Populism and elections

by Rodolfo Ascenso MISTAKE With the approach of new elections the Government has certainly given in to the pressure of those most populist groups of Macau politicians and decided to apply a series of measures to restrict the non-resident labour force. What a mistake! The very people who will have to pay for this, whether in the short or in the long term, will be the very same people who are supposed to be protected; - the workers themselves. One doesn’t have to be an economist to understand that one of the consequences of this measure will be an increase in the salaries of the workers concerned. More money going into circulation - as has been happening lately - causes an increase in the level of inflation. With the RMB (yuan) on a constant rise, and Macau’s dependency on the Chinese market, control over price rises becomes more and more difficult; so we shouldn’t be surprised to see the salary rises received by workers diluted by their increased costs of living. This, however, is not even the main problem. Huge problems are awaiting small and medium enterprises which are already strangulated and unable to compete with the salaries rocketing upwards, sky-high. Besides that, the economic problems are not the only ones that ought to be considered in this process. There are xenophobic undertones in the claims of those people supporting the measures. Promotions, management and supervisory positions, or even simpler tasks, should be distributed in accordance with competence, performance and qualifications, and not by the criteria of nationality or race. It’s doubtful, even absurd to consider, that any employer would keep a more competent and capable Macau resident in an inferior job position whilst making better offers to non-residents. It doesn’t make sense, and there are no reasons for it to be that way. There is yet another reason, of a historical nature, to disagree with the Government’s measure: if it were not due to the fusion of cultures, with all those religions, ideologies and social groups living in this land, a land which locals always knew how to open up and allow to be everybody’s place, the Macau S.A.R. wouldn’t have come into existence. Without all those cultures that make Macau a unique city in the world there would be no reason to have here a Second System. Macau would have been a village of just 200 thousand inhabitants in a country where cities take in millions of people. In that case, not even among this population of half a million, would politicians with weak consistency like Ng Kwok Cheong, Au Kam San or Pereira Coutinho be able to make their careers. What a shame that the Government gave them reasons to celebrate because, for Macau, the decision is wrong! POISON The United States’ Government decided to go ahead with an arms deal with Taiwan. The former Taiwanese President supporting the independence has done everything he could to have this deal, but he did not succeed. With the new President who won a clear victory in recent elections, the relationships between the two sides of the Strait improve day by day. The decision of the United States has only one objective: to poison the climate of reduced tension between Taipei and Beijing. The main victim is Ma Ying-jeou, who in the interim is not in a position to reject the North American offer; and accepting it means compromising the peace and harmony created in such a short period of time. This North American attitude is absolutely deplorable. Fortunately we can trust the responsibility of the Governments in Beijing and Taipei who will know how to minimise the consequences of this poisonous injection. Luckily, we are four weeks away from the Presidential elections in the United States, and all signs indicate that the policies of the unqualifiable Bush will not have a successor. NOTES As Alfred Gusenbauer noted in his opinion article published in the Macau Daily Times, mentioning the Nobel Prize Laureate Paul Samuelson, the absolute freedom of the market results in Rockefeller’s dog drinking the milk much needed for a poor child, not because of the faults of the market, but rather because “the goods would be in the hands of those who pay for them”; with the crisis established what should we expect? In the Ukraine, the crisis of the personal relationship between the President Victor Yushchenko and the Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko resulted in a political crisis with the country going to the polls, possibly in December; we shall hope that the heated discussions typical of electoral campaigns will not inflame the situation in the Crimea, alarmingly similar to those experienced by South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Published in Macau Daily Times, 11 October 2008