Interesting topic… I’m working in this industry myself and I don’t agree about this in 100%, but I added your page to my bookmarks and hope to see more interesting articles in the future

I think the government also hard sells the idea that the Malays are weak and need their crutches forever.

And the political parties of the BN only reinforce that. All Malaysians should wake up from their slumber and reject any party with such “crutch mentality.”

And what are the results? Pretty much everyone I know either filters their tap water, buy bottled water, or put up with undrinkable water. Every middle class neighbourhood I visit has a prominent security guards’ post at the entrance. (And in some of them, theft still occurs.) When I stop by at McDonald’s for a snack on a rainy day, I look out the window and see the national car whizzing past on the road, completely obscured by a wave of water from a bunch of potholes that the car just drove over.

I visit my school, and I see money spent on tiling the floor of the library and IT lab when nobody cared about the cement floor. I see a WiFi hotspot only the teachers use because the rest of us can’t afford laptops or our parents refuse to allow us to use them. I listen to teachers telling me “red blood cells prevent from sick”. I get asked how many oil rigs are there in Kelantan.

I head to the basketball court and see a group of Chinese, Indians and a Malay or two (all from national schools) playing on one half of the court. On the other half, a group of Chinese chattering away in Mandarin are playing alone by themselves. At the canteen, I might see a worker spraying Ridsect or Shelltox in the air - over exposed food.

I go home, and open the mailbox. My father’s tax refund from last year has finally arrived. As I enter the house, the phone rings - a phone I waited six months for after moving in to my brand new house. I try to logon to the Internet, but I realise TM Net has yet to finalise its installation of the streamyx hub. Nevertheless, I remain happy. After all, I have a friend who waited two years for her phone line.

Well, that’s my life - the life of a middle class Chinese secondary school student smack in the centre of a suburb of a developed state, and somewhere in the Multimedia Supercorridor. These are the results of our past budgets. Is this budget even trying to correct any of these problems? Not as far as I can see. So is this budget a bunch of bollocks (as a Brit might say)? Definitely so.

As Dr. Bakri rightly points out, it is a gross injustice to the Malays when it is used to explain any dysfunctional aspect of government. It happens also when Malays fail in their businesses –although here it is done by extolling the resilience of the Chinese entrepreneur whose street knowledge of business is better than any MBA degree the educated elite among the Malays may have earned in the U.S.

The stereotyping of Malays does not end there.

How much is allocated to the building of religious institutions in the recently announced Budget? I suspect it is a disproportionately large share for a small developing country like Malaysia.

The intention here is not to cast aspersions on anyone but merely to focus on the unintended effect such disproportionate spending on building religious institutions have. For one thing, it acts to reinforce the stereotyping of Malays as religious bigots who are unable to separate the needs of government and business to matters relating to his relationship with his Creator.

The truth is we do not need to take to religion the way the Chinese took to opium in the 1800s as a result of the deliberate policy of the British to “weaken” their resistance to colonization and the spread of western values. Their need to sell opium to the Chinese was for the most part, believe it or not, based on expediency: they needed another medium of exchange, another “currency” to make up for the world shortage of silver which was a popular and accepted medium of exchange in that part of the world. In the case of the Malay peninsula, before it came to be known as Malaya, their need for Malay administrators is a natural corollary of the then British Resident advisory system of government – again a matter of expediency. The ruler needs access to the ruled. How else could the ruler rule otherwise? The British did not have to sell opium to the Malays. Opium use was brought here and made popular by the Chinese. Today, we see the Malays take to “weed” or marijuana or ganja as a result of commercial dealing in this commodity (some refer to it as contraband) by the Chinese.

Such activity has gone on for a while now, and has given rise to another type of stereotyping. The stereotype is that of a Malay as a lazy, easy going, ganja smoking, fun-loving “brown monkey” with a need to prey upon others who are more industrious than himself to feed his addiction, greed, his need to support a lavish lifestyle.

