This is the transcript of part of the interview which the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.You can listen to the podcast of the interview here.
Watch BBC’s report (on video) on Singapore’s economy here.
BBC: Your own family has been quite involved in these funds. Your wife, till recently, ran Temasek. Your father’s deeply involved in GIC. Is there a risk that when the news is bad, as it has been over the past year for these funds, people will tend to blame your family rather than the institutions?
LHL: I think the way you put it is not the way things work in Singapore. The Minister Mentor is chairman of GIC not because he’s my father. It’s because he’s the best man for the job and he has been chairman since he was prime minister. Ho Ching is CEO of Temasek not because she’s my wife but because the chairman of Temasek and the board decided that they wanted to appoint her as CEO. And they’re there as long as they’re effective, performing, and if they don’t perform, well, they have to take the consequences.
BBC: A thing or two about perception. Perception is important in politics. And in difficult times like these, do you think, in retrospect, it might have been better for your family to have a lower profile?
LHL: (Laughs) Life would have been easier for me if the Minister Mentor were not my father and Ho Ching were not my wife. But they’re there. This is the way Singapore has worked. I think Singaporeans have understood this is how the system works. And they will render judgement when elections come.
BBC: Talking about elections, this is probably going to be the toughest year that most Singaporeans can remember. Are you anticipating some shows of public anger or displeasure because it is such a new experience for so many Singaporeans?
LHL: I think it is quite understandable that in a situation like this Singaporeans will be quite anxious, will be worried about their future and I think they have seen what the government has been doing. We had a very decisive Budget this year. The package was not only a big one but a directly focused one on saving jobs and helping people see through the downturn. And we will have to make sure we explain to people what can be done, what we’re doing and what they have to do.
BBC: People tend to blame governments…
LHL: Yes, that tends to happen but on the other hand, we’ve been through crises before and most times, after we’ve come back out and if we’ve handled it properly, we’ve come out stronger and better for the experience.
BBC: Finally Prime Minister, I read that you’re apparently the highest-paid head of government in the world. Your salary is about four, five times what President Obama gets. Are you worth all that money?
LHL: (Laughs) I’m not comparing myself and I don’t look at these rankings. We go on a system which is open, honest, transparent. What is the job worth, what is the quality of person whom you want. You need the best people for the job and these are jobs where you make decisions which are worth billions of dollars. And you cannot do that if you’re pretending and you just say, well, we’re all in it for the love of king and country. We wanted to be honest, we want people not to come in for the money but at the same time, their sacrifice cannot be too great. And at times like these, you want the best possible government you can have.
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Maybe should link these comments to BBC…ha ha ha
AIG came to mind when I read this. IMO, the son and his family is no diff from the shamed honchos who continue to suck the money blood out of taxpayers.
AIG = Arrogance, Incompetence & Greed.
Poor delusioned chap. Only his father will think so highly of him that he’s worth the million dollar salaries he’s endowed.
When the old chap’s six feet under, he will get a serious reality check when the ppl revolt to sack him.
Compare with Obama ? My foot, more like comparing with Obama’s 脚毛 !
sure they’re the best for the jobs and they happen to be all part of the big family. couldn’t have been any other way, could it? and of course singaporeans know he’s worth the money, that’s because he said it.
He who laughs best laugh……………………..???
Maybe London following Singapore ERP system…….naturally got to laugh mah!
LHL”: (Laughs) I’m not comparing myself and I don’t look at these rankings”.
Oh really!!!
Than why are your cronies love to selectively, on many occassion, ranked Singapore with other countries by blowing their candles to make ours brighter.
When you are proud, you ranked us on par with rich countries to justify your fat pay and at the same time increase peasant’s cost of living. When Singaporean are displeased, you ranked us with poor countries, to make us feel good and appreciative towards you as a form of threat.
Your MOE ranked schools and students, on grades, creating tremendous stress for parents, principals, teachers and students and eventually the whole society became a problematic place to live in.
