Everyone Wants Sex, But Not Everybody Have It

Malaysians who find themselves affording less than their contemporaries overseas have distorted and inefficient markets, lack of competition, low wages and a weak ringgit to thank for their poor purchasing power, which in the case of KL, is only 34 per cent that of New York.

Despite government assurances stating that inflation is under control, Malaysians are becoming increasingly restive over the cost of goods in relation to wages, especially those who are able to compare the corresponding price-to-wage ratios in developed economies.

Malaysians who have experienced working and living abroad often experience sticker shock when they come back and see prices in KL.

“Oh my God, a Tiramisu is RM15!” said Calvin Lee, a Malaysian who has lived in Sydney, Singapore and now London, referring to what cafes in KL are charging for a slice of cake as compared to about GBP5 (RM25) in London.

Aidi Zalman, a consultant who studied in the UK, told The Malaysian Insider that salaries in London could go much further than KL.

He had worked part-time as a waiter in London and noted that a single day’s wages of about GBP50-60 was already enough for him to buy a pair of branded shoes and even a low-end iPod, a concept unthinkable for local waiters.

“GBP100 can feed two apartments of students for a week,” he said. “Here you can spend RM100 and get hardly anything.”

“I hate it when politicians make stupid statements like Malaysia is cheap,” said Edward Seah, an engineer who has previously worked in Singapore and the US. “Prices might seem cheap when you convert it to US dollars yes, but then we should also convert our salaries to US dollars.”

Victor Wong, a Malaysian expat in Sydney, said that Australians get more mileage out of their money.

A report by Swiss bank UBS AG shows KL residents have to work 22 minutes to afford a loaf of bread as compared with 18 minutes in Los Angeles.

He gave the example of clothes where he said he can get a good quality shirt for about AUD100 but would need to spend about RM200 to get similar quality in KL.

Wong pointed out that even Asian food could be more affordable for those living in Sydney than KL.

“You pay RM15 for a bowl of soup noodles in KL shopping centres but only AUD10 in Sydney shopping centres,” he said.

The 2010 Prices and Wages report by Swiss bank UBS AG show that residents in KL have only 33.8 per cent the purchasing power of their counterparts in New York, 42 per cent that of London, 33.7 per cent that of Sydney, 32.6 per cent that of Los Angeles and 31.6 per cent that of Zurich.

The same study showed that on average, KL residents have to work 22 minutes to afford a loaf of bread as compared with 18 minutes in Los Angeles, 16 minutes in Sydney, 15 minutes in Tokyo and 12 minutes in Zurich.

The figures grow much worse for imported items. To buy an iPod Nano, a KL worker would have to labour a whopping 52 hours as compared with just 9.5 hours in Los Angeles and Sydney, 12 hours in Tokyo and nine hours in Zurich.

A check on salaries and prices in selected developed country cities by The Malaysian Insider showed that despite being touted as one of the world’s least expensive cities, KL residents pay as much or even more for chicken, broadband, cars and mobile phones as a percentage of their income.

Communications, for example, is one area where Malaysians are paying notably more than residents in developed countries even after currency conversion.

A 5Mbps broadband package costs RM149 in KL while in London, a 10Mbps package would cost GBP13.50, in Melbourne a 5-8Mbps package costs AUD40 and in New York, a 7Mbps service costs USD41.95.

Those who want to buy an iPhone 4 in KL, meanwhile, would have to pay RM1990 with a basic 24-month contract while in London, residents can get an iPhone 4 for just GBP199 with a basic 24-month contract and in Singapore, it costs just SGD210 with a basic contract.

Maybank Investment Bank chief economist Suhaimi Ilias said that what is important is local perception and not official inflation figures which claimed that the inflation rate in Malaysia was only 1.7 per cent last year.

“I think on the ground, not many people feel we are cheap,” said Suhaimi. “They feel that the cost of living is high regardless of what the inflation figures are.”

He added that inefficiency and lack of competition are contributing to the higher prices in Malaysia.

“I can’t understand why a motorcycle should have to cost RM6,000-7,000 and a car like the Perodua Viva should cost over RM30,000,” he said.

RAM Holdings chief economist Dr Yeah Kim Leng said that cars are one of the sectors where the Malaysian market suffers the heaviest distortion.

Despite being touted as one of the world’s least expensive cities, KL residents pay as much or even more for basic items as a percentage of their income.

A Honda Civic in KL costs about RM115,000, or 20 times the average monthly salary of an auditor.

In Melbourne and London by comparison, a Honda Civic costs AUD25,000 and GBP19,000 respectively, or only about three times the average salary of an auditor in those cities.

The high cost of cars is part of the reason that Malaysians have leveraged themselves to a record 76 per cent of the country’s GDP.

