Despite being advised, lectured and even ridiculed for some of the Government’s incredulous, and often contradictory stance of the Goods and Services Tax, they had maintained to the very end that the GST will end up with most goods and services with lower prices over the past few years.
It has only been barely a week after the implementation of the GST on the 1 April 2015, the number of goods and services which have lower prices are far and few between. Instead, consumers are faced with significant increases in prices for everyday goods and services. Some of the increases have been well above the 6% tax because the actual cost of doing business has increased significantly due to the administration of the tax.
Datuk Ahmad Maslan is indisputably the biggest advocate and spokesperson for the Goods and Services Tax (GST) over the past two years. The Deputy Finance Minister had stoutly defended the GST’s benign impact on prices in Parliament on 7 April 2014, when he announced that
…daripada 689 barang yang dibuat kajian, 73 barang atau 10% naik. 329 barang atau 48% tiada perubahan dan 287 barang atau 42% turun harga.
He would have Malaysians believe that only 10% of the 689 goods and services which the Government “studied” will increase in price. At the same time, a whopping 42% will see a price reduction. The rest of 48% of the products will be unchanged in pricing.
Today, the reality is more like only 10% of goods and services actually fell in its pricing while an overwhelming number of goods and services have increased in price. How did this Government conduct its study that came up with such unbelievable conclusions which the Minister could spout in the Parliament?
The Finance Minister and Prime Minister himself, Dato’ Seri Najib Razak had cited a different study with a different set of figures for the all-important 2015 Budget Speech on 10 October 2014. In the speech, he assured Malaysians that
Of the 944 goods and services in the basket of goods of the CPI, the prices of 532 items or 56% are expected to reduce up to 4.1%… Meanwhile, about 354 goods and services may experience some price increase but less than 5.8%.
Dato’ Seri Najib Razak actually promised the people that a majority of 56% of the daily goods and services will see a drop in price!
Even though he had conceded that a higher 37.5% of goods and services (compared to Ahmad Maslan’s statistics) will face an increase in price, he claimed that these increases will actually be less than the tax rate of 6%! How the Ministry of Finance, tasked with the ultimate responsibility of managing our country’s economy, can come up with such preposterous statistics is beyond me.
The biggest joke however, must be on Dato’ Ahmad Maslan boast that the opposition will “fail miserably and be left in despair (‘merana’)” for “lying to the people” about the GST. The Deputy Finance Minister said the Government was merely trying to cut costs with the GST while the opposition kept rejecting the initiative.
“Why don’t they (Pakatan Rakyat) want GST? Because when prices of goods and services fall, the opposition will not have any fodder to hit out at the Government,” he said on 22 December 2013.[1]
Datuk Ahmad mocked Pakatan Rakyat again at a pro-GST forum at Sheraton Hotel in Kuala Lumpur on the 26 February 2014, claiming that “this is a scary fact for the opposition, which now mocks the BN government as Barang Naik, but after the GST, we will be known as ‘Barang Turun’ government.”[2]
On top of the chaos the GST is causing on the markets today, the above failed promises of lower prices are certainly sufficient justification for the heads of Finance Minister, Dato’ Seri Najib Razak and Deputy Finance Minister, Datuk Ahmad Maslan to be placed on the chopping block.