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EDITORIAL: Attitude adjustment
04-Feb-2009, New Straits Times

THE usual caveats apply: the Merdeka Centre for Opinion Research sampled the responses of just 1,018 people for its "Fourth Quarter 2008 Peninsular Malaysia Voter Opinion Survey" to arrive at that all-important quantitative assessment of subjective emotions that is the raison d'etre of all such surveys, allowing them to extrapolate the data to venture a purportedly realistic portrait of the sentiments of an entire society. That's an important caution to bear in mind when considering the results.

That said, a clear majority of respondents cited economic considerations at the top of the list of the most important issues affecting the country, indicating, if anything, the pragmatism and level-headedness that has always held the imperative to "cari makan" as the single over-arching reality check for most citizens. Race relations and corruption ranked next in importance, with crime, social problems and political instability following. Trailing lower down the list: unemployment, disunity and the "quality of politicians". Lower still: poverty, education and illegal immigration.

In the present circumstances especially, the survey is a reminder that economic development in this country was never merely a means to national progress and prosperity, as long touted, but to our basic survival as a nation. Hence, in the aftermath of the last great national political upheaval in 1969, economic solutions were prescribed for sociopolitical problems, in the form of the New Economic Policy. The 22-year administration of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad laid far less emphasis on ethnic relations than it did on economic growth -- in the time of its tenure quadrupling per capita income in a doubled national population -- with the not incorrect reasoning that the differences among races could be subsumed beneath a rising tide of economic prosperity and opportunities benefiting all, even if to varying degrees.

This recent survey serves to reiterate this piece of Malaysian common sense -- especially with the respondents apparently more evenly divided on the performance of the present administration than the current political discourse would imply. Before consigning these results to the voluminous file of data on Malaysian sentiments, it's worth acknowledging the restatement that, as a once-winning American election campaign catchphrase had it: "It's the economy, stupid." On this score, at least, it would seem Malaysians as a whole aren't that stupid. Hopefully, their competing political masters recognise this cardinal unifying principle and realise that the ultimate political objective for now should be whatever best conduces to weathering the present economic turbulence for recovery in the future.