Call me an incurable optimist, but my first reaction to the announcement of the cabinet's cancellation a few months ago of further work on the project variously referred to as the "half", "scenic" or "crooked" bridge was that it might be the beginning of the end for half-baked, cynical and crooked activities in Malaysia.

A full stop, at last, to the squandering of public money on grandiose, graft-riddled, ego-building schemes, and a message to the self-interested and self-enriching politicos, civil servants, crony capitalists, kickback-paying contractors and other beneficiaries of such schemes that the people and at least some authorities in Malaysia would no longer tolerate or fund crooked bridges, crooked roads, crooked gas pipelines, crooked dams, crooked land deals, crooked public, commercial and housing developments, crooked waste disposal, crooked jails, crooked logging... and so on. And on and on and on.