Kalimullah, Abdul Kadir and the Astro rate hike

Group Editor-in-chief Kalimullah Hassan took to task Information Minister Abdul Kadir Sheikh Fadzir in an opinion piece on page 2 of the New Straits Times on 22 May for “shooting from the hip”.

He was unhappy with the minister for telling Utusan Malaysia that Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi and his cabinet had given him the green light to probe the pending hike in subscription to Astro. Apparently, Abdul Kadir misrepresented the prime minister. After the latter clarified that he and his cabinet had only approved a probe into the amount of violent and sexual content on TV, Abdul Kadir said he was misquoted by the media.

Kalimullah chastised Abdul Kadir for playing fast and loose with the prime minister’s statement and then blaming the media when caught. He also accused him of a tendency to take on business corporations but often without the facts to back him. Kalimullah even went on to attribute this tendency to the minister’s penchant for populism.

But for all his righteous indignation, Kalimullah’s criticism was misplaced. He appeared more interested in defending the prime minister than addressed the issue of Astro’s pending rate hike, an issue over which many Malaysians have expressed discontentment.

All Kalimullah had to say about Astro’s rate hike was to echo what the prime minister had said: that Astro is a private corporation and if the public did not care for the rate hike they could drop Astro and the decline in subscribers and revenues would hurt Astro. The market, in other words, would take care of the rate-hike issue without needing the government to intervene. After all, Astro is not an essential item like rice, floor or eggs, whose prices the government, wrote Kalimullah, has rightfully regulated.

But what the prime minister and Kalimullah failed to deal with is something that many unhappy Malaysians have stated: Astro does not operate according to market principles because it is a monopoly.

The public thus does not have a choice to drop Astro for its competitor. It is either Astro or no satellite TV at all.

Bear in mind that it is the government, starting with the one under Mahathir, that has been responsible for the monopoly status of Astro through its regulation of the use of satellite TV. Thus until Abdullah’s government is prepared to open up the satellite TV market for competition, it was he, along with Kalimullah, who played fast and loose with talk of having the market determine Astro’s rate hike.