I have been reading through the actual hansard from this LegCo sitting. Not the press releases, the real transcripts. Here is what matters if you are just trying to live your life in Brunei right now.
If you are waiting for government housing
There are 1,092 civil servants on the list right now. Some have been waiting one year. Some four. The government wants to build an online system so you can check your place in line. It is not built yet. Just an idea for now.
The bigger goal is 85 percent of us owning our own home by 2035. Right now we are at 68 percent. That is the gap.
If you have kids
The government admitted something honest. Telling kids “drugs are bad” does not work anymore. Social media makes drugs look normal faster than any poster campaign can undo. So they are changing tack. More focus on family. More focus on catching problems early, not after.
If you are worried about food prices
Some good news here, plainly. Brunei learned real lessons from Covid. We now keep three months of fertiliser in reserve, and six months of chicken feed. Our eggs are 100 percent home grown. There is a new backup arrangement with Singapore for food and medicine, in case either country hits a crisis.
If you are annoyed prices keep going up
The government did not dodge this one. They said straight out that shipping costs and world tensions are pushing prices higher, and Brunei cannot fully protect itself from that. What they can do is check prices weekly at over 100 shops, and keep price controls on rice, sugar, petrol, cooking oil and baby formula. That is it. They did not pretend it fixes everything. It does not.
If you own or rent a shophouse
Big change here. Leases just got cut from 60 years down to 30. Why? Too many owners let their shophouses fall apart for decades and never fixed anything. One example came up in the debate, 61 shophouses in Menglait, and only three owners agreed to help fix a badly broken road. Shorter leases means owners have to keep the place up or lose it sooner.
If you are job hunting
This is the uncomfortable one. Unemployment hit 5.2 percent in 2025, the highest in ASEAN. At the same time, foreign workers in private companies went from about 60,000 in 2021 to over 82,000 now. Members raised this directly in the debate. Nobody had a clean answer. But it is now officially on record as a problem, not something being quietly ignored.
The big picture
A lot of members stood up this week and said the same thing in different words. We do not need more plans. We need things to actually get built and finished. Someone pointed out the stock exchange was promised for 2017. It is now 2027. The new public bus system was promised in 2015. Still not here.
The motion asking government to coordinate better across ministries passed. All members voted yes. Whether it actually speeds anything up, we will only know by watching what happens next, not by what got said in the chamber.
Job hunting, housing, the 2035 home ownership target, it all circles back to the same question I keep coming back to, whether we are actually on track for the Brunei we want our kids to grow up in. I wrote more of my own thoughts on that here.
