Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin Abu Bakar said he has no issues if audit findings of the Hari Belia (Youth Day) celebrations are made public.

Although it is the prerogative of the Auditor-General’s Office whether to make the findings public or not, Khairy said opposition members can also raise the issue with him in Parliament.

"We are okay because we gave the information to the Public Accounts Committee. My secretary-general himself went to give all the information during the hearing so we have no issue if the audit is to be made public.

"In fact if the MPs concerned wants further information, they can ask me in Parliament and we can address it there. No problem," he told a press conference today.

Previously, Pokok Sena MP Mahfuz Omar ( left ) had demanded the audit reports of the annual event in Putrajaya to be made public, claiming that it cost RM93 million over the past four years since 2011.

Also calling for the audit findings to be made public was PKR Youth chief Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, who urged the Ministry of Youth and Sports to justify the expenses and admonished it for not spending the money on “worthier causes” such as scholarships.

In 2012, the event had caused controversy over confusion on who had paid the RM1.6 million bill to hire K-Pop artists to perform. A drag race accident that year also left 17 people injured.

Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Shahidan Kassim ( right ) had earlier admitted that an audit of the overall management of the event had been conducted, but it would not be made public because the Ministry of Youth and Sports decided to adopt the audit’s recommendations.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated development, the Ministry of Youth and Sports had signed an agreement to collaborate with the Singapore-based Temasek Foundation and ITE Education Services to help improve skills training programmes under the ministry.

This entails two training programmes for trainers from National Youth Vocational Institutes (IKBN), and a SGD200,300 (RM517,200) grant from Temasek to cover course fees, training material and other expenses.

Khairy, who witnessed the signing ceremony this morning, said the market is not pricing vocational skills properly, but starting salaries of IKBN graduates from some courses are beginning to improve after they have shown themselves to be competent workers.

"Vocational education anywhere in the world doesn’t make good news copies. Anytime I speak about technical vocational training, it doesn’t get column-inches in newspapers. It is not sexy, it is not sports, it is not a new development.

"But to me it is one of the most important things that we do at our ministry. It is equally as important as getting gold medals at the Olympic Games, the Asian Games and the Commonwealth Games, because this is about the future of our country," he added.