When the stereotyping is done by the Malays themselves to explain away their failures and shortcomings, it reflects their belief in fate having a central role in their lives. This traditional concept of the Universe built on the central belief, right or wrong, that everything has its place, its own purpose, everything happens for a purpose and there is nothing one can do to change all that, is rooted deep in the psyche of the Malays. It may have its origin in the Judea-Christian concept of the Old Testament - but it is misunderstood and misinterpreted. However, when the stereotyping of the Malays is done by others, it is done with the sole intention to belittle the Malays as being more suited to be administrators sitting behind desks pushing pen and paper earning a wage, waiting to collect that pension when he no longer has to work for a living.

Stereotyping and labeling does not help. It only reinforces the very weaknesses we have in ourselves.

As Malays we need to regain our self worth, dignity and correct the low self esteem we have of ourselves - the seeds of which have been planted there to reinforce the need for stereotyping by others who deal with us on a daily basis.

When the stereotyping is done by us, it is to help us understand the role that fate plays in the scheme of things. When it is done by others it is to fulfill their need to understand the person they are dealing with. Decision-making is that much easier when we deal with stereotypes. The need for stereotyping is mostly psychological. The stereotypical Malay today is that he is a lazy government servant earning a small salary. The latest Budget seeks to change that: the salary he earns is no longer “small”.

Try duplicate that through a machine that have a mind of its own, even better, try and do that through a machine that have 1 million minds (the “bureaucrazy”). and your patient is 25 million people, all with various sorts of ailments and needs sorts of attention.

i’m a civil servant and im more concerned about the budget and financing it, its macro repercussions and its sustainability. While I agree that its not perfect, my inside view is somewhat neutral- on the direction the budget is trying to get to.

I dont mind a bit of “Malay Bashing” hell i do it too. but to give broad general comments its too shallow- at best.

I’m not just plain lazy or grant dependent Malay who took the decision to joint government years ago just for the security or extra free time, I’m just a normal guy who do my daily job accordingly and sufficient enough as what was stated on the job description letter or perhaps more than that whenever required.

A material researcher would want to work in a company with big R&D activities and a big possibility of success with large sums grant hoping that one day he’ll be able to submit a pattern that worth the commercialization and one day bring income to the country – ideally.

What do we do? We spent hours every day to do research on the next advance material applications to reach the market; then come a minister who is so desperate to come up with some major achievement to show to the big office… “Show me what you have now,” he said, what will your boss do? Submit the project (with some patch up here and there) and call up the press. Tell stories on how the invention will help the nation and so-on blalala… The PM noticed, bang! So call project become major technology focus… first, second and third page in the science section of local newspapers… that Menteri get the promotion…

The researcher will need to work so hard to live up to that expectation, he’s actually in standard 1 but the head master promoted him to high school and requested him to complete an undergraduate kind of project…the result – pretty much obviouslaa… failure…

Politicians memory are not that good, nobody will ask about the project after a while… fair enough, all the necessary promotion were completed…ok… forget about the researcher, he’ll find some other thing to work on…take the money back from him and do some other research…what capacity building? The minister don’t know what’s that.

We’ve lots of engineer graduated from worldwide universities, why can’t we come up with a viable solution? Why do I need to suffer the humiliation of working with government agency? Why am I being labeled as lazy bunch of government servant? When the real lazy people are the administrator of this country who doesn’t spend their time listening to the working people of government agency…why?

PM Abdullah Badawi faces a humongous task. It’s not that he doesn’t have ideas of how to turn around the government and civil service but it requires tremendous effort and time, just like trying to turn around a 500,000 tonnes oil tanker.

Dr M did not prepare a succession plan and PM Abdullah Badawi was appointed PM by default (he was a VP of UMNO and became the President of UMNO when it became vacant and thus became the Prime Minister. His ascension to the throne was precarious with lots of horse trading done amongst the various constituencies and warlords within UMNO and BN in general. All these deals are now hampering his efforts to clean house. I don’t want to be in his shoes.