Its called the Pakatan Rakyat report card

You may have heard of it. It was released in late May, and was given wide coverage. The Star Penang DAP, Lim Guan Engs blog and also A different kind of report card

It did cross my mind at the time to point out the propaganda, but on reflection it might have seemed churlish to have done so. The recent contretemps with the State Development Officer, and the current distribution of the brochure to some areas of Penang, brought out the similarities and the contrasts between the two coalitions and the roles of the civil servants concerned. Hence my postings this week.

The headlines trumpet the Pakatan Rakyat government and the Penang Pakatan Rakyats report card to Penangites. But the brochure carries the coat-of-arms of the State of Penang, the state flag, and is published by the office of the State Secretary, and presumably paid for by Penang taxpayers. Why should the public, who do not all have party affiliations, pay for the cost of one partys propaganda?

It is always inconvenient to point out flaws, or the difference between rhetoric and reality, and there are fervent supporters of both coalitions. But the effort to carry out reforms and meaningful change in Malaysia also requires dispassionate enquiry.

Politicians are not messiahs, no matter how many of them suffer from a messiah complex. Parties are merely vehicles, as I wrote once. The general public will do themselves some good by keeping a healthy dose of scepticism of all claims by politicians.

Political parties and politicians do not a cause make.

Reform is a cause. Change in itself isnt.

Download link

Slides about the brochure can be found at the State Secretarys web site:
! Kerajaan Negeri Pulau Pinang

http://www.penang.gov.my/index.php?WebsiteId=1&ch=1&pg=93&ac=1573

Clicking on this link or the link shown there should give you a PowerPoint presentation.

The slides, properly for the State Secretarys site, do not show the party propaganda headlines you see in the brochure.

Images of the brochure are contained in the presentation. I dont know why they dont put up a PDF of the brochures. The PowerPoint file is 46 megabytes in size and may take a while to download depending on how the Penang server responds. Use a multi-threaded download accelerator (e.g. Free Download Manager for Win XP or axel for Linux) to use bandwidth efficiently.

2010 uppercaise

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