MALAYSIA’S 2021 budget has been substantially altered by the Finance Minister during its first reading.
This is due to strong protests from public institutions as well as the opposition.
Though the budget has been termed expansionary, in effect, there is relatively little allocation for capital expenditure to boost economic development.
However, the most important consideration is how to achieve much more with less to overcome the black swan event of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A black swan event is an incident that occurs unpredictably and unexpectedly causing wide-spread chaos.
Writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb, uses the phrase black swan as a metaphor for how humans deal with unpredictable events in his 2007 book, The Black Swan.
This article doesn’t deal with the budget itself, but rather the how to utilise the budget after it has been passed through a concept termed as “Innovative Public Governance.” So what is Innovative Public Governance?
Just imagine the government can halve its expenditure and triple its benefits to the people.
Imagination and innovation are required to steer our country out of the economic turbulence caused by Covid-19.
While resources are important, we need resourcefulness to fully harness whatever limited resources that we have.
The key philosophy is this: whatever problem we have, someone or some organisation in the world has already solved the problem for us, either directly or indirectly.
The problem that has been solved may not be the same but the features of the problem are.
Innovative Public Governance is a measurable results-driven fast-track innovation process that minimises mistakes and risks by adapting the features of proven and successful innovations from all over the world.
It involves a five-step system to tap into the best brains in the world for the best proven solutions.
The government cannot solve the mammoth problems of our nation by itself.
It needs the cooperation, collaboration of the private sector, professional bodies, non-governmental organisations and its rakyat.
Innovation begins by asking the right questions to identify the core issues and not taking the easy path to a temporary feel-good factor by addressing the symptoms.
It is about exploiting limitations to drive breakthrough action. Innovative Public Governance demands exploiting limits not ignoring them.
Experimentation is risky, costly, time-consuming with no guarantee of success. Worse still, it may end up with controversy and negative publicity for the government.
An excellent example of Innovative Public Governance is the launch of the time-bank system by the Swiss government.
Under this time-bank scheme, people volunteer to take care of the elderly.
The number of hours they spent with the elderly are banked into the volunteer’s account.
This will entitle them to free care by new volunteers when they are old and need care themselves.
If care is not needed, they have performed an essential public service.
Apart from Switzerland, the UK is also following the “time bank” scheme and the Singapore government is considering this scheme too.
If the government adopts this scheme, it will save the Ministry of Health (MoH) and the Ministry of Welfare millions of ringgit in their budget. Best of all, it involves participation from the public into its own health.
Another concept worth exploring is for the MoH to focus more on healthcare rather than sick care.
Malaysia has the probably the best sick-care in the world. However, sick-care costs keep rising without keeping our people healthy. No matter how much, the budget will never be enough.
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