Nature hath provided. . . but for whom?

AMIDST getting carried away in the end-of-year shelving process (and realising I’ve read one book for every 13 acquired) I stumbled upon this memorable quote from my political philosophy module at university:

“The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”

It is the labour theory of property as articulated by the English philosopher John Locke in his Two Treatises of Government. Many of his intellectual successors refined this view over the centuries, taking into consideration the existence of nation states, and how power is allocated within those states.

In 1974, Malaysia’s Petroleum Development Act created the sole entity – PETRONAS – that was allowed to remove petroleum resources “out of the state that nature hath provided” throughout the entire federation. Perhaps no longer.

Federal-state issues have punctuated my articles throughout this year, reflecting the desires of politicians (and presumably to some extent, the voters who elected them) to place decision making powers and access to resources at the most appropriate place to benefit the people.

The latest manifestation of this has emerged in opposing views about natural resources: specifically about who should be the sole gas aggregator in Sarawak. The assumption that it was and should forever be PETRONAS is now challenged by Petros, Sarawak’s state-owned energy entity, which wants that role instead.

This was given force, in the eyes of the Sarawak government at least, through the Sarawak’s Gas Distribution Ordinance (Amendment) 2023 which specifies that the principal functions of the Gas Aggregator are to manage the procurement of natural gas from all sources for distribution and supply to any person, plant, facility and premises in Sarawak.

Predictably, debate about whether this is right, logical, desirable or practical – and what the implications could be across the federation including among the peninsular states – is now being conducted in earnest by stakeholders. Lawyers in particular are enjoying digging up old laws that were long forgotten or assumed to be obsolete, but now are being raised as inviolable in an attempt to blunt the legitimacy of the Petroleum Development Act 1974.

Naturally, there is a considerable amount of hyperbole, with the break-up of Malaysia as a federation being touted as the most extreme outcome if this possibility is even entertained.

In discussions with PETRONAS friends however, there is certainly much concern about inefficiencies and corruption, the loss of employment, and most of all the loss of profits that should in their view be spent on all parts of the country.

The first point is weak. Apart from competition being a driver for greater efficiency anyway, inefficiencies and corruption can be combated by check and balance institutions at the state level, which ought to be established to encourage good governance across the board.

The second point is also questionable, since good employees who are released from PETRONAS may well be hired by Petros. If they are Sarawakian, there may be an intangible element of state patriotism that may increase their productivity.

Some compromise can surely be made on the third point. There are surely mechanisms to share the work and profits, despite the legal framework that is being inherited.

I think there is room to apply the principle that if a state is lucky enough to have an abundance of resources, then should it not have the opportunity to develop its own talent to develop them for its citizens? Taxation still remains a way to redistribute profits to benefit other parts of the country.

Not that we should be relying on only certain sectors to benefit the economy. It is not a zero sum game in which new opportunities don’t arise in other states. Of course they do. In recent years, rare earths have been found even in non-oil producing states, but you don’t even need natural resources to succeed. Good business policies and proactive investment strategies can yield much of the results too. In this regard, decentralisation to the states makes even more sense.

Several politicians reached out to me to write on this topic in the hope that I would say something sensible to prevent the inevitable break up of the country because of incessant demands for state autonomy.

But I hope they too see that these “incessant demands” are rooted in a real desire for decisions being made closer to the people being impacted by those decisions; and that this is a real opportunity to drive competition and efficiency without sacrificing our sense of national unity.

Tunku Zain Al-‘Abidin is founding president of Ideas.

The views expressed here are the writer’s own.