Pakatan begins work on alternative budget
A Pakatan Rakyat working committee held its first meeting today on its alternative budget ahead of the Budget 2012 announcement in October.
A Pakatan Rakyat working committee held its first meeting today
on its alternative budget ahead of the Budget 2012 announcement in October.
Speaking to reporters post-meeting at the coalition's headquarters in Petaling Jaya, committee member and PAS-Kuala Selangor MP Dzulkefly Ahmad said the outcome will be released prior to the federal government budget announcement.
However, he stressed that it would not be a full shadow budget but a strategic one as released by the coalition in 2008.
"We will take a strategic approach, where all the sectoral parameters are to be addressed.
"We will define what our objectives are, and move backwards on how to allocate funds to various sectors to avoid the mistakes of the BN in the last budget, where we saw a lot of pump priming," Dzulkefly (right) said.
The committee, comprising two members each from PKR, PAS and DAP respectively, will meet every Friday afternoon.
Details of the budget will be released in stages after each meeting.
Looking to distributive justice
"We want to release (the full alternative budget) prior to the Budget 2012 announcement and we welcome plagiarising from the BN government," said PKR Batu MP Tian Chua who is also part of the committee.
Also on the committee are parliamentarians Liew Ching Tong (DAP-Bukit Bendera), Tony Pua (DAP-Petaling Jaya Utara), Nurul Izzah Anwar (PKR-Lembah Pantai) and Negeri Sembilan PAS deputy commissioner Rosli Yaakob.
Dzulkefly added that the Pakatan budget, themed "Prosperity for All" (Kesejahteraan Untuk Semua) aims to look at not only "big spending but sustainable growth" and "redistributive justice".
The main focus, he said, was to address the 60 percent of Malaysian households whose main breadwinner earns less than RM1,500 a month.
"One we can do this we can break out of the middle income trap," he said.
Pakatan had failed to produce an alternative budget post-2008, with DAP filling the gap in the years following.
Its predecessor Barisan Alternatif had in 1999 presented an alternative budget.