Bank Negara statistics show that at the end of last year, 20 per cent of Malaysian household debt was due to cars, an asset which depreciates over time.

Yeah also said that the ringgit is undervalued and distorts the country’s purchasing power for imported goods.

“We need to ensure prices are right and that there are no market distortions, no subsidies and allow market prices,” he said.

But even if the ringgit is allowed to rise, there is no guarantee that savings would be passed on to consumers. The ringgit is now hovering at RM3.02 to the US dollar but Goldman Sachs predicated yesterday the currency could hit RM2.98 to the US dollar in the next three months.

When The Malaysian Insider contacted the director of wholesale and retail at government think tank Performance Management and Delivery Unit (Pemandu), Ravidran Devagunam about the higher prices Malaysians pay for branded goods, he acknowledged that some retailers will maximise profits on luxury items not readily available in Malaysia but said that the government is “unable” to compel them to discount their prices even after the abolishment of import duties as luxury goods and apparel are not controlled items.

“However, we believe that market forces and consumer education will eventually force a price reduction of these goods over time,” he said.

The Federation of Malaysian Consumers Associations Secretary General Mohd Shaani Abdullah said people should question the prices that they are currently paying.

“Consumer protection will only come about when people make noise,” he told The Malaysian Insider when contacted. “Only then will politicians act.”

Source: Malaysians plagued by poor purchasing power

By Lee Wei Lian, Yow Hong Chieh and Melissa Chi

Malaysian Insider April 19, 2011

Analysts say the undervalued ringgit distorts the country’s purchasing power for imported goods.

How Quality of Life is as Poor as Sex Life

For some time now, economists have become comfortable with catchwords that we once associated with the speech of psychologists. Even as they speak about money, profits and balance sheets, they no longer blush when they mention such things as emotional well-being, self-esteem and spiritual vitality.

And Malaysian politicians and technocrats have caught up fast in using these jargons. They are no longer talking about “standards of living” or “costs of living”, but rather the “quality of life”, as if it means anything to the poor Malaysian wage earner struggling to provide his family with three square meals.

Malaysia’s good old days are really not that old. Middle-aged Malaysians can still remember when you could have coffee with a friend for 20 cents. (We used dollars and cents then.) And if you had an extra 50 cents in your pocket, you could each have a roti canai or a bowl of mee or kuay teow. Your bus fare probably cost you 5 or 10 cents, and you could talk forever on the phone for 10 cents if it was a local call. If you earned around $500 a month, you could own a car.

In short, life used to be good. There was quality in it.

Today, an urban family earning a household income of RM3,000 a month would be lucky to survive the costs of food, utilities and transport. Try shopping with RM50 and see what you can take home to your family.

And now rumours are bouncing around that another round of price increases is in the offing.

Meanwhile, the issue of minimum wage is still in the dock.

Serious problem

Nothing has probably changed since the 2007 survey that showed that more than 57.8% of Malaysian households earned less than RM3,000 and 70.7% earned less than RM4,000.

Many villages in Sabah and Sarawak are still not connected by road and more than a quarter of households there do not have electricity. Furthermore, at least 50,000 families in the state are in need of new or restored houses.

In urban areas such as the Klang Valley, public transport remains a serious problem. Infrastructural coordination is poor and “networking” exists only in our dreams.

Municipal councils seem to be blind to the serious shortage of car parks, a shortage that takes its toll on housing estates and shopping centres and turns even the well-bred into inconsiderate motorists who have made a habit of double and even triple parking.

The rat population is increasing at an alarming rate in residential areas as night markets and hawker stalls sprout up everywhere and uncollected garbage pile up into mountains.

Quality sleep

Highways and expressways that cut across residential areas are causing so much noise that we can only daydream about having quality sleep.

It was once said that in Malaysia, as elsewhere in Asia, the affluent tend to surround themselves with comforts befitting their status, shutting out the plight of the less fortunate around them.

But times have changed. There are problems everyone suffers, regardless of income. The decaying environment, traffic congestion and rising crime rates make life lousy even if you are rich. Bad governance and inept public administration affects everyone.

In 2005, Malaysia was ranked 36th in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Quality of Life Index. By 2010, we had fallen to the 85th position.

If the quality of our life is not improving, should we change our lifestyle to suit our economic position or should we change the ruling regime? Perhaps Malaysians should be thinking instead of the quality of the government that they want.

source: Free Malaysia Today.

How To Revitalize - From Dysfunctional to Soulful Fullfilment

Education reform is a top agenda of the new Sarawak state government. We have seen that despite massive

spending by the Federal government and ambitious attempts at reforms, the performance of our education system has barely improved in decades. In fact, compared to school systems in the region, ours has seen a decline.

