In this posting, I will put up pics and a bit of commentary of the events I attended last Friday.
The day started early at 8 am with a breakfast meeting. As I have previously stated, I will be going to Taiwan on the 4th to 7th August for an Indo-Pacific conference. The breakfast meeting was to meet my Taiwanese hosts, Ambassador Ger and Ambassador Hung. We had a good discussion on the concept of Indo-Pacific and I voiced my dissenting views on it, preferring a more ASEAN centric platform. Nevertheless, it was very good to hear the views of Ambassador Ger. His assessments on the regional geo-political issues were sharp and clever and I left the meeting, having learnt new perspectives on things.
After that, I rushed to Parliament to attend the economic forum where the Bank Governor, Terence Gomez and Anwar Ibrahim delivered speeches. Terence was the usual combative self. He delivered sharp criticisms of BN and Pakatan on the lack of financial and structural reforms of GLCs and GLICs. Anwar spoke clearly about his needs-based economic model, as opposed to a race-based model. His vision for a better Malaysia, to tackle class and inequality issues irrespective of race, is one of the main reasons why I joined PKR a decade ago.
After that I rushed to the Guan Di Temple in PJS7 for a Guan Di birthday event. Both my ADUNs, YB Ng Sze Han and YB Michelle Ng were also present. The Guan Di Temple event was an apolitical fundraiser, including VIPs from MCA attending too.
After that, I went to my office to give a talk on left-wing/right-wing economics to my interns. This was followed by an interview on anti-corruption reforms with Dr Khairul Saidah, a Universiti Malaya lecturer.
Finally on Friday night, my wife and I attended a lively dinner hosted by my neighbours, Andy and Sonia, discussing politics, big data and Brexit with Prof Milner (another neighbour).