Immensity

An eager young man solicited the advice of an old millionaire at the turn of the century.  

The millionaire, although a young man himself, had already become a financial tycoon.

"Tell me, is there any sure and certain way to make a million dollars?" asked the youth. 

"Yes, one," replied the old millionaire,  "All you need to do is buy a million bags of flour at a dollar a bag and then sell them for two dollars each."

The strategy of making a million dollars may be simple, but the work of making a million sales is immense!

Migrating to Australia, Good Meh???

This article was excerpted and adapted from the book "Migrating to Australia, Good Meh???"




The age-old adage, “the grass is always greener on the other side”, does signal unwise and unrealistic optimism. Australia is a favourite destination for Malaysians wishing for a better life, but its sparkling and seemingly rich shores, as writer Ken Soon discovers, can be deceptive.
By Ken Soong
I am a Malaysian living in Melbourne, Australia. My brother, sister and I migrated here in 2004. Our parents came along as well. We applied under the “individual skilled migrant” category and later sponsored our parents. They were given a “bridging” visa from January 2005 until July 2012 before they were finally granted their permanent resident visa. This category of visa allows “aged parents” to stay in Australia on one condition – they must have “two-thirds” of their children living in Australia. Since all three of us were here, they had more than two-third majority.
This article is not about the technicalities of migrating. Rather, it is about the “why” of migrating. Most Malaysians who have migrated or have decided to migrate (soon) to Australia told me that their children would have a better future if they grew up in Australia. Back in 2004, I would have fully agreed with them. The idea of “becoming better off in terms of education, career, family life and life in general” in Australia was a no-brainer for me – of course we would be better off in Australia.




Ten years on, I have come to realise that Australia is not as good as we have all made it out or hoped it to be. We have no one (not even Australia since it is only natural that every government presents its country to the world in the most favourable light) but ourselves to blame for our own failure to make a more objective assessment about our future in Australia as migrants. Most of us are still using a very outdated perspective, rooted in our recent colonial history, with which to see the world.
For migrants who came to Australia back in the 1960s, the 1970s or even the 1980s, their decision to migrate would have benefitted them much more than if they were to do it today. Back in those days, Malaysia was still not adequately developed, modernised and industrialised. Foreign direct investments, education and infrastructure were definitely a far cry from today’s standards. Particularly for the average Malaysian professional, his or her work would have been much more richly rewarded in Australia than back home.
If a Sudanese or Afghan were to migrate to Australia today, then I can say with almost absolute certainty that their lives will be better off. But today’s Malaysians had better think twice. Jobs are moving in big numbers from Australia to Asia; Australian educational institutions are failing many of their own students, with many schools (even public ones) turning to attracting more students from China, Korea and other Asian countries for financial reasons; drug-related crimes and schoolyard bullying are becoming more rampant; and the total cost of income support (i.e. welfare) payment has now (as of 2014) topped A$70bil a year.
These trends and developments are here to stay, and the shift of fortune from the West to the East is an irreversible one. Investor Jim Rogers frequently remarked that if you were smart in 1807, you would go to London, if you were smart in 1907, you would go to New York, but if you were smart in 2007, you would go to Asia. (In 2007, Rogers moved his entire family to Singapore.)
So I wonder, why on earth are we still leaving Malaysia? What are we actually running away from? While most of us think that we are running away from some potential or real political threat, the actual fact might well be that we are running away from some real lifetime opportunities! With market saturation and an ageing population in the EU, US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and China, the Asean region, with its population size, relatively young median age and richness in natural resources, is poised to grow like never before.


