Some pitches come with a mood attached. Ours, in July 2020, was “Jobs that work: building resilience, hope, and community”. We pitched it to REFSA, a Malaysian think tank, as a short online video and podcast series on its prescriptions for an economic reset.
Hope was in short supply. By late August, the first Movement Control Order was more than five months behind us. According to REFSA, Malaysia’s second-quarter GDP growth was minus 17.1%, the lowest since the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis, and 773,200 people were unemployed.
#MalaysiaCiptaKerja went out on REFSA’s YouTube channel on 29 August 2020, in English and Bahasa Malaysia. It asks whether the stimulus plans were enough and walks through REFSA’s case for mission-oriented policies. The title means “create jobs”. The video spends about 20 minutes on how.