The new Malaysian cabinet was published in a daily national paper and the most striking feature is that for a population of 20-odd million, we appear to have too many ministers in the cabinet.

No doubt the various positions have been created to placate the various parties that form the Barisan Nasional government. But having 27 ministers, 30 deputy ministers and 16 parliamentary secretaries appears to be a top heavy cabinet that incurs more unnecessary costs for taxpayers who have to pay for their salaries and other perks.

The other more important factor is that with so many ministers, cabinet meetings can be counter-productive when different ministers with similar or overlapping areas present their proposals/budgets. Just an example, these ministries will tend to overlap International Trade and Industry, Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, Entrepreneur Development and the second group of Human Resources, Youth and Sports, National Unity and Community Development, Education.

The present UK cabinet has 23 members and when we exclude posts like Northern Ireland Minister, Chief Whip and Leader of the Lords, the number of ministers is reduced to 20.

In the US, there are only 14 heads of executive departments with four others accorded cabinet-level ranking.

Both these two countries have much larger populations than Malaysia and it appears that we have "too many chiefs and not enough Indians" to get the country going.

It is time to reform the cabinet so that there are perhaps only 15 cabinet ministers with the related areas being relegated to deputy minister status.

For example: The trade minister could have deputy ministers to handle domestic trade and consumer affairs, entrepreneur development, industry etc.

We should also reduce the number of ministers in the PM's department as the large number can create more chaos. Perhaps having one advisor with 'special functions' would suffice?