Can filial duty fill the care gap?

A GOVERNMENT confident in its welfare institutions does not need to legislate family feeling. It builds the institutions and allows obligation, affection and duty to operate freely within them.

When it reaches instead for the statute book – as Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi recently proposed with a law compelling adult children to financially support ageing parents – it reveals something about the state’s own readiness that the proposal itself does not say directly.