Time & Perspective Quote by Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

The sentence has the careful, managerial optimism of a leader selling modernization without triggering panic about disruption. Badawi isn’t trying to thrill; he’s trying to reassure. The repeated “will” works like a verbal stamp: inevitability, sequence, control. This is policy talk designed to sound like common sense, a checklist of benefits that makes resistance feel irrational.

The intent is tri-fold and strategically ordered. First: “lower…cost of doing business.” That’s the signal to investors and industry that the state understands competitiveness in a globalized economy. Second: “make us more competitive.” The “us” widens the coalition, turning a business-friendly reform into a national project rather than a technocratic favor. Third: public “satisfaction” with services “of the quality they want” and “quickly.” That final pivot matters: efficiency isn’t framed as austerity, but as customer service. Citizens are recast as demanding clients, and government as a provider measured by speed and quality, not ideology.

The subtext is that the existing system is too slow, too costly, and maybe too complacent. By stressing “people who demand services,” he acknowledges rising expectations - the pressures of a middle class, urban consumers, and a media environment less tolerant of bureaucratic drift. It’s also a pre-emptive defense against the suspicion that reforms primarily help corporations: he insists there’s a payoff at the counter window, not just in boardrooms.

Contextually, this fits a late-20th/early-21st-century governance script in Southeast Asia: state-led modernization, pro-business credibility, and public-sector reform sold as national competitiveness rather than political concession. The rhetoric aims to make reform feel like maintenance, not upheaval.