You boasted about our Airport, Seaport and whatever HUBs to make you feel superior than other countries, yet you can’t compete with AirAsia who started humble.
You selectively ranked our transport systems with other countries and our educational systems here and still bemoaned there is no talent here other than your closed family members. Than you ranked the populations of FT with other developed nations and opened the floodgate for all sort of foreigners into Singapore and downgrade our standard of living despite you trying to rank us with swiss standard of livings and your father think we are now living in golden era.
You asked your own controlled media to fabricate lies through ranking figures and put up outdated statistics with hidden political agenda.
Almost everyday, in your controlled media, we see ourselves being ranked among us, between countries and in the world to make your feel good and yet you desperately shy away from openly admitting the low ranking of your own control-media, and the high rediculous salaries you paid to yourselves and your puppets.
Now, you have the laughing cheek to tell BBC that ranking is something alien in your mind? Such open lies can only cheat 66.6% of Singaporean but you forgot the international medias are watching this interview too. Such lies will be recorded for many generations that no history books in Singapore will teach.
“I’m not comparing myself and I don’t look at these rankings.”
does benchmarking private sector pay count towards something similar to looking at ranking
“Laughter is the best medicine.”
Yes…. except the joke is on us, not on those expensive clowns. Fancy clowns laughing at the audience not at themselves ! Uniquely Singapore !
“Could the Lee family really be Jews? Maybe this is a case for agent mulder and scully?”
Aside, the Lee Family really is Jaws. Those audacious mouth of greed that keep eating money to no repentance. Even a sharks of sea knows their limits, our sharks of greed and power has no limit.
“The Minister Mentor is chairman of GIC not because he’s my father. It’s because he’s the best man for the job and he has been chairman since he was prime minister. Ho Ching is CEO of Temasek not because she’s my wife but because the chairman of Temasek and the board decided that they wanted to appoint her as CEO. ”
Really? You forgot to mention that you are the PM because you are the best man for the job and not because you are the son of LKY.
I have a bridge to sell too.
I think a tape recorder can do a better job than him. He’s baasically just repeating what the old man says all the time. Does this guy seriously have any opinion of his own?
Sick
These shameless skunks pegged themselves to top levels of bankers, lawyers, CEOs in the market. Now this peg has already dropped from underneath after protests over obscene bonuses and payouts to shameless CEOs on Wall St and corporate HQs. Why can’t these PAP skunks look at their faces in the mirror and kick themselves in their asses and commit harakiri instead of clinging to such obscene salaries!
Very funny that the best in SIN are from one same family for this tiny red dot.
All other Singaporeans are morons.
In some funny ways, it is true that Singaporeans are indeed idiots, for forty over years, they are still paying respects to Greeds.
Are You still in slumber ? Singaporeans.
we are all done for. no point posting on here. most singaporean don’t even bother what is happening to us. they ust accept the fact what is happening to them. i always got this answer” aiya is like that one la, even you vow for opposition also like that.” human like to stay in their comfort zone, and let people control their life without fighting for it.
“We go on a system which is open, honest, transparent”.
Yes, he did it so openly and transparently. The whole Singapore knows! 1 for myself, 1 for my father, 2 for my wife and 1 for my dear brother. In order to get more for themselves, they have to push up the salary for the rest.
The result is high inflation for the past many years. Pushing prices up for evertything. Making the gap between the rich and the poor wider away. The poor suffers and now with the worldwide financial crisis, people lost their job. He says he cant do much but to wait for the rest of the world.
NEPO….
wow, i am amazed to learn that so many talented people can come from 1 family and all got the jobs through their own capability in a fair way and not because of family connections.
simply amazing….but must say its the truth.
simply uniquely singapore.
We need Chee Soon Juan
????? just know that we need to pay and pay …….
I wonder has any of the local MSM reporters EVER asked this question :
“Your salary is about four, five times what President Obama gets. Are you worth all that money?”
