Global News Journal

Acronym soup swamps Malaysia reform drive

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak says he has embarked on a series of radical economic reforms. In reality it feels as if he has unleashed a barrage of incomprehensible acronyms on the unsuspecting public of this Southeast Asian nation.

The charge for economic reform is being led by the snappily named PEMANDU. As well as being the Malay word for “driver” it stands for the government’s Performance Management and Delivery Unit.

PEMANDU is in charge of formulating and implementing NKRAs (National Key Result Areas), MKRAs (Ministerial Key Result Areas) and getting “Big Results Fast”, according to its website, although it singularly failed to win political backing for a radical revamp of Malaysia’s costly subsidy regime.

It is also helping to formulate the 10th Malaysia Plan, 10MP for those in the know, a communist-era sounding 5-year plan that aims to help lift this middle income country to developed nation status by 2020.

PEMANDU is part of the GTP, the Government Transformation Programme, which also involves the SITF (Special Implementation Task Force). Throw in the NKEAs (National Key Economic Areas), another thinktank known as the EPU (Economic Planning Unit) and you haven’t reached the end of the alphabet spaghetti dreamed up by Malaysia’s civil servants…. There’s still the ETP. the NEP (sometimes good, sometimes bad) and the NEM (New Economic Model).  

To be fair to Malaysia, it is not the only country in the world that is wallowing in economic acronyms, the U.S. gave the world TARP, a $700 billion bank bailout programme, and the even more mind-numbing ABCP MMMFLF   (don’t ask), but it is fair to ask what Malaysians have got from all of this.

EU gets new Commission, but little to cheer yet

There was more a sense of relief than joy when the European Union finally got its new executive on Tuesday. These are difficult times for the EU and there is little to celebrate.

The new European Commission is taking office in a tough economic climate, with the 16-country euro zone facing its hardest test since the single currency came into being 11 years ago.

The EU’s image has taken a battering in the past few months, first as the 27-country bloc struggled to secure the approval of the Czech Republic to complete ratification of the Lisbon treaty, a charter intended to reform its institutions and make decision-making easier, and then after it chose two low-key leaders as its first full-time president and foreign policy chief.

U.S. President Barack Obama caused EU leaders further embarrassment by deciding not to attend an EU-US summit in Madrid in May, and the EU failed to force through its more radical ideas at the Copenhagen climate talks in December. An additional problem is media criticism of foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who has been under fire over the EU’s perceived slow response to the Haiti earthquake.

The European Parliament’s approval of the new Commission is just one piece in the jigsaw for rebuilding the EU’s image, but nevertheless an important one.

Its strong policy-making, regulatory and legislative powers mean it could quickly give impetus to new initiatives such as the 2020 strategy, a new 10-year plan for boosting economic growth and making the EU more competitive. EU leaders will discuss the programme on Thursday.

The Commission’s promises to reinforce the bloc’s single market are widely seen as vital to its credibility. It has long been at the vanguard of efforts to combat global climate change and it should continue to be so, despite the disappointment of Copenhagen.

Germany’s Finance Minister takes aim at the City

Has German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck finally said what many world leaders think but are afraid to say? That the British government won’t sign up to meaningful reform of financial markets because it is too worried about what it would mean for the country’s most famous cash cow, the City of London.

The City, which accounts for around 35 percent of global foreign exchange turnover, has been a popular target for critics of capitalism for years. But it has rarely been singled out so bluntly as a problem by one of Britain’s close allies.

Even for a man not known for holding his tongue, Steinbrueck’s remark on Wednesday that Downing Street was impeding reform because it had “practically aligned” its interests with the City, was unusually undiplomatic. Just days before global leaders meet at a Group of Eight summit in Italy, Steinbrueck suggested the British government was plotting a “restoration” of the pre-crisis order to protect its own interests. The United States, by contrast, was now open to reform, he said.

Back to the future in Malaysia with Anwar sodomy trial II

By Barani Krishnan

A decade ago, Malaysia’s former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was on trial for sodomy and corruption in a trial that exposed the seamy side of Malaysian justice and the anxieties of a young country grappling with a crushing financial crisis and civil unrest.

Anwar is Malaysia’s best known political figure, courted in the U.S. and Europe and probably the only man who can topple the government that has led this Southeast Asian country for the past 51 years.

Anwar vowed in a recent interview to fight what he says are trumped up charges.

