Rate of exchange and price of petrol to remain high

Anti-Wayang

For the common folks wanting a lower cost of living who had put their trust and voted PH in, the two announcements from Tun Mahathir and Guan Eng yesterday that blatantly broke their top promises before GE14 will be disappointing.

Tun Mahathir said that the fair value of the Ringgit is RM3.80 and will be the target that the new government wants to keep our currency at.

Before GE14, the Ringgit was already at RM3.85 (vs RM4.00 after GE14) against the US Dollar. Many had hoped that a Pakatan win will mean a stronger Ringgit back to the RM3.00 to RM3.20 level that will lead to cheaper imports and lower our cost of living.

So, one great hope has now been dashed with Tun’s statement simultaneously. It also proves that the perception that if Najib Najib is removed then our Ringgit will improve is wrong,

Another hope dashed is that Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng’s declaration yesterday that he price of petrol will remain RM2.20 until the end of the year.

He even told a reporter that it is unreasonable to ask the PH govt to honour their manifesto by reducing the price from RM2.20 as current global petrol prices at US$75 is “so high”.

But many Malaysians will remember that Pakatan and the people complained bitterly when the BN govt increased RON95 by 20sen from RM1.80 to RM2.00 when the global petrol prices was US$120.

At that time, all of us said the RM2.00 petrol price was too high too unreasonable and will impact our cost of living since petrol prices affect all other prices including food prices.

Now Guan Eng’s declaration not to reduce prices have not only broken their promise but has also dashed our hopes that price of goods can reduce with a lower petrol price.

Now that GST has been abolished and we did not see any reduction in prices, we now worry that when SST is imposed again on 1st September there will be another round of price increases since our Ringgit will continue to remain weak and petrol prices won’t be reduced.

It looks more and more that PH had given us false hopes and false promises prior to GE14 and may have made things worse for our day-to-day life. I hope not.