Two articles in the local press caught my attention today. The first is that Indonesia wants to join Thailand in asking for compensation from the Malaysian government for not being able to export automobiles to Malaysia after the implementation of Afta (Asean Free Trade Agreement) in 2003.

The second article is the one concerning China's refusal to allow importing of Japanese vehicles as a reaction of Japan's tariff barriers on China's agricultural products.

There are many automobile-exporting countries, such as the US, France, Italy, UK, Spain, Germany, South Korea and of course, Japan. After 2003, Malaysia wants all the Asean markets to open for us, but we will close our auto markets to them. Although Afta involves only Asean, the companies operating from these countries are multinationals, which will lobby their governments to put some kind of pressure on Malaysia - pressure that we don't really need right now when we are experiencing a downturn.

The reason Malaysia gave was that Proton suffered because of the currency crisis.

What about the other companies in other industries? Didn't they suffer too? Can the protection of one company hold the whole country to ransom?

To add salt to the wound, Malaysian car buyers get very much fewer safety features and shorter warranties. As if Malaysian lives are not as valuable!

Now we find out that some cars are 'hijacked' and new parts are changed for old ones. This was suspected by buyers for quite some time, but every time they complained about poor quality, they were always told that the cars were all new, and perhaps it was the owner who abused the car.

We have to do some serious thinking as to where we want to be in the industry. We cannot go on forever tagging it as a 'National Car' and expect the world to wait for us to grow up.