KUALA LUMPUR: A Malacca delegate at the Umno General Assembly today offered several suggestions to help reduce the rakyat's burden from the rising cost of living.
Among ideas mooted by Jasin Umno division's Datuk Seri Ahmad Hamzah were programmes to upgrade the skills of workers to ensure that higher-level, better-paying jobs can be secured.
He said more initiatives should be introduced to generate jobs, and opportunities should be extended that allow businesses to operate with greater ease.
"The 1Malaysia People's Aid should be used to help increase the income of the rakyat, more low and medium-cost houses should be built, and the social safety net should also be expanded.
"There should also be a migration from an economy driven by low-value, labour intensive and low-paying industries, to a high-income economy driven by high technology, high-paying jobs and high value-added industries," he said when tabling his motion on the economy.
The Jasin member of Parliament also lamented that while the nation's economy has improved as a whole since 1970, the Bumiputeras are still behind the non-Bumiputeras.
Among others, he said that over 70 per cent of Bumiputeras work for others (instead of running their own businesses), over 75 per cent are unskilled, over 85 per cent are not managers or professionals, over 90 per cent are poor, over 70 per cent earn low wages and a similar number are unemployed.
"For instance, the monthly gross household income for Bumiputeras is only 72.4 per cent of what the Chinese have.
"Another example is the widening of the inter-ethnic gap, where, for instance, the monthly gross household income gap between the Bumiputeras and the Chinese has increased by 52 per cent, from RM1,387 in 2009 to RM2,110 in 2014," he added.