THESE past few years, the government has attempted to implement several important initiatives, such as:
Increasing the minimum wage.
Launching affordable housing programmes.
Rationalisation of electricity subsidies.
The first two programmes provide much-needed help for the rakyat and the last one helps save much-needed government funds, which in turn can be utilised to fund more pro-people initiatives.
And almost always, there’ll be strong resistance from various quarters and/or urges for the government to delay implementing such measures. The main issue? Having to deal with higher costs of materials, items, services, etc.
Could all this very well stem from the unwarranted, opportunistic increases in such costs by certain providers and heads of companies in order to generate greater profits for themselves? Could all these higher costs be set purposefully simply due to corporate greed?
Let’s go through the issues raised with each example listed above:
Wage increases being problematic for smaller businesses
For minimum wage increases, the small and medium traders and businesses raise concerns about paying their workers higher wages as it’ll cause them heavy financial burdens.
One main problem here is the deliberate higher charging of larger businesses towards these smaller ones for their supplied goods. This reduces these smaller businesses’ profit margins, thus preventing them from being able to pay their workers higher wages.
The motive behind these larger businesses’ actions? To gain more profits for themselves by squeezing the smaller ones. This is clearly a case of unwarranted, opportunistic price increases.
Low-cost housing isn’t financially-viable for developers?
When it comes to government-driven affordable housing programmes, such units should be sold at lower prices in order to make them genuinely affordable, given the low and unstable financial statuses of many Malaysians these days. However, many housing developers aren’t willing to build houses at lower prices as they point out the higher costs of building materials. This insinuates that building more lower-cost housing gives them smaller returns in terms of their profits, hence their lesser preference towards such government-driven low-cost housing initiatives.
So, the question here is are those increases in building materials’ prices genuinely warranted or opportunistic attempts by those suppliers to reap greater profits?
Bigger businesses taking advantage of the electricity subsidy removal?
There are concerns that the electricity subsidy removal towards larger businesses, shopping complexes, etc, will lead to them increasing the prices of their sold goods and services. Such actions will in turn end up burdening average consumers.
So once again, are these increases genuinely warranted, or simply opportunistic attempts by these particular businesses to reap greater profits?
Increase in costs of other goods and services
Apart from the above examples, we’ve also heard of issues of costlier essentials like medical supplies and equipment, and more recently, planned hikes in certain services like electricity tariffs. Are these deliberate price increases by these providers genuinely deserved or not?
The need for much tighter governmental regulation and oversight
To ensure there are as few unscrupulous, unwarranted price increase practices as possible, the government must form strict regulatory and oversight bodies and strengthen existing ones towards all these opportunistic entities mentioned above. The government must make sure that such oversight bodies are truly independent, professional, and not susceptible to bribes.
Such opportunistic price increases that are solely driven by greed will only result in greater hardship for the common people and heavier financial burden towards the government. These types of practices mustn’t be tolerated as well as permitted to stand in the way of positive initiatives and/or policies.
Only by stomping out such shameless profiteering from society can the government effectively uplift people’s socioeconomic statuses and retain more funds to finance even more much-needed pro-people initiatives. – February 4, 2025
Raveen Veerasenan Jeyakumar is a Scoop reader