LETTER | There are many things I don’t seem to understand and I hope Pakatan Harapan leaders especially people like Tony Pua and Lim Guan Eng will explain to the people.

Now Harapan is saying that abolishing tolls in not possible at the moment given the dire financial position of the government. But then who said we are demanding that tolls be totally abolished even though Harapan’s manifesto promised so.

At the minimum, may I know what had happened to the “renegotiation” of toll and independent power producer (IPP) agreements that the people demanded for? Didn’t we say all those agreements were lopsided and unfair to the public?

Hence, can we not renegotiate all of them and get, at least, their compensation down, if not the toll rates? At least reducing the compensation to toll concessionaires would have strengthened the coffers of the government to some extent.

As I see it, we have done nothing much – no toll renegotiation, no toll reduction and no reduced compensation for the concessionaires for delaying or reducing toll increases and rates. So what exactly have we done?

On GST and SST, I think I have written a number of pieces on this even before the 14th general election, more or less envisaging how the changes will fan out. I asked for a reduced GST instead of abolishing the GST altogether and reintroducing the SST.

When the GST was abolished (during the tax holiday period), were we supposed to be happy with inflation was less than one percent?

When 6% of the prices were taken off, the prices should have come down across the board, not still with inflation even though it is less than one per cent (those not familiar with economics may want to check out the meaning of inflation, disinflation and deflation).

So where did the “zero GST” effect go? Can’t we see the government was sacrificing revenue collection but the people were not benefiting from it?

Now with SST reintroduced, are we not paying SST “over and above” GST since abolishing GST earlier did not bring the prices down? The SST is now imposed on prices with “GST embedded” in it.

At the end of the day, it is another field day for all the traders and businesspersons and another round of suffering for the people.

In fact, this was my concern when the SST was first mooted to replace the GST because I have seen enough of the incompetence when it comes to tweaking the taxation system.

When the GST was first implemented, prices had actually gone up by more than 6% because the tax was not “value-added” but “passed through” to the consumers since many traders had wanted to avoid the trouble to claim for refunds.

Therefore, when the GST was abolished, prices should rightly come down by more than 6%. Instead, we have Harapan politicians foolish enough singing praises that inflation was less than one per cent during the tax holiday period.

The people have rightly chosen Harapan to govern the country for the next five years because they had no choice left. Similarly, people are essentially helpless once a new government is formed.

The people can only expect politicians and political parties forming the government to do the right thing. Don’t keep blaming the old government and don’t keep disappointing us.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.