A government chief speaking at the UMNO general assembly today told her fellow party members that it was high-time that foreigners living in the country stop benefitting from sundry government subsidies on goods including petrol, sugar, and cooking oil.
Noor Aeiza Hassan, the party’s women’s representative for Penang’s Bayan Baru neighborhood, told the crowd at the party’s annual congress that the government should come up with mechanisms that would identify and require foreigners to pay market value for items whose subsidies are meant to be “enjoy[ed] for us Malaysians.”
Hmm. Identifying and separating a group of people, say you? Where HAVE we heard that before?
She added that foreigners not only benefit from working in Malaysia, but they also unfairly reap the rewards of cut-rate rice.
While the expats living in Mont Kiara’s ivory tower condos may care little about the rising cost of cooking oil — as long as the supplies of extra virgin olive oil remain unchanged — we’re not so sure about how the three million-plus foreign workers in Malaysia right now will feel.
Migrants brought in from poorer countries to work for less pay than locals, and in sometimes dangerous conditions, might feel the pinch if you pull the rice out from under them.
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