First of all, I wish to offer my humble thanks and gratitude to Allah SWT that we have a good understanding our roles in the services of the people and the country and execute our task properly. For that reason, we have been able to achieve tremendous progress and prosperity for the country and the State from one level to another and have been able to overcome problems that have become more complex from time to time. The complexity is emerging because of continuous changes in the world. However, the   process of change can be considered as a blessing as well as a challenge.  It has brought us to a position where we can look at the world as opportunities to build a future for ourselves.

It is also world which is going to be more exacting  in  its  judgment on us in trying to get us to conform to many standards and requirements be they something that evolve  the institutions of learning, something that are welcomed  quite a lot. But sometimes some of the changes, “values” are advocated by groups of people ranging from very conservative people, who say the world today is the mixture of stability and progress, some go all the way to radical groups who see the world as opportunities to transform it into the idea of Utopia.  This by itself already poses quite a lot of challenges and even conflicts all over the world.  The people who suffer the most are those in developing countries like us.

Those who have developed early, they set up the standards, the standards, which they have evolved over at least 200 years starting from the industrial revolution.    But we are expected to do everything in much less time than or take much shorter time to work out the transformation than the developed nations.   Therefore, to apply some of these so-called values, benchmarks or whatever you call them in our particular situation, in our national setting, brings to us a lot of challenges and even a lot of controversies. For High polluting values whether they be in the area of environment, human right, of freedom and democracy, coping with the challenge of changing climate and the impact on the ability of all the countries to slow down some of the degradation of the environment, all these things are sounding ideas with very valuable aims but all of them never tell you how to achieve them within the situation and limitation that you want the country to achieve.

Therein lies the changes and challenges of the future and they are going to be tougher.  Because of this therefore, our jobs,  as part of this change, is to make the transformation more practical, to make adaptation successful and to be able to contribute towards the  future and probably amend some of the exacting demands  that have not been surged by practical experience worldwide. Needless to say we have to follow the developed countries in the economics because they have developed the economics system for a long time at least since World War Two and we have benefitted from it.  But the changes that are taking place are escalating; they are not changing in a steady manner.

Of course when, the world was still divided into camps, people were a bit more humane, they wanted to make sure that there is solidarity within their own camps, the First, Second and the Third World, they had to look after themselves.  And the First and the Third World had got to come together because they were scared of the Second World.  Now COMECON has been dissolved and join the same system of the Free market economy.  The players are varied and the similarities in market economy are also varied.  But they seem to adjust very well. In the adjustments, you see them coping very well sometimes better than the masters of yesterday.

Of course, new rules have got to be devised but the new rules may not be all the way be prudent to the economic system.   The world has become a global economy; there are various people as members with various degree of involvement. So we ask ourselves where are we?  And for me it is Sarawak?  So I ask the question within the framework of one generation.  And for you where is SCORE heading to? SCORE, I can say is a game changer for us in Sarawak. It may not be for Peninsular Malaysia, industrialization has been going on much stronger in Peninsular than in Sarawak. We have just emerged out of the normal agricultural economy and the mineral economy.

And now the opportunity for Sarawak to become more prosperous lies no longer in traditional agriculture, no longer in mineral alone; our oil is depleting, our gas is also depleting. New mineral may come up but we have not really seen big promising quantity of new mineral that will drive or propel us to the strategic position in the world economy. So what are we going to do?  When we asked ourselves what after palm oil, I looked around all the potentials of Sarawak the only thing that I found that could bring us longer in the development was  the development of competitive energy.

And that was because the world was in the situation where it could only discover one more barrel to replace two barrels of oil that have to be used.  In other words, there is a growing deficit of oil in the world.  New energy sources are far more expensive and yet the prices of oil have gone up almost to the breaking point of a lot of other people’s economy.  When we say about US100 before the crisis, we thought the US100 would not stay;  it could probably drop down to US70 or US60 because of the slowing down of the economy.  But no, it stayed at US100 and now coming up to US110, there are people who think that it will go up all the way to US200 while waiting for the competitive source of energy because of mobility.