The Malaysian Smart Schools System - developed by a consortium led by Telekom Malaysia, and a flagship application of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) initiated by the then Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir in 1997, has failed to bear fruit despite the billions of ringgits being spent. The Federal government’s 2009 National Key Results Area (NKRA) for education has not produced any report card to convince us that the NKRA initiatives are delivering results.

Children in Sarawak cannot be allowed to fall victim to Malaysia’s failing education system. It is a priority of the new Sarawak government to immediately and quickly establish a new education system that works to raise Sarawak children to a level as those in Korea, Finland and Singapore – countries that have that world’s best performing education systems.

The Sarawak Community Action Network (SCAN) has undertaken a year-long study to understand how to develop a high performing education system for Sarawak. The result of the study is to be used by the new Sarawak state government to establish an education system that truly works for children of Sarawak. The new government cannot afford to have a single child fail and that is what today’s adult Sarawakians owe to the coming generations of Sarawakians.

The study involved an analysis of selected education systems from different countries that have improved significantly, analysis of education systems that have been maintaining top positions, interviews with some thought leaders in those education systems and an analysis of the annual OECD PISA results from 2003 to 2009. During the course of the study, elements that are specific to the individual system and those that are of universal relevance were explored in order to help Sarawak’s new educational leaders replicate the success of high performing education systems.

This paper presents a summary of the findings of SCAN’s study.

The study began with these key questions: Why do some education syste

ms always perform better and improve at a faster rate than others? Why do some schools consistently succeed where others do not? What do successful school systems have in common? What methods and tools do they employ to improve learning outcomes of students?

The SCAN study found three most important universal elements that work:

1. Selective hiring of the right people to be teachers,
2. Develop them into highly effective instructors, and
3. Ensure that the system is capable of delivering only the best instruction for each student.

The successful systems demonstrate that significant improvement in desired results can be achieved in a short time – 3 to 6 years. The systems also show that by applying these practices, significant improvements is achievable in failing school systems and that the practices are applicable to any system, irrespective of culture and geography.The following commonly used approaches to improve education systems in many countries, including the US and the UK, have been shown to be least effective, in that they do not contribute significantly to student outcomes as measured by scores in mathematics, science and reading:

1. Increase in public spending per student,
2. Improvements in student-to-teacher ratio,
3. Decrease in class size,
4. Decrease in school size,
5. Structural reforms in the governance of schools, such as autonomy of schools governed by elected boards and decentralization of powers to local school districts,
6. Reforms in curriculum standards,
7. Changes in assessments and testings,
8. Funding of schools,
9. Inspection of quality, and
10. Reforming relationship of schools to communities.

The SCAN study shows unquestionable evidence: student learning cannot be improved without improving quality of instruction. It is also noted that almost every education system have undertaken the process of reducing class size. For example, most countries in OECD over the past 7 years have increased the teacher-student ratio. However, evidence shows that this effort does not significantly result in better student outcomes, except at the very early grades. More teachers translate to less money per teacher and systems cannot be selective about who could be teachers.

Evidence from the SCAN study suggests that the new Sarawak educational leaders must focus on quality of teachers as this is the main driver of the variation in student learning. The quality of any education system cannot be higher than the quality of its teachers.

For example, a seminal research in one education system shows that if 2 average 8-year-old children were taught by different teachers – one a high performing teacher and the other a low performer, the learning outcomes of the students diverge by more than 50 percentile points within 3 years. Reducing class size from 30 to 15 students improves an average student’s performance by, at most, 8 percentile points. In a study of another system, evidence shows that students in earlier years of schooling, when placed with low-performing teachers for several years consecutively, suffer from irreversible educational loss. In some systems, students who score in the top 20% on literacy and numeracy at age 7, are twice as likely to obtain a university degree as children in the bottom 20%.

Sarawak’s new education leaders now have evidence suggesting that even in good education systems, children who do not make good progress in their early school years because they are not taught by teachers of sufficient skills and competencies, have very small chance of recovering the lost years. All top performing education systems depend ultimately on the quality of its teachers.

All top performing systems from Dallas to Seoul and from Singapore to Helsinki, dispel the common belief that it is impossible to make teaching a preferred profession for good number of high-performers and that attracting better people requires the government to pay higher salaries. These systems have shown that making teaching the career of choice does not depend on high pay, but more on small, simple policy choices such as: designing and establishing robust hiring and training processes, giving attractive starting pay, and managing the status of the profession more carefully. For Sarawak’s new educational leaders, it means legislating an entirely new policy on education so that a new education system can be implemented rapidly.

By continuing the education system of the Federal government in Sarawak, we will only fail Sarawak’s future generation.

http://tinyurl.com/edsys2012

Transparency with Maximum Sexual Appeal

Here’s how to maximize the sexual appeal of anything related to the functioning of the government. Do most Malaysians care about functions of the government?

