In turning down Rafizi Ramli’s request for a debate, Eric See-To explained that apart from there being no urgency to hold one, he did not want to “disrupt” Rafizi while he was in the midst of “fights” with his own party members.
“Rafizi should only ask me for a debate again in a month’s time.
“Perhaps in a month’s time, Rafizi’s internal fights could be over or he could have left or been sacked from his party,” he said in a statement, referring to Rafizi’s spat with fellow members, and activist Ambiga Sreenevasan.
Yesterday, Rafizi challenged See-To to a debate on the country’s economic development including the tax collected by the IRB.
This came after See-Too argued that there was nothing unusual about income tax collections outpacing the country’s economic growth.
See-To said this when responding to Rafizi’s claim that income tax collection had grown disproportionately with the country’s economic growth since Prime Minister Najib Razak took office in 2009.
“I invite him (See-To) to debate with me so we can see for ourselves how BN’s experts talk rubbish when faced with real economic figures,” Rafizi had said.
On Aug 31, See-To criticised the Pandan MP for comparing the average growth of tax collections in Malaysia in 2010 to Australia’s average growth of 5.3% during the same period.
Rafizi, See-To said, failed to state that Australia’s GDP growth was only 2.7% during that period, which meant tax collections had also outpaced economic growth there.
See-To also said he also could not understand why Rafizi was making an issue of the decline of personal income tax collection from RM51.3 billion in 2012 to RM27.6 billion in 2016.
“This is indeed strange as Rafizi’s initial complaint was that income tax collections by the government had outpaced GDP growth but now he is complaining that personal income tax collections have fallen by almost half.”
See-To also questioned why Rafizi was unhappy Putrajaya was collecting less income tax from the people while at the same time complaining that corporate tax collections had more than doubled.
Rafizi, he added, should be happy that despite the government cutting corporate tax rates from 27% to 24% since 2007, good economic growth in Malaysia had led to much-increased profits and hence higher corporate tax collections.
“Perhaps Rafizi should take a deep breath, step back and think carefully what his real unhappiness is and what he is trying to allege before challenging anyone to a debate.”