Affirmative actions are necessary for the poor and marginalised to get equal opportunity, said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim in a question and answer session at the University of California, Berkeley in the US on Tuesday (Nov 14).
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NewsTranscript
00:00 [APPLAUSE]
00:05 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
00:07 So in the United States, we have lots of debates
00:09 about affirmative action.
00:11 In Malaysia, you've had a Buhi Putra policy
00:14 for a very long time.
00:16 How do you think the Buhi Putra policy is likely to roll over
00:19 the next, say, 10 to 20 years?
00:23 Well, I think this debate for the Belka, Cornel West,
00:30 and the other, it's debate fair.
00:34 You see, affirmative action programs
00:37 are necessary for the poor, for the marginalized.
00:43 It need not be necessarily race-based.
00:47 It must be need-based.
00:50 But that's where I shift a bit, in terms
00:53 of our traditional policy.
00:54 Why do we need to continue?
00:59 Because I think Sandell, who is our professor,
01:04 talks about meritocracy.
01:07 Is such a meritocracy fair?
01:10 You talk about competition between Berkeley and Georgetown.
01:16 But you talk about Berkeley and Georgetown,
01:18 when to a remote university or school in Africa,
01:23 there's no justice.
01:26 As Ross alluded to, John Ross, justice has fairness.
01:30 It's not just fair--
01:32 to give equality to everyone.
01:40 Some countries, some schools, even in Malaysia,
01:42 some schools, urban schools, have the best facilities.
01:46 You have to compete with some remote school in the heartland,
01:49 rural heartland.
01:52 There must be some form of additional assistance.
01:55 You call it affirmative action.
01:56 You call it additional support.
02:00 But you cannot have purely meritocracy
02:04 when there is no fairness.
02:07 There's no justice in the city.
02:09 So I think, to my mind, we have to begin
02:13 with a very serious, effective program to eradicate poverty,
02:20 to allow for the marginalized and the poor communities
02:23 to be able to come up and compete.
02:26 But there have been a lot of wastages.
02:29 There's also a psychological buildup there.
02:32 There is the dependency syndrome.
02:35 There are issues that we have to discuss, yes.
02:38 But we must allow for a fair competition.
02:43 We cannot speak purely of meritocracy
02:48 when we do not provide basic, fair opportunities
02:54 for the--
02:56 particularly the poor and the marginalized.
02:58 The only difference, I repeat, is based on need.
03:03 We are poor.
03:04 You are poor.
03:05 You can be a Malay, or a Chinese, or Indian.
03:07 You are poor.
03:08 You are poor.
03:08 We deal with you as an issue of poverty, not race-based.
03:15 Must be need-based.
03:17 But a lot of issues, I think, we discussed in that bell curve,
03:21 which we have to take into consideration,
03:23 because we cannot allow for the society to be totally
03:27 dependent, as you call it, is dependency syndrome,
03:34 that the Egyptian economist, Hamed Amin, referred to.
03:38 [AUDIO OUT]
03:42 [AUDIO OUT]
03:45 [BLANK_AUDIO]