Observing the comments on the Prime Minister’s 1Malaysia blog, there’s a good indication that we care most about those which directly impact us personally. If we go to any magazine stand, there’s almost nothing offered that’s related to the workings of the government. At any display, most of the glossy magazines offer maximum sexual appeal. That’s what people people are attracted to and perhaps care about.

How can maximum sexual appeal be given to MACC’s report that 60% of government allocations for vital infrastructure projects in Sarawak have been misappropriated and diverted elsewhere? The fact that billions of ringgits of taxpayer money have been siphoned off has no appeal, except perhaps to anti-establishment species.

Do we care about why the Minister in-charge, Dr. George Chan, have not owned up and resigned? Do we ask why the minister needs to investigate the MACC report and to find out who is responsible when obviously he is the only one responsible? Many would care if the report was about how many young girls from China the minister is keeping, given that Sarawak is now a haven for China girls.

But it does not have to be sexual to be appealing. The sexual appeal of things related to the functions of the government can be maximized by using augmented reality. A company called Sunlight Labs, has done this by opening up the US government. The US government provides a portal, www.recovery.gov, for anyone to track where government money is being spent, who receives how much. The portal allows for reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse.

Sunlight Labs published the marked-up recovery.gov contract data and the results are fascinatingly appealing. You can point your iPhone 3Gs or Android phone in any direction and see the closest recipients to where you are. Some are surprised to see that an auto shop and a Bible college in their neighborhood received a lot more money than the technical college, eco-car company and Native American youth program down the road.

This is a great and sexy example of how government functions can be presented to improve transparency.

The Government’s official data set is published on the Layar Augmented Reality platform. Layar, is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the cinema you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going.

This is the kind of sexual appeal, similar to recovery.gov, that the new Sarawak state government must adapt. But while the recovery.gov website is beautifully designed, it does not provide raw or bulk data that would allow for open-ended analysis by the community at large. Until a government opens up access to the bulk data for other people to analyze, reporting its own data on its own websites does not equate to transparency.

Source:
Sunlight Labs
The Star

Playboy on Sarawak Civil Service Innovation Portal

Innovation Portal!!! My foot!

Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud recently launched the Sarawak Civil Service Innovative Ideas Portal (SCS-ii). The portal hopes to transform the state civil service into a more resourceful, creative and innovative organization. State secretary Datuk Morshidi Abdul Ghani said the SCS-ii aims to encourage officers, teams or agencies to propose new and innovative ideas that could make positiv difference to the civil service.

Here's my smart ass idea that would definitely serve all the above purposes - REMOVE Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud and REPLACE him with Mr. Baru Bian.

After accessing the portal, I have a fair idea of the kind of innovation that Sarawakians will continue to be getting if Taib Mahmud remains as Chief Minister for another month.

The portal takes a while to load. When it has been loaded on your browser, you get a full blank screen. You'll need to scroll down one full page before you get to the content.

Ahhhh . . . so much for innovation.

Who ever designed and developed the website can learn a lot from Playboy. And it's free.

How Journalists In Sarawak Have Better Sex

As of October 2008, the Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/, century-old newspaper and winner of 7 Pulitzer Prizes, switched its daily to entirely Web.

Read more here http://www.tinyurl.com/scimonitor. Several other great old newspapers have gone Web-only as well.

We continue to witness the rise and fall of species as evolution presents a different playground for newspapers and journalists. Are we witnessing that soon, there may be no need, not only for newspapers, but also no need for organizations of journalists?

The pressure from the suppressed Malaysians has hastened this process of evolution. Can we have a guided pathway to evolve?

The investigative piece, published by the Los Angeles Times on July 12, highlights a pathway to the evolution of alternative news sources and journalism in Malaysia. The piece is about the failure of a nursing board that oversees 350,000 registered nurses to remove nurses with histories of misconduct, drug abuse, negligence, violence against patients and incompetence. If these nurses were fired from one hospital for such misdeeds, they simply took their licenses down the street to another hospital, often to begin a new cycle of mistreatment and endangerment.

Read more here http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nurse12 2009jul12,0,2185588.story.

One thing that stands out from the report is that it was written and reported by two reporters, Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, who do not work for the Los Angeles Times. They work at ProPublica, http://www.propublica.org/ , a New York–based non-profit and nonpartisan team of investigative journalists founded in 2008 and funded by philanthropy.

Certainly no blogger would have the luxury of such time for the many painstaking months to assemble the evidence necessary to demonstrate that it was taking the nursing board unconscionable lengths of time to dig into these cases. Reporters risked being sued for libel or slander if they misidentified any of the miscreant nurses or mischaracterized their behavior. No bloggers can afford to lose - or even to defend - a RM10-million libel case. Databases needed to be built, analyzed, and made Web-friendly. Few bloggers have the quantitative or technical skills to do this.

