00:00The concept of facilitating through some subsidies are important because society is not even.
00:06There will be people who are top end of society, life goes on enjoying the good parts of it,
00:12but there will be people at the bottom end of society that may need some help along the way.
00:17The key for the government is actually to address where do we lift it up
00:21and where do we make sure that the subsidies, if we are given, doesn't have the distortive effect,
00:27doesn't end up giving things that the person doesn't deserve to get,
00:32that other people deserve to get in a better form.
00:34So the thinking frame for the government was actually first, let's legitimise that we have to do something about it
00:40because I need to create space within my fiscal budget.
00:43Second, get the people to accept that doing this change and the way we have done it is fair.
00:50Now the reality is we've now done subsidy rationalisation for more than two years.
00:55I still don't have riots in the street.
00:58So the government seems to have figured out how to do the balancing at right
01:01and actually to make it clear that society accepts that it has to take decisions,
01:06it has to accept that decisions not all the time are easy,
01:09but it accepts it because the concept of fairness is actually abided by.
01:16I think clarity is very important and I think what Malaysia has tried to do
01:20is to actually provide some clarity what success means to us
01:23and the economic framework that we introduced, the Madani framework,
01:28which talks about progression, talks about key directional targets that we want,
01:33actually puts a goal that we all want to be shooting for
01:35but also anchors in terms of building the right foundations for society and so on.
