In the debate on the 10th Malaysia Plan, Shah Alam MP Khalid Samad - also a PAS Political Bureau member - finds an unlikely ally in Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin on the need for the BN government to be more open and transparent when awarding public works contracts.

NONE Khalid ( right ) had hit out at the federal government over their relative silence on terms when awarding mega-contracts and projects to various private companies.

"If we are still talking about getting foreign investors to spend their money here, just how can we achieve it if nothing much is known about who is developing the Sungai Besi airbase land or the land where Pudu Jail used to sit?" he asked.

Khairy echoed his call, saying that transparency was the only way to go to get quality foreign investors into the country,

"I agree that if we are ready to show that (fair) opportunities are given to the best company with the best price, it has to be done in an open manner whether it is the airbase or the new rubber research institute or the new MRT system.

"We must be open and transparent. That is how it should go for the government," said Khairy, who is also the Umno’s Rembau member of Parliament.

khairy jamaluddin kj interview 190310 He also said that the time for ‘sweetheart deals’ and providing guarantees to companies to cover the possibility of losses was long gone.

"We should no longer be providing guarantees. I remember that old adage, ‘privatise profits and nationalise losses’.

"We cannot afford to bail out companies now," Khairy ( right ) told the forum organised by the Leaders magazine in Kuala Lumpur this evening.

‘10MP has unrealistic targets’

However, the common ground the duo took ended here when Khalid proceeded to tear apart the 10th Malaysia Plan as unveiled by Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak in Parliament in June.

"The previous Malaysia Plans were simply targets that the nation failed to meet. How different is this 10th Malaysia Plan? All it does it to simply present a rosy picture which is completely unrealistic.

"With all the problems with our foreign direct investments, how are we to believe that the target of 12.8 percent foreign investments is a responsible forecast by the government?" postulated Khalid.

Oxford grad Khairy retorted that this was only way to achieve a high-income nation status.

azlan "What we identified in the 10th Malaysia Plan were the 10 big ideas. But the crux of it all is the high-income economy meaning that by 2020, the average income per capita should be US$15,000 (RM47,000).

"So we work backwards from there, and that requires a Gross Domestic Product growth of six percent every year, meaning that we need an increment of 12 percent of foreign investments every year.

"So you see, we are not just plucking figures from the sky," said the son-in-law of former prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

After the forum, it was clear that although Khairy was put on the defensive against Khalid’s incessant salvos at Barisan Nasional policies, the PAS man was still less than stellar in giving his alternative views on how the country’s economy should be handled.

"If you want to reduce the subsidies, don’t touch consumer subsidies. The first one to go should be the subsidies given out to the industries or the cronies," was his comment on the government’s gradual reduction of subsidies.