Because of that therefore I say this is an area where if you can find a source of energy for the basis of our economy that if you are competitive enough you have something which is quite guaranteed in the world and that was how I came to the decision of the renewable energy as the basis for attracting new investments in Sarawak. That is asking us to serve in the areas of heavy industries, something that we have never done before. But the world is a global world, so it is o.k. The technology of the world is spreading out and the world today is o.k.  And technology is being developed in such a way that knowledge to manage it has been well spread out both in developed and developing countries.  All seem to be o.k.

It seems that we are able to be part of that global system and will be able to serve it in an ordinary manner and probably profit by it.  But we have to adjust our capacity upward and the speed, I think, will be neck breaking, take off for example by getting technical workers.  We need 100,000 people with degree and diploma qualifications and more than a quarter million technical workers all in one generation.  Yet we all know that our education system is not transformed towards the strong and viable technical education.  Various parts of Malaysia have various forms of technical education because of the spread of technology all over Malaysia are varied not in terms of degree but in terms of kind.

Because of that therefore, we have to find a concentration of technical workers that can serve our industries more efficiently.  In the case of Sarawak, thanks God, we will focus ourselves more in the smelting technology and that is good because we can educate people with second degree specialization much faster than if we were to create a wide spectrum of technical talents across the board for various kind of industries.  Peninsular Malaysia is in that position while ours is more focused.

So there is a chance that we can succeed. And that is why I say, we take the plunge, I think it can be done.  Now where would we be if we were to go into heavy industries?  And when we start the smelter technology producing aluminum  or processing aluminum, manganese, felon silicon  as a start, somebody dangle to me why not go all the way to steel?  That I am not sure, I am not that ambitious to create more problems for whoever succeeds me.  I don’t want our industry to fail because there is no room for failure.

Because of that therefore, I say we stick to the three areas that I have mentioned that will bring us to an intermediate position of the big global course for industrialization, production of machinery of cars, wide range of machine all over the world.  But where  do we stand, we import manganese from South Africa, Australia, bauxite mainly from Australia and other places, process them here and  sell them as semi-finished products, not finished products yet to various giant industries  all over the world. And you know the world industries, world class industries, they are very exacting in their requirements in dealing with you and you have to satisfy their requirements.

Because of that therefore we have to think about change, the primary industries that were used to be ours and then the world processing, sometimes all the way to steel industry, probably with a greater degree of sophistication. But that will come later on. Our initial heavy industrialization program will depend on our ability to satisfy the steel makers of the world, the aluminum consumers of the world, they are all big fellows and the various alloy manufacturers of the world; we will also be producing metal for alloy. All of these require a very high standard.

And all of these are done through partnerships, trading and teamwork with world industries.  There is no room for us to do anything less than the world class jobs, I am sorry to say it. Because of that therefore, we have plunged ourselves into the global economy. It is not a gradual entry into the global trade market like we used to do when selling our tin, rubber, palm oil. This one we have to do all out.  And we have got to know and deal with the hub of the industrial activities of the world.

In other words, SCORE heavy industries force us to become nothing less than the developed country in nature. Let us take the next one in SCORE, the Halal hub.  Halal hub comes from the fact that we have been successful in developing estates; that is what Malaysia is very good at, we can produce large amount of agricultural produce that can land us into food and pharmaceutical industries.  But that requires the development of school of knowledge going back to the basic of life sciences in agriculture that we have abandoned since the 70s.  We have to restart backward because Halal hub means the processing of agricultural produce into more sophisticated processing of food, we need more advance technology and the same in the area of pharmaceutical.

We have the raw material but again we have to build up the supporting technical workers that we need, expand the command on live sciences in various fields, bio-technology and all those in the mid-level of workers like the lab assistants. O.k. these are just two new things.    The third component of SCORE of course is eco-tourism. And that we must have all the mix of eco-tourism. And that is the area today we are going to open up by roads because we want to develop hydro, not just because we want to develop eco-tourism but because hydro requires that kind of development.