Perhaps then, that’s the reason Malaysian bloggers prefer to blog about biased opinions, hearsay, rumours, gossips and half-truths.

The LA Times’ piece amply demonstrates the importance of journalism and of journalistic organizations like the LA Times and ProPublica. Without such people and institutions, there is no way such a report would have emerged on the Web.

Malaysians need an institution like ProPublica to extend the practice of investigative or “accountability” journalism. The institution can empower citizens by creating a database enabling anyone to review budget and federal stimulus spending down to the kampong level. Bloggers can dig into the database to produce stories on the impact of the spending in their communities. At least, with that institution, we can minimize the threat to accountability and thus to our democracy.

The process of finding and communicating news may no longer require newspapers. But the process will still require journalism and journalists, to smoke out the most difficult-to-report situations, to test glib assertions against the facts, to probe for the carefully contrived hoax. These are reporting activities that take a great deal of time, money, and skill.

Today, newspapers like The Star, The Borneo Post, The Eastern Times and the New Straits Times publish only crappy work of inexperienced reporters and the usual political spins. Now, these newspapers have become robbers of the important bulwark of our democracy.

We need the kind of journalism that is intended to shine a spotlight on abuse of power and failure to uphold the public interest, and by so doing to give the public the information needed to produce positive change.

Guess how many investigative journalists are on the payroll of Borneo Post, NST and The Star, compared to total staff?

Mainstream media have no reporters digging into possible domains of corruption. This means that not only is there corruption that won’t be reported, but also that politicians, cronies, and others who might have toed the line before will now be tempted to cross it, because nobody will be watching. Who will be watching over to ensure that abuses highlighted in the Auditor General’s report do not get repeated year after year and that the culprits do not continue to stay in their positions?

Institutions like ProPublica can save our democracy and provides the pathway to evolve the Malaysian blog sphere.

Hot Agnes Monica at Bidayuh Gawai Festival?

How Bidayuhs Measure Up Today

If Agnes Monica's hot statistics are to reveal anything, it would be that many rural Bidayuhs also do not have enough clothing to cover their bodies. But Agnes Monica's exposure is nothing compared to UNDP statistics that reveal communities living in rural areas of Sarawak are among the worse off when compared to the rest of the country, and often face considerable hardships including securing land rights and other basic rights to development.

Many of the state’s communities such as the Bidayuh have, relatively low human capital, lack ready access to basic amenities and facilities, and because the physical infrastructure is underdeveloped in the areas where they live, they remain poorly connected to markets.

We know that for a strong Sarawak, we need quality human capital across races including minority groups such as the Bidayuh. However, our education system today is failing us. Quality health care fail to reach the majority of Sarawakians who are in the rural areas. GDP growth is concentrated only in major towns, not in the rural areas where most Sarawakians are.

The Bidayuh and other Dayak people have seen escalating erosion to their land tenure held under Sarawak Native Customary Rights (NCR), from first massive logging, and then giant plantations and dam building have robbed many Dayak communities of their land. Without land, the physical survival and the survival of their cultural traditions and ethnic identity are threatened.

Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact Foundation (AIPP) secretary-general Joan Carling urged Malaysia to take up the recommendation by other countries such as Mexico, which raised the issue of poor human rights record with regards to indigenous communities during the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) hearing in Geneva last year.

She said indigenous groups in Malaysia had long been fighting for their right to their native territories, and these struggles continue today. Although Malaysia adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in September 2007, there has been no real change on the ground to address the land-grab issue affecting many indigenous people, such as the Bidayuh.

Bidayuhs are a minority indigenous group in Sarawak. There are about 169,000 Bidayuhs, who constitute some 8% of the state’s population. Most of them live in Kuching, Padawan, Serian, Bau and Lundu areas in the 1st Division.

Bidayuh today remain one of the marginalized indigenous minority groups in Malaysia and represent a population of those living below poverty line. Like the other Dayaks, living mostly in the vast rural areas of Sarawak, many still live without basic amenities such as roads, jetties, clinics, treated drinking water, and electricity. Time for them has stood still since independence in 1963.

Issues of the Bidayuh Today
While the rest of the majority races in Malaysia progress in terms of socio-economic and education, the Bidayuh remain in the fringes of development and some Bidayuh communities live in poverty. Critical and urgent issues facing Bidayuh include:

1. Land are not titled and unaware of their rights under common law. Native Customary Rights land has been taken over by the state government for sale and development at any time. As Bidayuh are still dependent on subsistence farming, titled land is necessary to progress to modern farming.
2. Bidayuh participation in both the traditional and modern businesses are poor. This is hampered by limited business opportunity, highly dependent on public spending and government projects and poor networking. Some small sized firms made some inroads in small-scale construction sectors. However, none appears to be able to sustain their business due to easy entry and hence are very competitive.
3. Bidayuh form a large portion of the hardcore poor in Sarawak, living in poor housing with insufficient food supply and lack of access to quality health care, communication and transportation.
4. As most Bidayuh live in the rural areas, they are receiving the poorer quality of education than what people in the urban schools are getting. While good early childhood education is critical to the development of children, rural children are not getting pre-school development that urban children are getting. This leaves Bidayuh children to continue to lag behind others in education.
5. The high number of Bidayuh children not getting entrance into public institutions of higher learning, give rise to more Bidayuh children being left behind in the knowledge economy.

