After meeting with a Johor MCA delegation recently, Johor Menteri Besar Abdul Ghani Othman announced that the Johor state government would allocate RM3.2 million for Chinese schools and temples in the state, including RM1.5 million for Chinese primary schools, RM400,000 for eight Chinese independent secondary schools, RM300,000 for the Southern College and RM1 million for various temples in the state.

The state government did the same prior to the last general elections. Such vote-fishing tricks will not help develop the state's education field. For instance, each Chinese secondary school gets only a RM50,000 allocation which is not even enough to pay for half a year's electricity and water bills in some of the bigger schools.

Such 'ice cream tactic' are meant to woo Chinese voters in view of speculation that the next general elections is just around the corner. The people must be reminded to resume their position as the 'boss' since they are the taxpayers and hence, paymasters of the government.

Nonetheless, most Johor Chinese guild leaders think that a little government allocation is better than none. These small allocations to the Chinese community should be perceived as 'ice cream' handed out on a warm day which is nice to cool down but the Chinese guild leaders are advised not call any one who hands out these 'ice cream' a 'Daddy'.

It would be pathetic to praise the BN government for giving a token of allocation when the fact remains that we ourselves are the taxpayers and paymasters of the government. A toddler older than one-year-old is capable of recognising who his true daddy is and would not simply call any one who gives him a 'ice cream' as 'Daddy'.

Our education and human development (based on literacy rate, life expectancy at birth, primary to tertiary education enrolment and GDP per capita) is getting more and more pathetic. Currently, our human development ranking is only mediocre being in the same league as Communist China, Russia, Bulgaria, Thailand and the Philippines. While during the 1970s and 1980s, we were in the same league with Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, and were slightly ahead of South Korea and Taiwan. We are now behind all these industrialised Asian nations in terms of human development.

We need to look into our racially-biased education and religion policies more critically. Unless we have true freedom of education and religion which requires the government of the day to allocate funds fairly to develop each community's religion and education, Malaysia human development will never progress further from where it is now.

The writer is Johor DAP state chairperson .