We have to modernize the Penans, all the native races, so that they will not be bypassed by new development brought about by the new phase of development. And there will the big human question that must be handled in a very sophisticated way amidst a lot of advices from both inside and outside the country, I use advices in quotes. But when we have all these development, there is not one major strategy that does not plunge Sarawak into the world context of development. We cannot be isolated any more. So Change is an opportunity and big challenge for Sarawak.

Now the basic functions  of the administrations that you all have, to ensure  peace, unity of the people in the country, the welfare of the people  have to be changed completely now.  We used to be bound in the old context, now you have to do the jobs of the new Sarawak, the technologically entrenched Sarawak. How do we do it in one generation?

Thanks God, 10 years ago when we thought of SCORE, we have already been driven to make a drive for tertiary education.  Those 10 years of experience has enabled us to see that we can escalate the training of people at higher level faster than we have thought. And we have been able to do so by preserving the standard that is accepted all over the world through Curtin, Swinburne or through the normal national quality control of the Ministry of education.  That was good but it was not good enough for the   scale that we have set ourselves to do for the year 2030, which is much more than what can be achieved by the normal pace of development in education in training and more important, preparations for people to be involved in the new momentum that is new to them.

But for Sarawak to be in the world pull of modernization, in the global economy, it cannot be done without the civil service in the country to understand the activities of the global world economy.  Because of that therefore, the civil service as the precursor of any development have to understand many things that have not been well developed today. We have to look at NGOs with different eyes, you know some NGOs look at something from one side, the others may be good. So we have to choose which ones are good, which ones are relevant, which one is more understanding. If you have got the time to pick the approach, who can be allies, which ones can be big nuisance regardless of what you do.  How do you decide who are going to be your allies, who are going to be your enemies?  Of course, you cannot satisfy everybody.

In the end you have to develop an independent assessment of what is the best to be the standards that are relevant for your environmental policies.  We have to know what they really want, everybody has got this problem, not only Sarawak, the US has got its own problem but the government is strong to tackle the problems. Some countries have to go along with all kinds of movements.  We have to play the same game now.

Because of that therefore we have to understand what the world expects from us.  The developed world of course dominates the trade, the market, all being dominated by them.  And their requirements are very stringent.  But they expect relative efforts to comply with whatever standards, which are quite good.  So we have to move with the world movement whether it is the association of paper producers in the world, the timber producers of the world, the mineral owners of the world; all these things are necessary. You have to work within the world context. You cannot tackle all the problems alone.

Because of that environmental officers in our country cannot swallow everything thing that has been told to them because the standard is very high and probably irrelevant in our context.  The second one, they cannot accept all the high polluting plans preserved for the preservations of the forests, as they can disrupt our development.  We can’t spend the same amount of money as in Germany or America, or in Canada, the development is impossible to perform at such costs.    Therefore, you have to find out how best to cope with requirements of the world and how they fit into our development.

All these policies on environment are supposed to be a balance between development and conservation of nature. For us, like any other nations, we have to target the fruits of our development and at the same time preserve our environment. For us, whatever good things we want to do, we think of the future generations too. For me to enact environmental policy in the 80s, is not submitting to anybody.  It was part of the step to make Sarawak to conform within the context of the world movement.   Does that mean many other things are irrelevant in Sarawak?  People talk about the Penans without knowing what they talk about, they don’t even know what the Penans are?

They do not even know that Penans only form 500 people, who are still roaming in the forests.  They appear to believe that the Penans represent one third of the population. So you can see a lot of these unintended lies are floating around  and in any developing countries they do not have enough budget  to projects its case to the world, the position will be, it will be disastrous. In some countries you have very educated people in the department of environment, who are not practical in their thinking, adopt the wholesale recommended by the world level and demand a lot of budget   that probably swallow half of the price of our development.