What Bidayuh Need to Achieve Equal Progress
There is widespread resentment among Bidayuh that they continue to be marginalized and continue to be left on the fringes of development. To achieve equal progress with other races, equal opportunities and privileges must be given to Bidayuh. The following are critical for the state government to provide the Bidayuh in order to achieve progress:

1. Immediate halt to indiscriminate acquisition of untitled native land by the state government.

2. Expedite the issuing of titles to all native land.

3. Allocate native land that have been designated as state land to Bidayuh families as temporary occupation for a minimum of 60 years for the purpose of modern farming. Land not developed within 3 years are to be taken back and allocated to other families.

4. Establish a well-funded and appropriately staffed Farming Program for Bidayuh that will among other things, do the following:

• Provide financial aid to Bidayuh families to develop their land for modern farming. Access to the aid must be easy and mechanism for repayment must also be easy.
• In addition to providing financial aid, the government must also provide quality professional assistance to upgrade the knowledge and skills of Bidayuh families on modern farming.
• Encourage Young People to Become Farmers: The Farming Program will establish a new program to identify and train the next generation of farmers. The program will also provide incentives to make it easier for new farmers to afford their first farm.
• Encourage Organic and Local Agriculture: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will help organic farmers afford to certify their crops and will also promote regional food systems.
• Strong Safety Net for Family Farmers: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will provide family farmers with stability and predictability and strengthen producer protections to ensure family farmers have fair access to markets, control over their production decisions, and transparency in prices.
• Support Small Business Development: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will provide capital for family farmers to create value-added enterprises, like cooperative marketing initiatives and farmer-owned processing plants. They also will establish a small business and micro-enterprise initiative for rural Bidayuh kampongs.
• Improve Rural Education for Bidayuh: From the moment our children step into a classroom, the single most important factor in determining their achievement is their teacher. To improve the quality of education that Bidayuh children are receiving, the state government must provide incentives for talented individuals to enter the teaching profession, including increased pay for teachers who work in rural areas.

The government must create a Rural Revitalization Program to attract and retain young people to rural Bidayuh kampongs. More quality community colleges should be created and increase research and educational funding for community colleges in Bidayuh areas. Early childhood development centres must be established in Bidayuh kampongs and staffed by only trained and qualified professionals. The government must ensure all rural Bidayuh children have access to pre-school; provide affordable and high-quality child care that will promote child development and ease the burden on working families.

The government must ensure competent, effective teachers in rural schools that are organized for success. The government should provide service scholarships to recruit and prepare teachers who commit to working in underserved Bidayuh dominated districts. To support teachers, the government must foster ongoing improvements in teacher education, provide mentoring for beginning teachers, create incentives for shared planning and learning time for teachers. To retain teachers, the government must support career pathways that provide ongoing professional development and reward accomplished teachers for their expertise. An initiative must be taken to help eliminate teacher shortages in hard-to-staff areas and subjects, improve teacher retention rates, strengthen teacher preparation programs, improve professional development, and better utilize and reward accomplished teachers.

6. Increase the number of seats for Bidayuh students in public institutions of higher learning: In order for the Bidayuh community to come to equal progress in education with other races, more places should be allocated for the Bidayuh students in local public colleges and universities.

7. Improve Health Care for Bidayuh Communities: Rural health care providers are often less experienced and do not have access to the latest medical and healthcare practices in order to deliver the best clinical outcome. Rural folks have to come to Kuching city to get better medical treatment and that is often when illness become more serious. The government must increase rural access to quality care by promoting health information technologies like telemedicine and staff rural clinics and hospitals with more experienced and better trained physicians and nurses. A Nurse-Family Partnership should be established to all Bidayuh, first-time mothers each year. The Nurse-Family Partnership provides home visits by trained registered nurses to Bidayuh expectant mothers and their families in Bidayuh kampongs.

8. Establish a Bidayuh Business Development Assistance Program: As Bidayuh community lags far behind in participation in business and entrepreneurship, the Bidayuh need specific business development assistance. The assistance program will include allocation of government infrastructure projects to Bidayuh community, allocation of business premises in strategic locations and access to financial aid and grants. Rural infrastructure projects must be allocated to local Bidayuh contractors.

