COMMENT | Budget 2022: The devil is in the details

COMMENT | When Finance Minister Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz presented Budget 2022 last Friday, it was my first time in 16 years not being inside the Parliament precinct, either as an aide or as a parliamentarian.

Each time the budget was presented throughout those years, I kept reminding the public a simple fact - the speech read by the minister is not the budget per se.

The speech is just the political message the minister and the government would like you to hear.

Typically, the minister’s speechwriters will try to touch the hearts and minds of the audience - the rating agencies, ethnic lobbies, business groups - in the hope that all of these varied interest groups, however contradictory they may be, feel important and satisfied.

One thing that frustrates me a lot is that most politicians and media practitioners, even many financial analysts, couldn’t be bothered to read the fine print in the actual budget documents.

My first experience with a budget presentation was in December 1999. As Teresa Kok’s aide, when she was first elected as Seputeh member of Parliament, I had to carry volumes of those documents from the MP’s desk in the Parliament back to her office. My library still keeps those documents.

When I became an MP in 2008, each time the minister read his budget speech, which typically took about two hours, I would focus on the 500-page or so Estimated Federal Expenditure documents that detailed the government’s spending by ministries.

Each year, the only time Parliament sits on a Friday is budget day. I would then spend Saturday deep-diving the documents.

I am glad that some fellow MPs such as Tony Pua and Ong Kian Ming, as well as colleagues in Malaysiakini, who poured in hours of their time to understand the Estimated Expenditure documents year in, year out.

Only in recent years did the Finance Ministry put most of the budget documents online.

However, the ministry has yet to share the...