The government must use globally-accepted poverty measures instead of relying on absolute poverty measures that do not reflect on-the-ground realities, PKR’s Lembah Pantai MP Nurul Izzah said.

Counting households who have incomes under the poverty line of RM830 per month will not show that one in five Malaysian households are relatively poor, the PKR vice president said.

This is based on the Malaysia Human Development Reported commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) which shows Malaysia’s relative poverty has been rising since 2007.

"The figures released by the report clearly show just how meaningless and futile the measure of absolute poverty is," she said in a statement.

Absolute poverty measures the number of households who earn under the poverty line, while relative poverty measures the disparity of income in a country.

As such, she said the government must adopt relative and multidimensional measures of poverty to glean the true state of the country.

"It is important that the government honestly and sincerely admit the real problem that we are facing

"As long as we hide behind rosy numbers and glorified statistics, the issue of poverty will be neglected and never properly addressed," she said.

Worrying household debt levels

The poverty line method, based on the minimum calories a household must consume, does not show that Malaysia’s household debts against disposable income is at an "extremely worrying level" of 140 percent.

At 86.8 percent against Malaysia’s gross domestic product (GDP), this level is higher than that of the US’s household debt levels of 78 percent of GDP in the first quarter of last year.

 

Similarly, at least 70 percent of Americans earn enough to be eligible to pay income tax, but the same proportion of Malaysians earn below RM3,000 a month, making them ineligible for taxation.

Yet, the same more than 70 percent will be taxed through the goods and services tax next April, she said.

"On top of this, the GDP of the nation by income only goes to less than 30 percent to the wages of our employees," she said.

Nurul Izzah said more sophisticated measures  of poverty disproves Umno’s claim that it had managed to reduce hardcore poverty from 60 percent before Independence to less than one percent today.

"I urge the government to admit the poverty numbers and move to address poverty seriously in Malaysia.

"Poverty might have been ignored in the Umno general assembly. let us not allow the same mistake in governance," she said.