9. Expand Access to Jobs: The government must invest in transitional jobs and career pathway programs that implement proven methods of helping low-income Bidayuh succeed in the workforce. The government must also create a program to directly engage disadvantaged youth in job opportunities to strengthen their communities, while also providing them with practical skills in important high-growth career field.

10. Establish At Least 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs: The government must create at least 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs in areas that have high levels of poverty and low levels of student academic achievement in Bidayuh dominated districts. The Promise Bidayuh Kampongs have a full network of services, including early childhood education, youth development efforts and after-school activities, to an entire kampong from birth to college.

The government should work with community and business leaders to identify and address the unique economic development barriers of every one of the 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs. The government will provide additional resources to address community needs.

The government, by implementing all of the above with full commitment on a sustainable basis, can help bring the Bidayuh community on equal progress with other races. As Bidayuh progress, Sarawak and the nation thrives. The nation will be strengthened for further prosperity.

The Hottest Stimuli For Sarawak's Economy

What's more stimulating than revealing, eye-catching sizes? To citizens of nations today, nothing is more stimulating than the revelation & size of economic stimulus being formulated by their governments to minimize the impact of global recession.

But like the stimulus of revealing sizes, short-term economic stimulus cannot sustain the feel-good moments.

The 12 new dams to be built in Sarawak under SCORE could well be the erectile dysfunction of a 12 inch possession. Sarawakians concerned with the well-being of the future generations to come must seriously think about what is really needed.

I am recommending that the hottest stimuli for Sarawak's future prosperity is investment in innovation, not in another dam. Failure to do so, future Sarawakians will be beggars in their own land despite the wealth of natural resources today. Because besides Korea, Japan and Taiwan, China & India will be important centers of innovation in the coming decades, leaving Sarawakians to live on scraps in the region.

Not only are both China & India producing a rising share of key technological innovations, but they are also pioneering innovations in business models that allow their companies to prosper in low-income markets. These new models tend to be capital light while heavily leveraging technology. The companies employing them produce goods and services at surprisingly low cost and use the vast scale of home markets to create new technology standards. These are practices that companies in neighboring nations will need to watch closely as they attempt to grow their competitiveness and as they meet new competitors from both countries in global markets.

Education levels are rising in both countries. China and India have world-class technical universities and produce a steady flow of talent at the top of the world’s academic pyramid. In addition, both cultures reward entrepreneurial risk taking. Innovators in China and India possess immense drive and desire to succeed. Their commitment and focus on business execution make them notable entrepreneurs on the global stage. It helps that both China and India allow successful people to retain much of the wealth they create, though both governments expect contributions back to broader society from those who become millionaires or even billionaires.

What is the situation in Sarawak? Firstly, our education system is failing us, educating us out of our inherent creativity. As the government builds infrastructure in the rural areas, GDP growth remains in the urban. Indigenous technologies is unheard of, not even in the farming or timber sectors which are the main economic activities in the state. In Sarawak, revenues from natural resources can be allocated to the benefit of seeding innovations rather than being pocketed by a few individuals.

India's flexible local entrepreneurs are creating new models that bake in low-income levels. ICICI Bank is a good example. Making intensive use of technology, it has created a banking model with capital outlays that are one-tenth those of banks in the developed world. ICICI reaches deeply into India’s rural areas using mobile ATMs and simplified Internet banking. It runs a booming and profitable business in remittances at fee levels that undercut Western Union by 70 percent. Health Management Research Institute (HMRI), meanwhile, uses technology to revolutionize medical services. Paramedics rove through rural areas in vans coordinated by GPS. Routine ailments can be efficiently diagnosed with the help of algorithms; more difficult diagnoses can be provided by remote medical experts via a video kiosk in each van. HMRI can already serve over 50 million patients.

China selects and invests in what it believes are next-generation sectors—biotechnology, electric vehicles, and clean energy. These are markets where China’s domestic demand could lead the world. The government’s goal is to accelerate the market’s development and nurture national champions. In telecom, where the Chinese market is already one of the world’s largest, the government is encouraging national standards that it hopes will eventually define the global industry.

Can Sarawak build & sustain China's & India's innovation pace and eventually move to the next level of technological innovation? Absolutely. The talent is there, as are capital and effective new government that encourages it. With stronger protection and rewards for intellectual property — a likely development as international companies begin to license technology from Sarawakian entrepreneurs — the stage will be set for the next step forward.

Sarawak must wake up to the realization that investing in innovation is more critical than the 12 dams. The most innovative countries — which will also be the highest earning in the future — will be those that embrace a model of “innovation economics,” which places technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship at the center of economic policymaking. Successful nations will not be content to wait for innovation to happen or expect it to occur as a byproduct of other activities, such as rural development or dam building.