The 14 months I spent covering the 1998 trials saw Anwar accused of sodomy with three men and having sex with a woman over a period of years. This case is simpler, there is just one accuser. All homosexual acts are illegal in this mainly Muslim country and sex outside marriage is illegal for Muslims.

The first trial was gruelling. Lines began as early as four in the morning as people tried to get into the court that could seat less than 200. Most of the spectators were ordinary people, but there was a sprinkling of dignitaries and businessmen who had known Anwar when he was in office.

There was a separate media queue and again a fight to get in line as dozens of reporters from local and international outlets jockeyed for space. Ringing the court were hundreds of riot police, backed by watercannon, waiting for trouble in a country where there were daily protests at the time, often involving tens of thousands of people.

Rising from the dead – Haider presides over Austrian regional election

Some 25,000 people attended his funeral, countless books have been written about him, a bridge was named in his honour and now the spectre of Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider is dominating a regional election in Austria.

“A campaign with the tragically deceased Haider”; “A dead man is spearheading us”; “And above all, the spectre of Joerg Haider” read newspaper headlines.

Both of Austria’s far-right parties are staking their claim to Haider’s legacy in an election in the Alpine Province of Carinthia where he was governor for more than a decade.

“Carinthia is going HIS way,” proclaim the posters of Haider’s former Freedom Party. Freedom says Haider achieved his greatest successes when heading the party.

“We will look after your Carinthia,” echo the posters of Alliance for Austria’s Future, the splinter party that Haider set up in 2005 after internal disputes within Freedom.

Both parties, which mopped up a third of the vote between them in Austria’s recent parliamentary election, recognise the mileage still to be had out of Haider’s success.

The populist leader, who led the right into a coalition government from 2000-2006, was one of Austria’s rare internationally recognised public figures.

Hu hiccup gives vent to China power speculation

By Benjamin Kang Lim and Simon Rabinovitch

When Chinese President Hu Jintao spoke to the nation this week, an unusual six-second pause may have said more about elite politics in this secretive state than the other 90 minutes of stolid Communist Party rhetoric. In an address marking 30 years of economic reforms, Hu appeared to lose his place in the middle of a sentence, halting awkwardly for 6.5 seconds — the only such break in his speech and an extremely rare bump for Chinese officials long-practised in flawlessly reading out speeches.

When Hu picked up again, he skipped a chunk of the prepared comments, forming a sentence that appears in none of the official transcripts of his speech, nor any Chinese press report. “One centre”, he said, then went silent before continuing, “is the lifeline of our Party and our nation.” The official transcript read, “one centre and two basic points are mutually linked, mutually dependent”, a slogan coined in the 1980s in which “one centre” has a purely economic meaning.

In skipping the second part of the slogan, some thought Hu was using “one centre” in a political sense, referring to himself as that nation’s paramount leader. Hu’s pause could have been a simple verbal misstep. But it came in a passage broaching the touchiest of issues for the 65-year-old president, who also serves as Party chief: how much power does he wield and has he won the “core” status accorded early leaders. And some observers spied a message in Hu’s silence.

Faced with his stiffest challenge yet as the economy slows sharply, Hu may have been trying to stress to the Party that he was still firmly in charge. Even had he lost his place during the address, the “one centre” phrase leads into a slogan repeated so often by Chinese officials that it would be unusual for Hu to have missed its second part. “One centre is the lifeline. It doesn’t imply another way,” said a Chinese scholar, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of talking about the top leadership.

The setting for Hu’s speech, given before ranks of senior officials, retired and in office, seated in the huge Great Hall of the People magnified the potential significance of his comments. The highest-ranking Party officials sat on the stage behind Hu and directly to his rear was Jiang Zemin, Hu’s predecessor as president who still wields huge influence. Hu had paid tribute to Jiang earlier during his speech, using an officially sanctioned phrase to call him “the core of the Party’s third generation of leadership”. The assembled Party members gave Jiang a strong round of applause. Hu, the paramount leader of the so-called fourth generation, is still not referred to as its “core” despite having ascended to the presidency in 2003.

The “one centre” phrase also recalled comments reportedly made by army officials in 2003 when Hu was consolidating his power but Jiang was still chairman of the Central Military Commission. “One centre is called loyalty. Two centres strung together is trouble,” two military delegates to the National People’s Congress, or parliament, told Hu and Jiang, according to the Liberation Army Daily newspaper.