Privatization of parking brings up major issues

Murray Hunter


Privatization of parking brings up major issues

What is Madani’s real philosophy of government?

Aug 04, 2025





Selangor’s plan to privatize parking in Selangor is nothing new. In places like Perlis, parking has long been privatized in favour of crony companies taking the job over as a concessionaire.

We were once told during the Thatcher era that privatization brings efficiency and better services. The opposite has been found to be the case. The dishing out of utility services to private corporations, are often cronies. Privatized utility operations don’t invest in maintenance and infrastructure development because it erodes rent-seeker profiteering. We just have to look at Mahathir’s privatization during the 1980-90s. MAS had to be bought back by the government to prevent the airline collapsing.

The issue here is the “wellbeing and vibrancy of the community”. State governments have thought in terms of profit and loss. This is the issue when town and municipal councils are run by non-elected bureaucrats. They just don’t care. They see their respective jobs as gravy trains.

Much can be said for council elections, where the officials are elected by the public, and thus responsible directly to the public. Elections for councils would change the nature of local governance. Council elections would create more transparency. Rent-seeking concessionaires just continues crony-capitalism in Malaysia.

Rather than democratizing local government, its being corporatized.

Rather than democratizing local government, there is a trend in Malaysia towards corporatizing local government. This means governments rather than the people manage grassroots authority, without any public input.

A group of Silicon Valley tech elites are creating think tanks to rethink traditional government into private governance. This extends the principle of public-private cooperation in private-governance. Prominent names such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Balaji Srinivasan are leading this charge.

As we have seen, this is far from a new idea in Malaysia, and the Silicon Valley elites are capitalizing building think tanks in Asia. These ideas prioritize efficiency over public opinion and maintain control through biometric surveillance, similar to the system installed in Selangor.

The Silicon Valley elites have just opened a Network School in Forest City Johor to extend their corporate philosophy in Malaysia and the rest of Asia.


Dystopian government

There is a real need for a national debate about what should be the general philosophy of government. The Centre for Industry 4.0 Malaysia set up by the World Economic Forum (WEF) now has a lot of influence on Malaysian public policy, particularly the Malaysian Digital Economy Blueprint (MyDigital) the cornerstone of Malaysian policy to develop Malaysia into a high-income nation with a regional digital infrastructure. C4IR is also driving policy on the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) 2010 to introduce a new cybersecurity landscape. The C4IR has a close working relationship with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) in transforming this landscape.

This is not diverging from the topic. The technologies and philosophies recommend by these organizations are pushing towards corporatized government that controls citizens, rather than seek citizen participation. The mysterious Network School, which is outside the regulated education system in Malaysia is preparing to spread Balaji Srinivasan’s philosophy on developing corporate government.

Going back to the privatization of parking in Selangor, people must start asking questions about which way government is heading.