Koh Emerges From Hiding

Tomorrow signals the start of the World Cup in South Africa. I am rooting for France – but they are not most people’s favorite team. Granted, France made a poor start to UEFA Group 7, losing the opening game 3-1 to Austria, and eventually finished in second place, one point behind Serbia. This meant a playoff against Ireland, which has now gone down in football history thanks to Thierry Henry. If you don’t know about this infamous incident already, then Henry handballed (not one, but twice) to set up the goal for William Gallas that won the playoff for France and sent them to World Cup 2010. I wager that France will top Group A when we consider the other teams in contention – South Africa, Mexico and Uruguay, and then to fight it out with the winners from the other seven groupings. Besides, whatever we may say about France, this is still a team with talent galore to choose from and still the nation that only missed out on winning World Cup 2006 on penalty kicks. Or was it headbutts?

Finally, Koh Tsu Koon, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department crawled out from hiding to add his two cents’ worth of comments to this “subsidy” issue. Being a politician, he was very adroit in addressing the conflicting and confusing perspectives. Although both the Treasury and Pemandu gave starkly different figures on government subsidy expenditure for last year – Koh had no intention of ruffling any feathers and so he played safe by declaring that both sets of numbers were technically correct. The “discrepancy” was in fact due to differences in definition, classification of expenditure and sourcing, he explained. E.g. Treasury’s figure did not include the petroleum subsidy of RM12 billion by Petronas as the Treasury considered that it was not borne directly by the government. Pemandu’s figure included this amount because Petronas is wholly owned by the government and Petronas money is public money. Whatever the numbers, they still don't add up. Hmmm, cannot these people add?

Simply put, the Treasury numbers were understated! And then it seems that Pemandu issued a statement to say that the Treasury and Pemandu collectively agreed that Malaysia should increase revenue or GDP and at the same time reduce government expenditure in the next 10 years in order to stay competitive (The Sun, June 10, 2010, p 1). Idris has been very silent – he hasn't spoken out, so I am assuming he is burying his head in the proverbial sand – even though the numbers that he churned out the other day were most likely to be correct. From a marketing research perspective, these numbers demonstrated good measurement – at least, I believe that they met 2 of 3 criteria, i.e. reliability and validity.