The New Sunday Times this week featured two very interesting opinion pieces in its centrepage spread. One by Abdul Razak Ahmad highlighted integration issues related to our first 50 years as a nation and the other by Khairy Jamaluddin who defended the socio-economic integrity of the Iskandar Development Region.

This past week, I also happened to have had lunch with my good friend and first president of the Malaysian Integrity Institute; the current director-general of the EPU. His big burden for now is to frame our strategic macro-economic vision and agenda for the next 50 years, until 2057. Therefore, Professor Khoo Kay Kim's question, 'What should be our agenda for the next 50 years' is a valid and relevant way to frame future core issues of our nation we call Malaysia.

How can we emulate and replicate our past successes when the world is changing faster? How can we do it when the world of tomorrow will not be the world of today? How will we do it in a more porous and dynamic world, wherein control of the key enabling factors is mostly outside of our jurisdiction? How can we do it responsibility and equitably given our multi-cultural framework of community development?

How can we still move towards a more liberal economic environment which is the demand of the new free trade environment? How can the government become more private-sector driven and less EPU-driven via 'hand-outs of large projects'? How can we become more demand-driven as opposed to supply-driven in our macro-planning? How can the Khazanah and other government -linked companies - which define more than 30 percent of Bursa Malaysia's value - become more attractive stocks for international private unity trust funds?