I give you a theoretical example. If I were to spend RM2 billion to resettle the Penans in making one hydro, it will swallow anything between one third to one half of the costs. Even then we can stop them from talking about the Penans. There will be another group that will say have renewable energy but there will be another group that will say look after the Penans, give them RM 2 billion to build a village, give them all sorts of gadgets  and they will be better than the average Sarawakians living in urban areas.

So this kind of interaction between the world and ourselves can only be forged if we in the civil service can set standards that are practical in our situation, dedicate ourselves to the advancement of the world; we all want to save the world because climate change will drown everybody. Probably, the first will be Maldives, to be followed by Sarawak, Singapore, I do not know, nobody want that kind of picture, right?

But who have caused all these things, the melting of the ice in the polar regions of the world, pollution started in the 70s because of so many motorcars, 10 of millions of motorcars vomiting out a lot of pollutants, not me and yet all the environmental debates in the world today, the developed countries promise to do something, most of the promises remain fulfilled.  So why not as the developed countries to pay for the problem of climate change?

Poor China, which has got enough money has to pay for some of the problem, I don’t have enough money for the purpose.  So these are kinds of things that we have to be aware of.  And we have to fight them with integrity, dedication to put our case forward.  Otherwise, you will be harassed by unnecessary movements, they can accuse you of all sorts of things and they can come up with all sorts of direct actions against you. Because of that therefore there is no substitute for the civil service to know its own case no less than 100% so that you can show the superior knowledge about your own country and argue with all those people, who talk in very idealistic style but are blind to the realities of the world.

Let us take palm oil, they want to stop us from opening land for palm oil as they destory our forests. They do not know that we do not plant palm oil in areas that are deep in the interior or deep in the peat soil, they do not know everything. In all Peninsular Malaysia, they do not have peat to defend us, they agree with these people.  I had to go to Indonesia to get support to side with our case.  It is a bit awkward, is it not.  With half of the country that is not reasonable to us we have to get help from other country for survival.   So there is only one way, we have to do a lot of research, we have to understand your position in a thorough manner so as to get what you want to achieve.

Now let take another step, what is Malaysia’s policy to counter climate change.  How do you want to prepare in case of long draught or heavier floods?   I can’t tell you when and how much heavier flood will be coming in the next 10 or 20 years.  All our statistics have gone, you are working on the assumption the highest water level of the last 50 years that had allowed us to build roads, bridges and all other things that can be safe from destruction.

But in the last few years also there seem to be not safe.  I do not know, I can only guess.  If there are more water melting from the two Polar regions where will the water eventually be circulating?  Of course, they contribute to extra or heavier floods. These are world events and yet how much are we having a say in the world events.  Now we have to come up and understand the phenomenon of climate change, the phenomena of climate change in all the   half cooked theory, nobody knows yet.  There are arguments among scientists whether they represent a bigger circle of world climate change or the destruction of the world because of incessant carbon output from industries.  Who ever win, it does not matter.

But we have to find out a way that is practical; dynamic enough that can be transferred into actions. For example, in Sarawak, we have already identified areas which have to be protected. All these things, we cannot escape why?  Because we are already part of the world community.  We are the market of the world; we are customers of the world, the people, who criticize you also from the world.  The people, who are unreasonable to us also come from the world.

How do you equip yourselves, arm yourselves to be able to be master of your own case. You have something nice, you have something valuable, you cannot allow yourselves to be static that come from political movements and other movements of the world. Whatever you say in the civil service, you gather all the facts, the statistics, the policies, the picture, the vision that is clear enough for the future development of the country.  You have to work together even with the assistants that can share information, analyse them and use them as much as you can  to produce a policy that is specific .

The private sector must also help but if the private sector does not have the correct information, your investment program, your economic program will not be conducted in a way that will sustain our efforts to get Malaysia or Sarawak on the move on the same rewarding manner. Therefore, you cannot work outside the system, a separate mechanism for development. Therefore it is better to share a vision.  And what is more important, you have to bring them to contribute toward a more complete picture of what the challenges and problems are.  How many of them are prepared to do that most private sector entities are imperfect.  They should not go into business if they you have not got any philosophy.

