I am just totally confounded and appalled on reading Minister for International Trade and Industry Rafidah Aziz's rejection of the suggestion made by her former boss Dr Mahathir Mohamad that a public disclosure be made of those who were granted APs for the importation of cars, which according to her was 66,277 units last year.

This had been a source of high profits to those granted the APs whilst at the same time giving tough competition to our national car, Proton.

In the first instance, our government under the leadership of Pak Lah had announced loud and clear that it would uphold the principles of transparency and good governance. It would not leave any avenue open for those under it to hide any of their wrongdoings or to cover up any controversial practices.

But here we have a cabinet minister rejecting outright the administration's declared policy. What does all this really mean? One cannot but deduce that the Malaysian government has all along had been practicing selective transparency and enforcement of its own declared basic fundamental principles.

We are intelligent enough to appreciate that the challenge by Mahathir is heavily-loaded and would be too onerous for Rafidah to tackle in plain and honest language. At the same time, neither are we amused by her political answer which has provoked more questions from us than it tries to answer.

Here we have the case of two veteran politicians confronting each other with political semantics and supposed answers given in a form of political riddles in the hope that they would satisfy the unsuspecting general public.

Of course, Mahathir already knew the answers all along. His mistake is that he tolerated the whole AP issue during his time in power. It is now being thrown back at him.

The administrative practices and the semantics of politics adopted by the Abdullah Ahmad Badawi government are not too much different from that when Mahatihr was in power. For this reason, we have a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

The sad part of the whole episode is that the government is still not truly genuine and serious about upholding its own fundamental principle of transparency, the very basis on which the overwhelming mandate was given by the people to Pak Lah during the last election.