The government should come clean and reveal the Knowledge Economy Master Plan it had proposed last year and not hide behind the Official Secrets Act, a veteran opposition leader said today.

"Malaysian must be embarrassed to have the dubious distinction of being the first country in the world where its K-Economy Master Plan is a secret document placed under the OSA," said DAP national chairperson Lim Kit Siang in a statement.

Lim also noted the disappointing exclusion of the K-Economy Master Plan in the prime minister's Budget 2002 Parliamentary speech on Friday.

"Has the government since [last year] downgraded the importance of the Knowledge Economy Master Plan?" he asked.

Lim said he "stumbled" upon it instead in the accompanying Economic Report 2001/02, which stated that the plan was "recently completed" and that it was "holistic in approach and outlines the key strategies to transform the economy to be highly competitive and resilient".

"Why was the K-economy Master Plan which holds the key to Malaysia's future prosperity in the face of the challenges to globalisation and ICT, treated in such a shabby and summary fashion . . . when it should be announced in the usual grandiose fanfare typical of the Barisan Nasional style of governance?"

'A thousand ideas'

Lim also questioned why the plan, which has seven strategic thrusts and 155 recommendations, has not been made public and openly debated on.

He accused Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad of not keeping to his word that the drafting "is not an elitist process but one involving every Malaysian from the teacher in the classroom to his pupil, to his fisherman father and housewife mother, to the driver who drives the school bus, to the mechanic who maintains it, to the engineer who designs the vehicle, to the entrepreneur who owns the company, to his secretary, the janitor and the chairman of the board".

Mahathir had promised this in his speech at the Second Global Knowledge Conference in March last year, pledging that the plan "will not be drafted by the best and brightest, cloistered behind closed doors".

He also said it "must be a master plan for the entire nation and a personal master plan for every citizen. It must belong to and be owned by all Malaysians. This is why in the process of drafting it, all segments of Malaysian society must participate. Before a full national consensus is reached, a thousand ideas must contend and a hundred flowers must bloom."

The shift from the traditional production-based economy to K-economy, a brainchild of Mahathir, is part of the government's plan to propel Malaysia to become a fully developed country by 2020.

The most obvious manifestation of the plan is the Multimedia Super Corridor, a hub for foreign and local technology companies to act as 'incubators' for future technology development.