ian unspoken

Prime Minister Abdullah’s claim that Malaysia is currently ranked 8th in the world in terms of competitiveness is deliberately misleading. He just can’t stop misleading everyone. The lie about the dissolution of the Parliament is still very fresh.

Do not compare Singapore’s economy with that of Malaysia’s.

It is like comparing “first-class grapes (Singapore) with first-class apples (Malaysia),” Prime Minster Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said when addressing the Chinese community at the Penang Chinese Town Hall (PCTH) dialogue session yesterday.

“We are a population of over 20 million and we rank eighth in the world in terms of our competitiveness.

“This is not the Government’s figure and I am not telling you lies. This statistic is from an international survey.

“If I quote statistics from our own surveys, you will not believe us. Everywhere I go, the business community tells me that Malaysia is doing very well. These people are smart. You cannot fool them because they are well-read,” he said, adding that the Government had no reason to lie.

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Yes, it is true. The Malaysian Parliament has been dissolved. Elections are on!

Yesterday’s dissolution of the Parliament also portrayed Mr Bugger-wi as a cunning liar. Come on, even a ten-year-old would know that you are telling a blatant lie. Can’t he just wait another week for the Chinese New Year celebrations to end? Mr. PM, Malaysia is plural FYI!

We know that it is impossible for BN to not win this round, but it’s a possibility that they might lose their two-thirds majority in the Parliament. Penang is getting a new Chief Minister. I hope Jeff Ooi, Lim Guang Eng and his father, Lim Kit Siang will run for Penang seats. Hopefully one of them would even be the new Penang CM!
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Yes! I have moved to my new place in Kingsford. It’s just 1km away and opposite uni.

Bye bye, Willis St.

Hello, Barker St.

While I was “busy” not updating, Australia has changed governments. Yes, the Australian Labor Party won and Mr Kevin Rudd is now the Prime Minister of Australia.

After winning the elections on Saturday night, he went straight to church on Sunday morning. His immediate priorities were to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, attend the international climate change talks in Bali next month, and implement his agenda on hospitals, education, child care and broadband. All these promises sound good, and I hope that he will keep his promises. God bless you, Mr Rudd and Australia.

Poor John Howard could not keep anything, even his seat at Bennelong; this makes him the second sitting prime minister to lose his seat. Never underestimate a lady. A lesson of humility for you, Howard. Hehehe. Especially this lady…

Change is good. Australians have exercised their democratic rights and I expect a change in the US government in the imminent elections. For Malaysia, in contrast, citizens have asked for a free and fair election, but they were asked to “exercise their democratic rights” by voting in the elections. Moreover, they were replied with chemical-laced water cannons and tear gas. What kind of democracy does the government claim Malaysians have when we do not even have a voice. I think I’ll call this ‘demo-crazy’. Governments should be afraid of the people, not the other way.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) raised interest rates on Wednesday, causing the Australian dollar to reach a fresh 23-year high. The domestic currency hit 93.74 US cents at 1330 AEDT - its strongest level since April 4, 1984 when it closed at 93.93 US cents.

The RBA lifted official interest rates on Wednesday morning by a quarter of a percentage point to 6.75 percent. This has brought rates to their highest level since November 1996. Prime Minister John Howard has apologised to borrowers for the consequences of today’s rise, but Treasurer Peter Costello insisted that rates have only gone up because Australians have never had it so good.

This is the first time that the rates have changed during a campaign election. However, Mr Howard said Australians should remember the ballooning inflation under the previous Labor government.
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Malaysia’s political knife act: theatre or threat?
Tue 6 Nov 2007, 11:29 GMT
By Mark Bendeich

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - In Malaysia, there are very few public meetings where people can turn up with a weapon — but the nation’s largest annual political gathering is one of them.

For the past three years, a leader of the main ruling party, which represents the ethnic Malay majority, gets the party’s annual assembly underway by drawing a 2-ft-long (60-cm-long) ceremonial dagger, kissing it and then brandishing it in the air.

And each time, hundreds of party faithful inside the assembly hall have erupted into a cheer while, outside, many in Malaysia’s large ethnic Chinese community have quietly cursed, convinced that the knife is metaphorically pointed at them.

“I don’t think you bring in a weapon of war to a meeting where you claim to want to discuss and deliberate on nation-building policy,” opposition politician Lim Guan Eng said after the latest knife-kissing episode on Tuesday.

“It has been used to threaten non-Malays.”

The traditional Malay dagger, or keris, is a symbol of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), which leads the multi-racial coalition that has ruled since independence 50 years ago, but it has also become a symbol of racial tensions.
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