full support.

But unless the government's new 6R socioeconomic strategy fully takes into account the above and many other public policy issues that can be discussed more openly and widely with the NGO's, universities, businesses and community leaders, we will not progress much.

Instead, we will stick to the Old Normal and play the old records, and lose our momentum to move to the New Normal and the new socioeconomic model that we all desperately need to move ahead faster for the benefit of all Malaysians, especially the poor in our society!

(Tan Sri Ramon Navaratnam is the Chairman of ASLI Center for Public Policy Studies.)