Calligrapher at work during the 2014 Sydney Chinese New Year Festival. The most populous city in Australia also has a significant migrant population

When jobs are getting scarce in Australia, why move there at all? Already we are seeing Malaysian migrants’ Australian-born children returning to Singapore and Malaysia to work in high corporate positions because they could not get that kind of opportunity back in Australia! Sending your children to Australia today does not necessarily mean that they will benefit from being exposed to different cultures, because there are now so many Asian students in Australian schools that they do not have to interact or mingle with their Australian classmates anymore! It also means that these children risk being exposed to the rising drug-related crimes on Australian streets, and by the time we retire, the Australian government would not have enough to support our retirements. Yes, Australia is famous for its social safety net. But this net has many holes in it, each of which is getting larger by the day!
Still, without fail, we Malaysians have somehow managed to convince ourselves that Australia has more of a future to offer than Malaysia. To be fair, I shall wait for another few years to find out, because the future I envisaged for myself in Australia is still not here. Will it ever be here? For my American neighbour and my British and South African friends, they are reasonably happy and satisfied here, but not so much for Malaysians, I feel. Maybe it will happen for us one day. Maybe.
Not many migrants want to admit failure in achieving their goals here. I know of at least two such migrants – one telling friends he works for ANZ Bank (one of the leading banks in Australia) in Melbourne and the other telling people he works for American Express in Sydney. In truth, both of them are working for two Australiabased call centres which provide outsourced customer relationship management services to their clients – who happen to be ANZ Bank and American Express!
Coming from Malaysia myself, I can perfectly relate to the “face” issue most migrants had to handle when they first started out here in Australia. Many of them came from relatively successful professional careers in their home countries after all. I have seen a former middle-aged Indian-Malaysian lawyer working as an insurance underwriter earning graduate entry-level salary, a former listed-company director driving a taxi, a former Filipino corporate accountant studying to become a nurse (because he could not find a satisfactory corporate accountant job) and a former Hong Kong University mathematics professor working as a sales representative in a mobile phone dealership – not because his English was not good enough, but because he did not sound Australian enough.

 

To migrate and live comfortably here in Australia, we need firstly to have the right knowledge – for example, the tax system here is very, as a tax accountant friend says, “oppressive”. One needs to be financially stronger first, otherwise one is here to throw good money away! Yes, we will get some income support and welfare payment, but that is like hoping for free medical treatment when we should not be bleeding in the first place.
To migrate or not to migrate – it is your call. It is your future at stake.

This article was excerpted and adapted from Migrating to Australia, Good Meh???, published by Gerak Budaya to help Malaysians make an informed decision on migrating to Australia

Malaysia, a RINO country

Last year, our PM Najib gave the most important speech of his career during the Budget when he spoke about the rapidly growing deficit.
It was the PM’s most focused and deliberate address on income inequality to date, but for many it wasn’t nearly alarmist enough, for it didn’t recognize how far this nation has fallen.

It’s time we call it what it is: Malaysia HAS become a third-world nation.

LOOK AT THESE SHOCKING STATISTICS.  These countries’ exchange rate used to be  Hong Kong    RM1 to HK3.        But today only worth HK2         (Lost 33 %) Singapore    RM1 to S$1.         But today only worth S$0.40     (Lost 60 %) and getting worse...... everyday! Taiwan          RM1 to TWD16     But today only worth TWD9       (Lost 44 %) And look at our per capital income!! Pitiful.

Malaysia has become a RINO: Rich In Name Only.
By every measure, we look like a broken banana republic.
Not a single Malaysian town or city is included in the world’s top 10 most livable places.
Only our KLIA airport makes the list of the top 10 airports in the world.
Our students are rated in the bottom third in PISA math and science, and some 30 countries have longer life expectancy and lower rates of infant mortality.
The only things Malaysia is number one in these days are the number of snatch thefts per day and adult heart disease.

Four decades of trickledown economics; the monopolization, privatization and deregulation of industry; and the destruction of the labor market has resulted in 5 million Malaysians living in poverty based on 2009's HIBAS survey, while the 50 richest individuals own more than one-third of the nation’s wealth.
As the four richest Malaysians enjoy a higher net worth than the bottom 40 percent, our nation’s sense of food insecurity is more on par with developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania than with OECD nations like Australia and Canada.
In fact, the percentage of Malaysians who say they have insurmountable household debt at some point in the last year is three times that of Germany, more than twice than Italy and Canada.

