KUCHING: The federal budget tabled by the PH administration, in a nut shell, is a desperate attempt to justify their relevancy as a good and efficient government.
All those goodies that they announced were just temporary “feel good” initiatives, said Assistant Minister in the Chief Minister’s Office (Corporate Affairs and UKAS) Datuk Abdullah Saidol.
In view of this, he advised Sarawakians not be too quick to get excited about it because they (PH leaders) were the ones who actually caused so much damage to our nation’s economy within two years of taking over Putrajaya.
Saidol, who is also chief political secretary to the chief minister,
questioned whether state DAP chairman Chong Chieng Jen and all Sarawak PH representatives were truly sincere and honest about fighting for Sarawak rights and interests?
Responding to a statement by Chong on the 2020 Budget, he described it as a shameless attempt to over glorify it to please Sarawakians and unscrupulously claimed that the PH government had fulfilled its promises to bring more development fund to Sarawak.
“It’s either he is trying to bluff us again or his arithmetic is horrible.
“The Development Expenditure announced by the Minister of Finance was RM56 billion; 30 percent of RM56 billion is actually RM16.8 billion. Sarawak is only getting RM4.5 billion which is only 8.04 percent of the total Development Expenditure,” said Saidol.
Instead of admitting their political clumsiness by deliberately lying to Sarawakians, he said Chong tried to put the blame on GPS government alleging that GPS leaders of mala fide (bad intent) and were trying to twist facts.
“Our calculation is based on their snobbish public announcement and promises that they
will, amongst others, deliver 20 percent oil royalty to Sarawak and 50 percent of all taxes collected in Sarawak,” he said.
He said sometime in July, 2018, Chong said the total amount to be paid to Sarawak should be approximately RM8 billion.
“So I called on all Sarawakians to truthfully judge who actually is distorting facts and bluffing. All Sarawakians should know that the federal budget is a deficit budget,
in layman’s terms it means they plan to spend more than their
revenue.”
He said out of RM297 billion budget, RM241 billion (81.21 percent) is for Operational Expenditure and only RM56 billion (18.79 percent) for nation development.
He noted that a majority of the people viewed this skewed budget as not progressive and it is almost impossible to achieve PH mission of boosting economic growth.
Why so much funding for OPEX especially ‘parking’ huge fund at MOF? We should be suspicious of this because the Minister of Finance has that frequent habit of twisting and ‘u-turn’ policies,” he said.
He said it should be noted that the federal government was facing a declining tax collection of 13.1 percent of GDP, which basically mean the federal government is collecting less revenue.
“Things don’t look favourable to federal government when national debts are also increasing after they took over Putrajaya.
“Are we going to face a serious national inflation and PH administration has no clue how to widen the revenue base? Thus the people will end up suffering due to increasing cost of living.”
Saidol said the administration by now should admit that their biggest mistake was to abolish GST, adding “that big ‘hole’ in federal coffers has caused them to ‘force’ Petronas to pay the federal government that ‘special’ dividend of RM30 billion”.
Ironically, oil and gas come from Sarawak; Petronas gives federal RM30 billion and we only get RM4.5 billion.
That does not include amount from other taxes paid by Petronas to federal such as Corporate Tax & Petroleum Income Tax (PITA).
“Do you think that is fair to Sarawak?
