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Pakistan’s latest austerity measures — salary cuts at state-owned enterprises, a freeze on vehicle purchases, a ban on official foreign travel, and cabinet members foregoing two months’ pay — have been triggered by the fuel shock from the US-Israel war on Iran. The measures are necessary and, in the immediate sense, welcome. But they carry a familiar and damaging odour of crisis management.
Austerity must not be an emergency instrument. It must be the permanent condition of governance until the economy — which is still passing through the stabilisation phase despite fiscal measures directly affecting the masses — has genuinely moved into the growth phase. The numbers alone condemn the status quo. Pakistan’s public debt consumes more than 80 per cent of net federal revenue, yet government expenditure on official perquisites — vehicles, foreign jaunts, board fees, ceremony budgets — continues as entitlement. Salaries have now been cut and vehicle use reduced, but the question is why were these luxuries ever the baseline? Why did it take a war in the Middle East to produce what fiscal responsibility should have demanded all along? Common people have had no buffer. The state’s own financial indiscipline is part of what left them none.
The government’s instinct to frame these measures as temporary is itself the problem. Two-month salary freezes and two-month travel bans are political theatre without structural permanence. Instead, every luxury the government extends to its officials must be stripped and must stay stripped until tangible relief reaches the ordinary Pakistani. Pakistan cannot keep borrowing the language of austerity and lending the practice to convenience. Hard caps on official expenditure must be legislated with automatic triggers before any external crisis forces the conversation. This is the price of governance a broken economy can actually afford.