Any ST, Today, newpaper, CNA, class 95, 933 worker here can advise?
And here is what impressed me the most:
1. “We go on a system which is open, honest, transparent.”
2. “Ho Ching is CEO of Temasek not because she’s my wife but because the chairman of Temasek and the board decided that they wanted to appoint her as CEO. ”
3. “This is the way Singapore has worked. I think Singaporeans have understood this is how the system works. And they will render judgement when elections come.”
Yup, I think its really the People who approved their way of doing things. Its actually the people. Its all very clear now.
Talk is cheap, clever talk gets one away without answering anything and is even cheaper…..
Never ever believed until heard it from BBC and confirmed on print above.
Hope no more minsters or president start bragging about their well deserved salaries again – the whole world is watching and it is such a bad example of leadership coming from Singapore.
Really ashame.
Quote from LHL: ” And you cannot do that if you’re pretending and you just say, well, we’re all in it for the love of king and country. ”
Yes I can. If I were the leader of a country, I would want good lives for all my subjects & not selfish gains. What is the point of leading a group of people if you don’t want them to lead good lives? I know if I don’t love the country & its people, I have no right to govern it.
wonder do we really know the system? the system we know and we thought we know all this while is that the government agencies have consistent bonuses of 2 to 3 months in good times, but the actual case is likewise within weeks after the news of CDC staff with 8 month bonuses.
So civil service is to come at a price? What a great idea! Saves us all a lot of campaign rhetoric when elections roll around. Let all party representatives submit their tenders and we can pick leaders who will do the same work for less.
yap, singaporeans understand how the system works, but did I said I agree with it?
Ha ha, Singaporeans understand? How many of them? More than 50% of people on the street?
Ha ha, remember ’4 million-smiles’ campaign during the S2006? Did they get more than 2 million of laughing faces from Singaporeans?
Ha ha, either our leader is not sincere, or he is living in his own world of fantasy.
Ha ha, this ‘ha ha’ is so fake and lack of sincerity. Ha ha.
It is just pure conceit from the First Prime Minister to the Current One.
And their conceits will bring SIN down to its’ knees in the not too distant future.
Sad to have to witness the downfall and demise of a tiny small little cute place.
(Laughs) seriously how many politicians laughs so much in interviews, and don’t really like the laughs, make me feel uncomfortable , so weird sound … if it is u or me, they would lock us up in green hill.
(more Laughs) this is no laughing matter.
Let the light shine. Don’t lie to the people of Singapore. I still can’t understand why he draw 4-5 times more over US President. Spore can’t compare over US but his salary is 4 to 5 times higher. He made decisions over billions but US President made decisions over few hundred Billions. I don’t think without the connection, HC & you will be PM & CEO of the company.
You are taking our money to pay for yourself. What a shame. The next election if I could vote, I will never cast a vote to you…
#24
On page A10, in the article entitled Obama: I’ll take blame for AIG fallout, he said : “For everybody in Washington who’s busy scrambling, trying to figure out how to blame somebody else, just go ahead and talk to me, because it is my job to make sure that we fix these messes, even if I don’t make them.”
“I’ll take the blame” are 4 words that we will least likely hear LHL or any PAP minister utter. They believe so much that they are right about everything and that they are infallible. They don’t believe in transparency or accountability so why should they believe in serving the people in the first place.
As a Singaporean, I am ashamed of our government and it’s apparachik.
aiyoyo
is there a local obama??
aiyoyo
(Laughs) long live the emperor, “wan sui, wan wan sui”
the sg leadership’s great words and replies have now reached the homes of many around the world.
they should now know more about our great leader and his views on his salary.
I watched Obama’s interview @tonight show, and I am impressed by his wise words about AIG executives also. I say GIVE THIS MAN A RAISE, GIVE THIS MAN A MILLION MORE.
Things are getting out of hand on this site with unequitable comparisons.
