Debate speech by Dr. Hiew King Cheu on Agong's Royal Address in Parliament on Wednesday, 21^st March 2012:

Urge the government to pay more attention to Sabah

The situation in Sabah did not improve as expected and as promised by the government. Sabah remains as the poorest state in Malaysia in spite of its abandon natural resources like oil and gas, huge plantations, plenty of land and the forest. Why and what happened?

The only possible explanation is simply Sabah did not have a good managed economy. This is reflected by the huge number of people applying and receiving the BR1M money, the highest in Malaysia. This is telling us we have a very high poverty rate, and it is true that Sabah is the poorest state in Malaysia, with 42% of the poor people in Malaysia are in Sabah. In fact, with all the rich natural resources, we should be enjoying prosperity and be well off. The people in Sabah are migrating to oversea countries is another proof, coupled with huge number of the young people moving out of the state to seek work else way.

Sabah has a very slake economy with very little development activities in the industrial, infrastructure, agriculture and tourism sectors. The government has been making big announcement on big plans, but will that happen? In fact Sabah is known to be at least 15 years behind other states in Malaysia. We are so backward until investors now don't choose to come to Sabah. Sabah has everything, Penang has little, why Penang achieved the top state in investment for two years.

We have no fast growth in economy but surely we have very fast increase in the population. When compared with other states we are 5 times faster in population growth. Where are these people coming from, and why they can become Malaysian so easily? The call for the RCI to check on this by the people is a solid proof that Sabahan wants to know what happened. very sadly, while the call on RCI had been made, there are more new Sabahan being produced.

On the issue of NFC, how nice if the RM 250 million is being used in Sabah, like in Kota Belud where there is plenty of gracing land and green pastures. There will be at least 2 cattles for each family, many people will benefit from it and Sabah can be a meat producing state in the future. The "food security" in Malaysia will be achieved. Very sad to see until today, the production of rice is still with no significant increase, what is happening? We still don't see the effect of the millions ringgits of money pumped in to develop and increase the production.

On the program that the government will focus and speed up on the new and replanting of oil palm and rubber to raise the income of the rural folks especially those in Sabah and Sarawak, this will not work if the government is not fully committed to do so. We have plenty of land and it only need funds to get these going. This money should have been sent to Sabah long time ago, and should have been used extensively in Sabah to benefit Sabahan.

On improving the housing needs, the National Housing Policies aimed at providing adequate, comfortable, and affordable housing has yet to show its effectiveness and results. There are thousands of house buyers facing problems both in financial and other aspect in Sabah. The SPNB projects in Sabah have faced difficulties due to its delay and stop work. How can the policies be implemented smoothly? We want to see some quick action to speed up the various projects in Sabah to solve the problems of the people, and not giving them more problems.

The development of human capital in Sabah is still in lacking, as seen from the large untrained population especially those from the rural districts. The young people from the rural areas should be given the technical and vocational training, and they form the back bone of our work force. Without this training, our Sabah and Sarawak young people are now flooding the general labour market in Semananjong especially in KL and Johor, and it is estimated in some few hundred thosands. We can not afford to have this continuing, the foreigners are taking over their jobs in Sabah already.

The government talks about quality health care, but what happened to the Sabah sector? Why we have serious shortage of doctors, equipments, ambulances, and hospitals? Many such issues have been raised and should have been attended to. The government can wait but the patients can't, and there are evidence that lives had been lost. The negligence in hospitals had been repeatedly reported in Sabah. Is this due to the incompetent or our medical standard has drop? There are 30% the Sabah ambulances either sick or in the ICU, why this high casualty rates occurred? Why can't we get more ambulances to Sabah? Saving life is more important. In Labuan, the hospital is in need of new equipment like CT scan machine and other equipment to back up the work of the specialist doctors, and without that they are helpless. When is the car parking problems in QEH2 be solved, and any plans on the multi storey car parks be built? The proposal on collecting parking fees there is not acceptable for now.

To eradicate corruption is a must, and we can see corruption in Sabah and Malaysia is growing fast, the International corruption index has indicated that. We want all the government jobs and projects to be opened tender to allow equal and fair competition among the qualified contractors and not be given to cronies companies. Many jobs had failed because of the not qualified contractors and especially the "ali baba" type. That had damaged the country. Why do we have to pay so high price to get something done? There are plenty of corruption in the offices, on the street, on Highway, and places you name it. Do we want to see this to become common practice or culture?

The infrastructure in Sabah is known to be the worst, in Kota Kinabalu, many traffic junctions needed flyovers and traffic lights, but it took the government 5 years to build one, while in Semananjong, many flyovers were built without connecting roads, just sitting doing nothing, built ready for 2040? There are roads fit for only cows, where are the promised highways? Why can't we have good roads? The rural folks are furious having to travel on these bad roads.

Again I urge the government to pay more attention to Sabah, if not the Fixed Deposit will no longer hold.

* Dr Hiew King Cheu, MP for Kota Kinabalu