Remove e-hailing rules and help 200,000 earn more

QUESTION TIME | Transport Minister Anthony Loke’s puzzling suppression of the e-hailing industry, including Grab, will crimp the growth of a very valuable service to ease transport woes, and needlessly make it more difficult for some 200,000 people to supplement their incomes.

If these drivers earn an average of just RM1,000 a month to supplement earnings, that’s an income of RM200 million or RM2.4 billion a year, which is probably more than what the government has ever achieved through any one single income-increasing scheme, 1MDB excepted of course.

Such a short-sighted policy prevents both improvements in services for the public and at the same time reduces opportunities for hassle-free increase of incomes for hundreds of thousands of people, yet again demonstrating policy bankruptcy within the Harapan government.

The government, and in this case Loke, needs to recognise that e-commerce is burgeoning and any regulations restricting their growth should be done away with if they are unnecessary, so as to stimulate growth in services and, by extension, the incomes for many...