The destruction of labor has been so comprehensive that first-world nations now offshore their call center jobs to Malaysia.
In other words, we’ve become the new India.
Foreign companies now see us as the world’s cheap labor force, and we have our economic policies to thank for that.

In Sweden, the minimum wage is $19 per hour and workers enjoy a minimum of five weeks paid vacation every year.
In Malaysia. the minimum wage is a tick above RM3.40 per hour and workers can expect no more than 12 days of annual leave.
So guess what?
The likes of Honda, Toyota etc have all set up in Thailand to take advantage of the our ever-changing automotive policy.
Moreover, the profits of these foreign companies goes toward stimulating their economies instead of ours.

So, it’s amusing when right-wingers blame our failures on liberal policies because nothing could be further from the truth.
We are faling behind into a third-world banana republic.
A business model that the rest of the country is forced to compete with i.e. lower wages, low corporate tax rates, low property taxes, and low environmental and labor protection, which results in a migration of industry and jobs from our country, which means a shrinking of the tax revenue base.
Take this as an illustration of how we are in a never-ending death spiral race to the bottom.

Not only is the middle-class fast becoming the working poor, but upward mobility is becoming almost impossible to attain.
At a time when Malaysia should be investing in its own future, it is dealing with a sequestration that was never meant to have happened.
It happened because politicians would rather destroy the economy than see a meritocracy policy succeed. 

THE COUNTRY HAS NOT LOST A DECADE, BUT HAS LOST TWO GENERATIONS

The signs foretell that Malaysia will be left behind during the rise of Asia. 

There was mass migration of talent, shameful waste of human capital through a faulty educational system which discouraged meritocracy and mass migration of skilled people to countries like  Australia and Singapore.

 

		PER CAPITA INCOME (US$)
Country		1971		1981		1991		2001		2008
KOREA REP		302		1,648		7,119		10,243		19,505
TAIWAN				4,859		8,077		14,426		17,040
SINGAPORE		1,061		5,645		17,750		20,865		38,172
HONG KONG		1,107		6,015		15,353		24,695		31,887
MALAYSIA		406		1,805		3,099		3,701		7,000

 

THE FIGURES TELL THE STORY OF HOW MALAYSIA FELL FAR BEHIND THE ‘FOUR ASIAN TIGERS’.   

From 1981 to 2011, a period of 30 years, we had leaders who lived in their own world, and implemented policies which drove away investors, and depended on the revenue from oil and commodities to fund the restructuring of the economy and so that there would be no identification of race with economy.

 

HOW DID  SOUTH KOREA , TAIWAN, HONG KONG AND SINGAPORE  BECOME THE ASIAN TIGERS? 

BECAUSE THEY EMBRACED FREE MARKET POLICIES.   

Analysts say that between 1980 and 2005, the world embraced free market policies. These caused living standards to rise sharply, educational standards rose, poverty declined and democracy improved, and life expectancy rose.   

China is the leading example of the miraculous effects of free market policies launched in 1978.  

Coming to the end of 2013, EVEN INDONESIA, THAILAND & VIETNAM ARE AHEAD OF US!!!! 

Robust public investment had been a key to Malaysian prosperity in the previous century. 
It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. 
As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. 
Roadways and agriculture research were examples. 
The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce, and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.
But only during that time.

Malaysia is in urgent need of significant investment.
We need to not be stuck in a stale debate from two years ago or three years ago.
A relentlessly growing deficit of opportunity is a bigger threat to our future than our rapidly shrinking fiscal deficit.

That’s one part of the solution.
A higher minimum wage; higher taxes on corporations and the rich; and a greater percentage of the labor force protected against inflation will help restore the Malaysia whose middle-class was once the envy of Asia, and whose people were among the happiest and healthiest on the planet