But over and above making profits, you have to draw them in to be interested in the bigger picture.  The private sector has got to learn the many things that you have to defend together regardless of whether you are partners or competitors.  Because the common interest of any segment of the industry depend of people being able to chart out a good framework of things that will come for them.   If they don’t co-operate on the basic level they will be destroyed one by one at the secondary level.  So co-operation in the private sector and the public sector become indispensable from other mechanism.

Thanks God at this stage most of civil servants are quite friendly in Sarawak.  There are interactions between them. Now let us bring it down to the common people.   Now who are the common people?  And how do we get their views?   The common people at what the politicians have got to deal with. They are supposed to be the body of people to common up with a common theory and views that must be taken into account and incorporated into our policy.  But where do these common people get their views, how do they formulate their understanding of the situation.

So if the civil service cannot lead in the social field, in the interaction with a section of the society, the common people will just listen of BBC, Aljazeera and the conglomerate of views that cause a lot of disputes whenever they meet. We cannot allow that to happen. Therefore the private sector can be friendly, they call it part of the public relations, places for their advertising campaigns, those things are good but we with the basic interests of the country that can disseminate right down to the common people. That is our problem for the future.

At the moment the common people are listening to whatever the government is telling them, something which is in your favor. The second one there will new groups of people, the students, the graduates who think that they know more than the previous generations and who command  the people’s respects  by  their  parents, by the older generations.

These  are people, who are supposed to be the elites of the community, if they get good information, the correct information, information that are relevant and more congenial to the development of the country and not the genuine ones that float in the sky, our development will be better, the consensus of opinions for development will be there. But if they do not share the same things, they will breed   a lot of controversies in our society.  And that will slow down a lot of our development.

The role being played by the internet in this kind of transformation is very powerful. The Internet is just like any purveyor of abuse, they should not take any stance and all that they want is freedom of information.  It is good. It is up to the people to think of the information that they want, to believe and to act on that is given to us.  And what we think depend on our experience, our   views, our upbringing. In countries where there is not enough flow of information  that are relevant to the development of the country,  to the people, their development will be followed by a lot of discussions, sometimes controversies and sometimes even obstructions.

What happen to Muslim countries, they are very telling things, on one side, you have got Tunisia, very healthy but a small country. It can handle the situation for the society, the intellectuals are quite close together in serving the country in a normal way in an ordinary manner.  They even try to ensure that there will be no violence occurring in their demonstrations.  And of course, the situation in the country remains good.  They can solve problems of the country peacefully.

By contrast what happens in Libya?  The people won the revolution but they lost the peace and stability of the country. As far as development is concerned, it is no good. I do n ot know what will happen in Syria, I do not want to comment.  But you can see the power of the social media, the power for good as well as the power for bad.  Who decide it for good or who make it for good; we are not sure of that strange as it may seem to people in democracy.  What I want to say is this, any society that needs minimum consensus, a basic thing that a society needs, if you question it, you progress is going to be very slow or even it may lose   the momentum to develop and engage yourselves in quite a disruptive  movement forward.

Thanks God in Malaysia we have the process of transformation  and the process  is peaceful  and fruitful because the civil service  can rise up to the occasion and give us something that the transformation means that  we set to do it together. If you take part in politics we tell the people what is good for the country.  You may not be giving your views in a political way as what democracy wants because you are committed and become practical enough to implement what has become the policy.  If it becomes a policy in a healthy atmosphere, it is being developed by the civil service and the political leaders of the country. As long as there is stability, this will be continued. If there is no stability, I do not know what will happen.

I see that Civil Service is a bit under pressure to do more and more in  less and less of the time in the country and I am very grateful that this is happening in our country.  But sometimes it can happen that the civil service can become immune to public opinions.    That will be very difficult.  I know politicians have got to be very sensitive to such opinions.  A person, who is translating what the politicians want into the civil service system, is not a tough process. I have started to change, since I first came to Sarawak a lot of things. It took me three years, I can still remember.

