MAY 7 — Thank the stars for the Goods and Servive Tax (GST)!
What a million columns could never do to that many millions in such devastating fashion has come to pass.
An evil friend mused that besides the obvious awful commentaries, parodies and ironies encircling and fascinating statisticians to comedians, it has improved the general population’s ability to calculate daily.
“6 per cent of RM14.50 is… let me look at that receipt again,” says the buyer at the checkout counter with a trailing eye on the cash register, almost half-expecting to reveal a magic trick.
He said, an active mind wards off Alzheimer’s. I did say he was evil.
It’s only a month old, the introduction of the GST.
A month complete since April — strikingly this is also the second anniversary of the present government’s mandate; May 5, 2013 where were you? — yet the conversations are not dying down in kopitiams or café latte specialty stores?
(Not lost on us that today is polling day for the Permatang Pauh by-election, another referendum on GST, don’t doubt that!)
I say this because the past day I have been beset by a basic question directed at me by a senior police officer at the headquarters of the Perak police.
'Why do you need to know?'
I wanted several rudimentary pieces of information; for instance, the number of police personnel in the state, beat bases and crime prevention campaigns in 2014 and compare that with the previous year’s figures.
Believe me, they are as basic as they come, a few miles away from “state secrets” (as seen under the security section in our Perak survey section in www.mykuasa.org).
In return, she grilled me for the temerity to ask, and requested a complete checklist of items to be submitted before she would even process the request.
And I will come back to that later.
The rug we have
The hullabaloo over the prepaid cards/top-ups is not about them costing one price now and one price before, it is rather about how there was an attempt to hide away from the collective conscience of the lower earners and students —the base users of top-ups, as they march to convenience stores nationwide — that the increase is the work of the government.
That they want their taxes. Which is not altogether a foreign concept for bodies charged with collecting and expensing for the benefit of voters, but this government has a desire to not look imposing. Always want to be a cool and hip headmaster with St. Vincent playing in his Apple EarPods.
They rather the telcos looked that role. The nasty role.
I’m not the biggest fans of telcos in this country, they overpromise and under-deliver with a great eagerness thereafter to punish the consumer when he or she fails to pay completely, fully and in a timely manner for a service they probably did not receive. And then they blacklist you from any of them when you have not pleased one of them.
However, they are right in wanting their customers to know which part of the top-up is to them so that consumers are alert about how much they are paying for the substandard service, and so the cursing is proportional to the king’s ransom they collect anyway; and which parts go to the government to run the country in a way that displeases them too, but in a different way.
Let each laggard have his own demons to bear, I say.
The government in their infinite wisdom had the thinking that they were going to introduce the largest shift in our taxation system affecting every payment collection point in the country and not have too many people notice it, well at least not very much apparently.
Which is why there are senior politicians from the ruling party either arguing that the lump-sum GST burden is actually negligible or even in some instances reducing the cost of living.
While people, I’m sorry if I sound desultory, don’t completely mind millions paid over other millions to some project they never heard about, they are completely on point when it comes to what they pay the minutest of items, whether a pair of loafers or giant pumpkin.
They’ve just been waylaid about where the money to pay the project came from, they leave that as a pivotal angst point for the middle class, who earn too much to escape income tax and earn too little to afford a tax accountant to expense off the yacht off the Mediterranean coast of Italy.
But fear not, with GST, day by day a population long denied lessons of paying for what you don’t want because you are part of a democracy — like rate-payers in Quebecers paying for 30 years for the Montreal Olympics — are learning. That being ignorant about your country is not bliss. That asking about spending after the fact is not a means to escape the burden of the spending.
The escape route
As an oil-producing country with a massively successful energy company coupled with a litany of natural resources sidled by gorgeous geography carved by the gods for tourists, Malaysia had every chance to escape taxes.
That the country pays for itself, and a government of any kind escapes vitriol thanks to an absent tax collection system. A system perfect for incumbency and low dissatisfaction, no matter what the human rights abuses are, cue the seeming oasis nations in the Middle East. Be a Sheikh and stay chic.
If only they learnt to live within their means, then political security would be a moot point. People vote on self-interest, no matter what the ideology preaches.
Unfortunately, it has not and here we are in a new dawn of possibilities and a pile up of fears for the government.
Which brings me back to my interview. Thinking about it, I am not sure why a person with a service revolver within earshot of dozens of other policemen with their own revolvers, handcuffs and access to jail-cells, needs to be worried facing a non-governmental organisation’s representative who was holding back his bad jokes. He has no good jokes.
I don’t know, and maybe I’ll never know.
But since I am part of that dawn and mass consciousness GST is bringing to all Malaysians, it’s not going to look completely out of place—my answer.
Why can’t I just know — without needing to justify — how many policemen, beat bases and crime prevention campaigns have been run this year, last year and every year after?
I’m paying for it madam. If it does not trouble you too much, scratch that, I want to trouble you, do tell me what I’m paying for.
As I said, it’s manna from the skies, as long as you know how to count.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
