Reading all these letters of your readers, one can't help but sense that whatever goodwill of the people that our PM Abdullah Badawi had gained in the last general election is all but lost.

No amount of explanations will help the government explain its way out of this because the 30 sen rise in fuel price hurts everyone, save of course, the upper elite group. The call for the rakyat to make sacrifices for the sake of conserving of our natural resources and to remove our addiction to the 'crutch mentality' will fall only to deaf ears.

Why so? For one, people just cannot understand why a country such as Malaysia which is a net exporter of oil cannot channel the benefits of its oil production to the public in general. The recent global survey of Petronas as being the least transparent among global oil companies explains it all.

The truth of the matter is Petronas has been systematically and continually drained of its wealth by the well-connected and privileged few. Unless the revenue of Petronas all these years is made public, the people will continue to be angry.

The many scandals and wastages of public funds of the BN government is well-known to the public. The people are not blind, neither are they deaf. The sinful, ill-gotten wealth of the many rich and powerful are constantly displayed in the public domain, thanks to the Internet. So the call to 'change our lifestyle' can only ring hollow to the many who are already feeling the pain of the rising cost of living.

Twenty years ago, the starting pay of an engineer was between RM1,800 - RM2,000 while a normal graduate fetched about RM1,500. A friend told me that today an engineer starts with RM1,800 and he can even employ a normal graduate at RM1,000. So while the salary of employees has remained static or decreased, the cost of living has gone up tremendously.

Penyokong BN proudly wrote and boasted about the many achievements of the BN government through its many grandiose project such as the KLCC, the F1 circuit, Putrajaya, etc. But the reality is that the rakyat has not progressed much.

Unless the BN government is prepared to tackle many of the public scandals and abuses of public funds with sincerity and openness, it has really lost its moral authority to demand what it does of its people.