So you have to understand therefore that civil service without engaging in politics must keep abreast with what is going on.  I try to see the separation between the official input that we include in government policies and the unofficial ones. The unofficial ones will be up to the politicians but whatever you can crystallize into something more definite, the more you circulate and establish the official ground ones the better. And I think even the unofficial ones are insufficient and that politics can be focused on political organizations.  People like will be outdated.

Politics are being motivated by many factors today.  The more prosperous you are, will make you aspiration to become quite big; that is the fact of life. It is happening all over. If you think developing countries are bad, look at Europe today, they are worse than we are. So  we must think of the way of trying to get worthwhile ideas  and get them cross pollinated across social groups  they can prove to  be quite a permanent feature of  our  society must be  encouraged  to influence the machinery of the government.  And that is very difficult.

We must protect the Independence of the Civil service; there is no doubt about it, all down the way to the district level.  And we cannot allow them, embarrass them in  fact  by getting them embroiled  in the process of discussions  that do not offer defined  means  of jobs because  they can mean  touching  sizes of problems though they may not happen yet.  But we must bring them all to the surface.  And that is when we think that the best way is to change a bit of our local government.

In Sarawak every inch of the country is under local government. In Peninsular Malaysia, it is not, only in town areas.  We have a long history of local government.  And we are engaging a lot of our society even though communication may be difficult in some areas accessible. We try to make the local government as the implementation of development at the local level.  We have been doing quite alright.   But the discussions have been distracted. There is the argument whether the local government should have direct elections or not.  Judging by the activities in the political arena, do we need another arena for boxing, I am not sure whether that will be good for the people, I am not sure. But I am very doubtful of it.

So what we want to do is to get the local government to gather respectable views, the views that can be developed to become real trend toward s something, which group for example. And that is why we want to change the local government to become no longer be subservient to political parties; there are already too much politics already.  We should bring in people who are dedicated to serve the society in the charitable way, in the commercial way, in the promoting health activities, in the field of education, in the field of culture and other social and cultural activities.

There are already many people emerging from our society who have got that kind of tendencies.  It will be a loss to us if we do not bring them in in formulating public policies and in consolidating public opinions.  It will probably take us five years to do this.  What I want to see happening at the lowest level  will constant airing of views as results of consultations  at the local level, you will find out at the level of the local council will come the resolutions, probably the local council desire  for local matters that are good. If that happen the D.Os tend to be the chairman of the local councils will bring us a process, a kind of osmosis to the civil service.

Civil service must maintain the power to implement policies the local government will open its door to the local community. These two can interact in a more peaceful manner. I just hope that it will not become too political that the local government will become another arena for debates. But if we restructure it properly, I think   there will be something that can bring about a thorough transformation of our society.  That transformation is called the empowerment of the ground workers.  And that is coming whether you want or you do not want or   whether you want it in a healthy or unhealthy manner.

Empowerment for example at the local level of officers to interpret policies of the government in implementing to suit the common taste requires a lot of these, requires a tradition of people, who with the open mind and who knows his subjects and who will be loyal enough to work within the framework of the work ethics that you have established in the civil service. That will come probably after the year 2030. By then the State will be more prosperous. One thing good about the year 2030 is what my feeling is going to be realized there will   be more technical people among our workers. They tend to be more precise, more focused in their views than the people who are not trained the technical way.

Perhaps, they will be blessed with the growing number of people, who make the process of consultation in our community easier for the administrators to deal with.  Because of that therefore, we have to be more focused in whatever we do in the next 20 years.  You know the challenges, you know that changes will come, the level of change that will permeate into our society, the kind of people that will be influenced, how and how do we can keep them on more even keels rather than meander and get our development to be slower.

But I feel if we start step by step  what the evolution ought to be  ending with better empowerment system, more honest civil service, much more caring society, I think Alhamdulillah, we will not only become a developed country  in term of money by the year  2030 can be sustained a much better  quality  of life.  A lot depends on your leadership today.  I am sure you can supply it.

Thank you very much.