Penang BN chief Teng Chang Yeow has fired another salvo at the state government, this time claiming that the state's manufacturing sector has achieved "zero growth" under DAP rule.

In what he described as a rebuttal to Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng's "series of bull****s", Teng said the current administration has failed miserably to manage this very important sector.

"The DAP-led state government has no industrial master plan nor a strategic development blueprint," said Teng, who is also Penang Gerakan chief.

"The manufacturing sector has been one of the main pillars of state economy since Gerakan transformed the economy of the state from 1970 to 2008," he added at a press conference today.

"It is the sector that provides employment to the people of Penang and many talented Malaysians, for decades before DAP took over," stressed the former state executive councillor.

Teng said the Penang chief minister should stop "bragging" about his record.

The state government led by Lim has performed badly since 2008, Teng claimed.

"Step by step and year by year, he has failed to manage the manufacturing sector as one of the main economic pillars of Penang, bringing down the growth of the sector from 10 percent annually under BN to zero growth under DAP," Teng said.

"We are launching a series to expose the chief minister's bull****s, the lies and misleading achievements that he has claimed," he added.
 



Teng was responding to DAP leaders, including Lim and Serdang MP Ong Kian Ming who claimed Penang's economic performance was better during the DAP's rule, if compared with the time Gerakan held power.

Lim had claimed Penang had "painfully" climbed up the economic performance ladder as Gerakan left the state in the bottom rung in 2007, a year before DAP took over the administration.

Wrong data used

Meanwhile Gerakan secretary-general Liang Teck Meng also joined Teng in returning fire to the DAP-led Penang government over their argument on who are better stewards of Penang.

Though his crosshairs was on DAP Bukit Mertajam MP Steven Sim  who had also defended DAP as being better caretakers of the Penang economy.

"His arguments basically consist of two parts. The first part is that Penang has the fourth highest median salary of RM1,600, below Selangor, Johor and Negeri Sembilan," Liang said in a statement.

However he argued that Sim's data was flawed as it was based on the Department of Statistics' 2015 Salaries and Wages Survey Report that look at only 2014 data, with no comparisons to past years.
 
A more suitable point of reference, argued Liang, would be the department's Median Household Income Survey, which looked at data from 2009, 2012 and 2014.

Based on this, Liang noted that Penang ranks fourth lowest in terms of household income growth from 2009 to 2014, while Selangor is third lowest.

Not only has Penang fallen further behind Kuala Lumpur and Labuan for median household income but Penang was also overtaken by Johor and Malacca, since 2009.

Under the DAP, Penang had fallen from fifth highest household income in 2009 to seventh highest in 2014, he argued.

Liang also trained his guns on Sim's allegations that the federal government does not allocate enough funds to Penang.

"Sim's table is only allocations for operating expenditure and completely ignores federal government allocations for capital expenditure and also direct aid to the Penang citizens via BR1M, social welfare or subsidies," he said.

Based on data from the Economic Planning Unit, he added, the true total allocation to Penang by the federal government had reached RM5.8 billion in the year 2015 and had always been above RM4 billion per year since 2005.


"I repeat that the DAP must stop engaging in political dishonesty and propaganda to cover or be used to go into self-denial mode of what the true economic situation in Penang is. The people on the ground in Penang are already feeling something is wrong," Liang added.