If there should be any comparison, it should be KY vs BH on account of hard fought self making and into iconic history making, and currency of holding real power.
The PM’s interview especially with laughing and perhaps whinning of ambivalences regarding families should never be aired in the first place. However what is said cannot be unsaid…
So the well wishing hope is that there may be some quick damage control with the BBC, and in future may there be better speech writers in the PMO .
This is important ;cf …. SM has improved much from his earlier days where he had made comments about his religoius beliefs, and then scolded Singaporeans who have gone away; SM is older and wiser in his speeches nowadays( confirmed as there is no further official use of words “wooden spoon”).
Singapore is waiting for USA’s recovery to save our economy, why LHL salary is much higher than Obama?
Hi Frirends, probably most of you above are below 40yrs old, the “acquisitive & assertive” generation. Who is to be blamed for our present predicament?? My take is, blame your parents whom are mostly Chinese Sporeans, for swallowing
wholesale the sunshine promises of the PAP. “PAP hoh, ehsai tanh lew”, eagerly
the Chinese Sporeans got seduced by the PAP’s pot-of-gold vision.
The minority non-Chinese Sporeans knew that had we made up at least half of
Spore’s population, the PAP would not have easily bulldozed their way. Their song “My Way” would have been fractured and Spore would have matured into a more wholsome city and not ONLY economic acheivement is the most desirous aspiration.
It is a natural inclination, perhaps genetically for the Chinese, that “The keeper of the well will not drink half a cup”, that “The durian gatherer, puts aside the best fruit” and that “the caravan leader has a specially-laden camel”
Personally, as many of us will also concede, I do not doubt the PAP’s sincerity to do good for Singapore. But, “We shall do it my way” the PAP’s way of not wanting to give in so as not to appear weak to the electorate whom many will be “bought” when the next GE arrives, with generous cash handouts and rebates.
Abel
To really quantitatively and qualitatively know if someone is the best,
must be proven by competition.
I have always wondered,
what happens if we put other 1st world citizens as citizens here with the current system and problems and the high transparency and the very bombastic press and the dulai peanut and the mini pon pons and the town council excellence and the CDC highly fair reward system and the T and G performances?
Are we really the 1 of a kind citizen in this world? As in Unique?
Well I thought it was the most polite way for our leaders to answer all these “frigging Westerners” with no idea how to run an Asian country. All they do is to put jobs in danger.
Would you rather he say the following?
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
Son, we live in a country that has people and those people need to be ruled by men who can give them jobs. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Melanie Kirkpatrick? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.
You weep for transparency and you curse Singapore; you have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that the lack of transparency while tragic, probably saved jobs and that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves jobs.
You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties. You want me to lead Singapore, you need me to lead Singapore.
We use words like open, honest, transparency. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent creating jobs for Singaporeans. You use them as a punchline.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to Singaporeans who rise and sleep under the blanket of the jobs I provide and then question the manner in which I provide them. I would rather they just say “thank you,” and went on their way. Otherwise, I suggest they join politics and win elections. Either way, I don’t give a damn what they think they are entitled to.
You are not comparing. You are not comparing with the President of USA because it would show how over-paid you are. Than why is your salary bench marked against top private sector earnings?
Just pay yourself $x per year with inflation adjustment.
You are paid to do your job. Why must you be paid performance bonus just like the greedy executives of Citibank, AIG, Merrill Lynch?
The highest paid (LHL) is telling the world that he is waiting for the lower paid (Obama) to turn things around. How ironical can that be?
as the leader said, there was no real growth. Just on paper.
The biggest joke is even when the problem is so big, NO ONE knows the weakness in the credit system. Where is the Economists? Why always on hindsight that economists look handsome? Assuming economists know, what have they done in their due diligence to mitigate the problem and not let the bubble burst ? If someone is supposed to know or do something but does not do it, its as good as ……..
