PRIME Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim had a Tuesday shocker for the nation, when he revealed in Parliament that the two previous administrations had spent RM700 million on publicity and promotion from 2020 to last year.
If one wants a per year feel, it is a whopping RM233 million. This is an astronomical waste for three reasons.
One, Malaysia is a nation with a RM1.3 trillion hole in its government coffers. A million ringgit will set the nation back years, let alone RM233 million.
Two, even McDonald's in Malaysia spends less per year. Current figures are hard to come by, but working on decade-old data, we estimate it to be way less than RM70 million in 2020. To make sure that we are not comparing apples to oranges, we will add an industrial average of 10 per cent a year to bring the numbers to 2022, the year in which the government's publicity and promotion spree ends. As generous as we are. McDonald's advertising and promotion annual budget didn't exceed RM90 million. What were the previous administrations selling, we ask.
Finally, and more importantly, such publicity has the danger of being political ads in thin disguise. They should not be run on the public purse. To do so would be to ask the public to pay new taxes to fund such wasteful expenditure. While describing the RM700 million spent by the previous two administrations as "a violation of regulations and decorum", Anwar is promising to spend only RM100 million a year.
In our book, this is still astronomical. Even if the government is able to make a good case for publicity and promotion, it should be a small fraction of what McDonald's spends on advertising and promotion every year. McDonald's has competitors, and that itself is a good reason for a hard sell.
Notwithstanding this, its advertising and promotion expenditure is thin. Who are the government's competitors? Other political parties? If that is the case, take out a political ad on the party's purse, not the public's. What is there for the government to sell? Governance?
That people know with or without ads or pamphlets trumpeting it when they come face-to-face with the government machinery. Even on the rare occasion that the government has something to "sell" — Covid-19 jabs, for example — there are numerous government-owned channels and platforms that can peddle them at no expense to the public purse. We will argue that there is never an occasion for the government to waste money, but especially so now. What should be green is now swinging between amber and red.
People are still manacled by cost of living issues. Wages have stagnated, but prices of essentials have not. The average Malaysian in the street expresses one persistent pain: how high prices leave him low. These are difficult times for most people. Only recently, doctors were pleading for a raise in their on-call hourly rate from RM9.16 to RM25. The plea remains a plea. There was a plea, too, for the minimum wage to be raised to RM1,800. This, too, was dismissed as not being timely.
If the government hasn't enough money in the public coffers to pay the doctors (the increase in minimum wage has little impact on the public purse), then it should not spend a ringgit more than necessary. RM233 million per year is unacceptable, and so is RM100 million per year.