On the contrary: the new leaders will search out innovation and actively create an environment that nurtures it. That is the job description of Sarawak's new leaders when Pakatan Rakyat takes over from BN.

Sources: Alessi, IDEO, NASSCOM, ADB, Global Institute for Human Capital Development

The Sexy New Normal for Sarawak

It is increasingly clear that the current downturn is fundamentally different from recessions of recent decades. We are experiencing not merely another turn of the business cycle, but a restructuring of the economic order. The structure of the order will be dependent on a fundamentally new leadership and new government in Sarawak.

For some of us and for some organizations, near-term survival is the only agenda item. Others are peering through the fog of uncertainty, thinking about how to position themselves once the crisis has passed and things return to normal. The question is, “What will normal look like?” While no one can say how long the crisis will last, what we find on the other side will not look like the normal of recent years.

The new normal will be shaped by a confluence of powerful forces—some arising directly from the financial crisis and some that were at work long before it began. The most powerful force is the one that each of us can exert to bring about the long overdue and much needed new leadership and new government in Sarawak.

Obviously, there will be significantly less financial leverage in the system. But it is important to realize that the rise in leverage leading up to the crisis had two sources. The first was a legitimate increase in debt due to financial innovation—new instruments and ways of doing business that reduced risk and added value to the economy. The second was a credit bubble fueled by misaligned incentives, irresponsible risk taking, lax oversight, and fraud.

Where the former ends and the latter begins is the multitrillion dollar question, but it is clear that the future will reveal significantly lower levels of leverage (and higher prices for risk) than we had come to expect. Business models that rely on high leverage will suffer reduced returns. Companies that boost returns to equity the old fashioned way—through real productivity gains—will be rewarded. Nations that are governed in a truly transparent manner by the true power of the citizens will flourish and endure.

Another defining feature of the new normal will be an expanded role for government. All signs point to an equally significant regulatory restructuring to come. Some will welcome this, on the grounds that modernization of the regulatory system was clearly overdue. Others will view the changes as unwanted political interference. Either way, the reality is that around the world governments will be calling the shots in sectors (such as debt insurance) that were once only lightly regulated.

They will also be demanding new levels of transparency and disclosure for investment vehicles such as hedge funds and getting involved in decisions that were once the sole province of corporate boards, including executive compensation. Only new and capable leaders can engage at this new level of integrity and transparency.

While the financial-services industry will be most directly affected, the impact of government’s increased role will be widespread: there is a risk of a new era of financial protectionism. A good outcome of the crisis would be greater global financial coordination and transparency. A bad outcome would be protectionist policies that make it harder for companies to move capital to the most productive places and that dampen economic growth, particularly in the developing world. Companies need to prepare for such an eventuality—even as they work to avert it.

These two forces—less leverage and more government—arise directly from the financial crisis, but there are others that were already at work and that have been strengthened by recent events. For example, it was clear before the crisis began that US consumption could not continue to be the engine for global growth. Consumption depends on income growth, and US income growth since 1985 had been boosted by a series of one-time factors—such as the entry of women into the workforce, an increase in the number of college graduates—that have now played themselves out. Moreover, although the peak spending years of the baby boom generation helped boost consumption in the ’80s and ’90s, as boomers age and begin to live off of retirement savings that were too small even before housing and stock market wealth evaporated, consumption levels will fall.

As Sarawak moves into a new era with new leadership and new government, by observing the impact of the two above-mentioned forces on the economies of nations, our new leaders can learn and develop better strategies to develop Sarawak.

Companies seeking high rates of income and consumption growth will increasingly look to Asia. The fundamental drivers of Asian growth—productivity gains, technology adoption, and cultural and institutional changes—did not halt as a result of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. And Asian economies—though they have rapidly deteriorated in recent months—are unlikely to be stopped by this one.

The big unknown is whether the temptation to blame Western-style capitalism for current troubles will lead to backlash and self-destructive policies. If this can be avoided, the world’s economic center of gravity will continue to shift eastward. And for Sarawak, only a new leadership with sharp foresight and passion for the peoples' well-being will be able exploit this new opportunity coming to Asia.

Through it all, technological innovation will continue, and the value of increasing human knowledge will remain undiminished. For talented contrarians and technologists, the next few years may prove especially fruitful as investors looking for high-risk, high-reward opportunities shift their attention from financial engineering to genetic engineering, software, and clean energy.

This much is certain: when we finally enter into the post-crisis period, the business and economic context will not have returned to its pre-crisis state. Leaders and executives preparing their countries and organizations to succeed in the new normal must focus on what has changed and what remains basically the same for their citizens, customers, companies, and industries.

The result will be an environment that, while different from the past, is no less rich in possibilities for those who are prepared. Effectively, Sarawak will not have to bear more of the same for any longer.