THE 2025 Budget has been put under the microscope by almost everyone. For Sabah and Sarawak, this looks like a fair and balanced budget.
What strikes me is that despite the quick turnover of governments since 2018, the Pan-Borneo Highway project was never jeopardised. The project's cost is RM25 billion.
For next year, some RM10 billion is allocated to the project, largely to complete the Sabah portion of the highway.
A further RM7.4 billion is for linking up the Sabah and Sarawak ends of the highway.
The Tawau and Miri airports will be expanded to the tune of RM253 million, and the Sarawak Cancer Centre will get RM1 billion.
The annual special grants to Sabah and Sarawak will increase from a relative pittance before to RM600 million.
This comes on top of the general allocation of RM6.7 billion for Sabah and RM5.9 billion for Sarawak.
Given that the bulk of the RM421 billion budget next year will go to operating expenditure at RM335 billion, leaving RM86 billion for development spending, what Sabah and Sarawak will get is not insignificant.
The budget is also notable for its efforts to be redistributive through increased taxes on the well to do and excluding them from government subsidies, and giving more targeted hand-outs to the less advantaged.
Poorer Malaysians in Sabah and Sarawak stand to benefit from these initiatives.
Moreover, taxes imposed by Sarawak on oil and gas products in recent years have given its coffers a windfall.
This has allowed the state government to introduce initiatives and programmes of its own to benefit Sarawakians.
Premier Tan Sri Abang Johari Openg has promised that more such goodies are in store when the state budget is presented soon. But former federal minister Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz warned that budgetary initiatives introduced by the government must be balanced against the potential for leakages.
Unless vigilance is enforced and weaknesses in the bureaucratic machinery closed, whatever good intentions the federal or state government has for the underprivileged may be negated.
Through the budget, the government has taken steps in the right direction, especially in efforts to rein in the widening deficit.
The writer views developments in the nation, region and wider world from his vantage point in Kuching