“So, the role of women in development must have increased over time. It is not something that I really like because I think the men are just as capable as the women. They have shown that they can cook as well as women in the hotel. Most of the cooks are men. Well, we need their energy and we need the energy of everyone in this country, as many people as possible because we are really short of people. We are only 27 million. You must remember that when I first became the first Prime Minister, I said that this country should have a population of 70 million and people were shocked.

People were saying that we were being told to keep down the numbers of children, family planning and all that. And here was this new Prime Minister advocating 70 million of population. What they failed to hear was that I said 70 million by the year of 2100. At the rate we were growing at that time, we would achieve 70 million by the year 2050 because we were growing at 2.3 percent or 23 children per thousand. I don’t know why they go for that kind of figure but anyway we would be growing at very fast rate. And of course we would achieve 70 million very very quickly.

The idea is to slow down a bit so we can go steady reaching 70 million by the year 2100. Why do we want to slow down a bit? We need the country’s wealth to grow along with this population and obviously if the population grows too fast they are going to be very poor. So, you have to work out at what rate they should grow not just because of the increase in the population but because we need their contribution as well as we need to be able to feed them and to get jobs for them.

That was why we advocated the growth of population of 70 million and some people took the opportunity by saying that now Dr. Mahathir (Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad) asked them to marry four which was stupid. It was not true at all. If you marry four people, it is the women who are going to give birth not the men. You see if a woman marries four men, the rate of production is not going to be the same, but if one man marries four women, one cannot be sure that the production rate would be as good as four men. And of course you render three men incapable by doing that so we are not contributing.

But, any excuse is a good excuse to marry four. So, when I said 70 million of population they said that now I can marry four, Dr. Mahathir (Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad) asked me to. I get blamed for everything of course. But if we have the population growth of 70 million but they are incapable of working and do not want to work, it is not good because we want the women and men also to work in this country. And we will have the population of 70 million of men and women who are contributing towards the development of this country. Obviously, the growth of this country would be much faster.

If we have only the women contributing, we would like to say thank you to them but the growth cannot be much faster. So, everything must be taken into consideration, the fact that we have men and women about the same number and that the women work hard are taken into consideration. We need a big population to have a big domestic market, so that when we produce anything, then we can sell to the domestic market as the base and then we can export the rest to the rest of the world. Of course, if we had the men to work as hard as the women the growth of this country would be much faster.”