If the art of rhetoric is the deployment of persuasive reasons, back-to-back speeches yesterday by Anwar Ibrahim elaborated with panache the conceptual framework the opposition leader has been constructing for the better part of a year, perhaps longer.

In both pronouncements, the PKR leader inveighed against the perils - to the economy and civil society - of moral hazard which exists when a policy produces incentives for perverse behaviour.

Anwar’s first speech was to a luncheon gathering at the Bankers Club in Kuala Lumpur where he shoveled free market fundamentalist Friedrich Hayek, an icon of the Thatcherite revolution in Britain, into oblivion by claiming that the worldwide crisis in credit debunked the Hayekian notion that markets are self-correcting, a staple of classical economic theory.

parliament 170209 anwar ibrahim His second speech was a response in Parliament to the Royal Address where he adduced evidence of corruption and chicanery by the Umno-dominated Barisan Nasional which, he claimed, had caused the deposing of the Pakatan government in Perak.

He also decried BN attempts at offering inducements to Pakatan legislators in the Kedah Pakatan government to defect.

Anwar said the BN’s shenanigans in Perak and Kedah, led by the prime minister-designate Najib Razak, were done without the “slightest trace of shame”.

His lament echoed the dismay of Agamemnon when addressing Pyrrhus in Euripides’ famous play, ‘Trojan Woman’: “If the law does not forbid, then let shame forbid.”

Both speeches highlighted the Pakatan leader’s eclectic capacity to trawl disparate streams of intellectual speculation and pick up nuggets to endow a new point of view with compelling life.

Thus, he told Parliament that the idea of a constitutional monarchy was embedded in a treatise entitled ‘Taj-us Salatin’ by Bukhari al-Jauhari, written in Aceh in the early 17th century, a work preceded by eight decades of the arguments for constitutional government advanced by the English philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.

In other words, before the notion of constitutional government began seeping into western thinking in the later part of the 17th century, thinkers in largely Muslim Southeast Asia were already nibbling at its edges.

Huge dent in the balance sheet

Further, Anwar held that the refusal of a court noble to obey the Malacca sultan’s command to kill a ward the noble felt had not committed any wrong, as told in the much debated ‘Hikayat Hang Tuah’ chapter of the ‘Malay Annals’, indicated that the notion of monarchial absolutism was alien to Malay political consciousness.

Anwar cited the treatise of Bukhari and the story of ‘Hikayat Hang Tuah’ to dispel the perception that constitutional government is an alien, specifically western, concept.

He deduced from the conduct of the court noble in Hikayat that early Malay political consciousness viewed monarchs as bound by laws (“If not of men, then of God”) and ordinary citizens as enjoying some form of rights.

To the Bankers Club gathering, Anwar held forth on the need for Keynesian pump priming when the economy has fallen into deep recession such as much of the world faces now, but he said this priming should not be in aid of oligarchic economic interests.

Anwar felt that it was not only the task of good government to prevent and mitigate market failure, but also to be wary of government failure. He cautioned against the promotion of moral hazard.

He warned: “The new stimulus package that is being proposed will be making another huge dent in the balance sheet…the powers-that-be continue to hold tenaciously to power and employ all means necessary to perpetuate it or even enlarge it, even if it means resorting to unconstitutional ways.”

corruption and judiciary 240507 Elaborating, he asserted: “We must revive the lagging economy by adopting market friendly policies and take decisive action to cure the festering sore of corruption and cronyism that have decimated the judiciary, rendered anti-corruption impotent and leached billions of dollars from the state coffers.”

He added that “right opportunities must be made available to every single Malaysian – to learn, to earn an honest living, and to realise their dreams”.

Within an hour of declaiming on the economics of his new agenda for Malaysians, Anwar was warning in Parliament about the perils of the arrogance of power – executive, judicial and police – that disdains the chastening mechanisms constitutional government has put in place for democratic and civil society to flourish.