Time to Limit the Logic of the Market
4 min read
In December 2015 Playboy magazine released its January/February 2016 issue. It featured 48-year-old every-pubescent-boy’s-fantasylifeguard Pamela Anders...
Transcending Dualism In Public Administration
3 min read
THE OLD GREEK philosophy has a famous law, the law of non-contradiction, which says, a thing cannot be its opposite in the same time-space continuum. In pl...
MPSP 2012: A Good Deficit Budget
5 min read
Maimunah Mohammad SharifIn our country, if there is any attention at all paid to government budgets, they are mostly focused on the annual budget of the f...
Don’t wait! Innovate NOW!
5 min read
MANY OF US WILL remember for years to come the moment when we learned the news that Steve Jobs had died.For me, it was somehow strangely sublime; I was atte...
Gender Issues are About Democracy
5 min read
A prominent woman politician recently lamented the enormous difficulty faced to achieve the United Nation's (UN) target of 30% women participation in Malaysia....
Making It Hard To Ignore Complaints
4 min read
The thing about democracy is that there are no experts. It assumes that a decision for a public action cannot be made in isolation without everyone who is invol...
"Better Penang": The First City App in Malaysia, A Vision in Action
5 min read
Penang has always been a close-knit community. The close physical proximity of the different urban centres with George Town serving as the hub means that both p...
Real Democracy Requires Democracy in Planning
5 min read
When I attended the One-Stop Centre (OSC) committee meeting earlier this year, one of my long-held suspicions was confirmed: development planning really is elit...
The MPSP Budget: Another Surplus Year
6 min read
A year ago, I wrote in this magazine that a budget is a moral document. It is not just an announcement of the latest goodies. It reflects the priorities of the...
Make Walking Our Way of Life Again, Please!
5 min read
Three-and-a-half million years ago, our human ancestors began to walk on their hind legs, distinguishing themselves for the first time from quadrupeds. Then, 1....
Let’s be fair to women – especially homemakers
5 min read
This year’s UN theme for International Women’s Day is “Equality for women is progress for all”. Yet second class treatment of women is s...
A history of local elections in Penang Part I: Democracy Comes Early
13 min read
Fifty years ago, in March 1965, local elections were suspended throughout the newly founded Federation of Malaysia.Those were turbulent times in many ways, no...