Citing statistics released in Parliament, Lim said around RM100 billion in tourist revenue had been lost this year due to the pandemic, adding that tourism-reliant states had seen many business closures and job losses.

He said the government needed to do more for stakeholders, like tour guides and hoteliers, saying an industry in such severe economic distress should be given a higher wage subsidy than the current one offered.

“The tourism ministry continues to adopt an ‘ostrich in the sand’ approach by predicting that the average hotel occupancy for 2020 will be 61.1% and 58.4% in 2021.

“Such false and unrealistic rosy projections will damage public confidence that the government knows how to do its job to save our tourism industry,” he said in a statement today.

Tourism Arts and Culture Minister Nancy Shukri had previously clarified that the projection of 61.1% made for 2020 was done in 2019, taking into account the Visit Malaysia 2020 campaign.

Lim said Pakatan Harapan (PH) had suggested that the unemployed should be given a monthly welfare aid of RM1,000, adding that one-off payments were like band-aids to the jobless.

“There should be an automatic extension of the bank loan moratorium (excluding for the T20 group), RM500 wage and RM300 hiring incentives every month to create more job opportunities for locals, and an additional RM10 billion in financial aid to SMEs, especially in the tourism industry.”

Lim said the Perikatan Nasional government needed to come up with a comprehensive tourism survival plan to compensate for the losses the industry has suffered, adding that a frequent complaint was the difficulty in securing loans from banks.

“The tourism industry is the biggest victim of Malaysia’s triple crisis of political instability, economic recession and the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Failure to address the triple crisis has contributed to Malaysia suffering the humiliation of being the first Asean country to have our sovereign credit ratings downgraded by Fitch Ratings,” he added.