Gardenia Bakeries (KL) Sdn Bhd’s announcement that from September 1, its standard sliced bread, a staple food product among the B40 and M40 groups, will see an increase of between 20 and 70 sen, shows that increased cost of living is still a pressing economic concern. Gardenia said the company had no alternative but to increase its prices due to a hike in transport cost and costs of raw materials such as wheat flour and vegetable fat.
The price increases of Gardenia bread contradicts the irresponsible claims made by the current government that they have brought soaring prices under control, especially food which rose by 6.2% in July 2022. Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Economy) Mustapa Mohamed said without the provision of subsidies, aid, and incentives Malaysia would have recorded an inflation rate of 11.4% and not 3.4% in July 2022.
Mustapa said of the RM77.7 billion subsidy, the highest subsidy allocation of RM 38.3 billion was for petroleum, to continue the policy initiated by PH in 2019, of maintaining the RON95 price at RM2.05 and diesel at RM2.15, although the international market price had exceeded the price in this country. Clearly, financial measures and subsidies of RM77.7 billion alone undertaken by the government have not helped to arrest soaring prices, as shown by the rise in Gardenia bread.
Instead, the government should take a holistic approach to slow down soaring prices by addressing fiscal bottlenecks, severe labour shortages, depreciating ringgit, bureaucratic red-tape and barriers to economic growth faced by businesses. Addressing these problems will help to reduce costs and generate higher economic growth, where the higher volume would help businesses to further cut down costs.
Unfortunately, the current government appears to be obsessed with political survival and holding general elections at the expense of taking concrete measures to resolve our economic ills. The earlier tabling of the 2023 Budget by 3 weeks to October 7 points to early general elections being called in November this year.
At a time when every resource, energy and focus should be on saving the country from our current economic crisis, the government is sacrificing good governance for political expediency. If early elections can help to resolve our economic problems, then elections should be called yearly.
Tabling an earlier Budget merely for general election purposes negates the entire purpose of the Budget being a fiscal and monetary policy statement for next year. Clearly the proposed 2023 Budget is an Election Budget to benefit the ruling parties’ selfish political interests, not a proper Budget to help the people and overcome our country’s economic problems.