IF someone really understood the credit system , they should easily know how the house of cards can fall. this is basic Risk Management. Or did capable talented millionairs know full well the problem BUT choose to ignore it? OR fail to manage the risk? Either way, FAILURE.
Now, my main question:
Those who invested AND lost billions and billions of peoples money,
DO THEY really KNOW the companies they invested well enough to just invest so much? For example, did they know how the credit system works and how vulnerable the companies are BEFORE making investments? Or is hindsight the wise man who enlightened the world?
Know means know. DO NOT know means do not know. Dun come and tell people , I know but dunno at times. Or its beyond what we expected. this means Fail to succeed. Fail means fail. Pass means pass. There is no such thingie as Fail and Pass. So, which is it? I like to know.
Where is the Risk Management?
If wall street ‘growth’ was on paper only, what else is only on paper only?
While some say full recovery at least 2 to 3 years away, I would make a educated guess and say maybe 2 to 6 years away. My margin of error is less ;)
by ‘leader’ , i was referring to the video of Obama.
ha ha ha ha ha ha laugh and laugh
“We go on a system which is open, honest, transparent”.
I suppose he is right: the government is shamelessly open, honest and transparent abut the corrupting high pay they get.
And ask what they can do? “What can we do? Wait for the world to get better lah!”.
The Singapore government are as good as AIG.
Wow…the PAP government should really try and explore the potentials of many posters here…with so many assuring and big thoughts, ideas or criticism contributed, how can Singapore fail?? Hat’s off!
PAP, be careful, as one day, Singapore’s governing policies can also be made by the many bright posters here through TOC…who needs the PAP government anyway?
Anyway, on the issue of the appointments in Temasek and GIC, I do agree with all that MM and Ho Ching should not hold any appointments in both organization, this is a matter of conflict of interest and it is the duty of every righteous government to practice this fundamental principle in politics.
So cut the crap and be sensitive, LHL, the issues of both their appointment is way beyond meritocracy and capabilities! Stop treating us like 3 years old kid, PLEASE!!!
Mr Lee Hsien Loong is a honest guy who keep on using the argument put forth by his father to justify Minister’s salary. He may be deluded to believe his father hypothesis. The weakness of the PAP is : THEY HAVE LOST TOUCH WITH THE GROUND. I bet with all of you that without the grassroots and other political (supposed to be apolitical) organization in Singapore, they will be BOOTED OUT OF Governance. I would like to see at least a GRC won by an opposition party before the demise of Fuhrer LKY. PAP do play the gangster in some sense. I did attend a dialogue with one of the Minister and one of my friend asked about an issue and instead of engaging the students, he asked the students ridiculous question to put the students to fear. The mentality that the Govt knows best is passe; it’s time to treat OUR people like an intelligent human who knows what they are doing. Period.
These arrogant and out of touch politician should face a tough competition (similar to LKY generation) to prove their worth.It’s not that this is the Singapore’s system and our people accept it rather it’s the rule that PAP had done and enforce on its people. Majulah Singapura! Mundurlah LKY!
I have no qualms abt PAP’s governing the country if the people genuine and intellect in them still exist and that arrogance is not in their agenda. How can you say Ho Ching, and all related LKY family friends are the best and no one can replace them. Simply illogical and riduculous. My dear TOC-ian, it’s time for a social revolution the next time they ask legally to corrupt their minds to serve with money.
Let’s join hands to shake the establishment. We are SMART people not only the PAP- and its affiliates.
“Quote: (Laughs) I’m not comparing myself and I don’t look at these rankings. We go on a system which is open, honest, transparent. ”
IMHO, if you are notingcompare why then the benchmarking? And benchmark with the top few earners at that? I see much envy here. I seem to hear the question being asked why are these people paid more than us when they are only running some company and we are running a country? What a laugh!!!
IMHO, please look into the mirror all of you. Go into the private sector and see what is your job worth. You will be surprised. (My turn to Laugh — LOL)
#97
Typo error, should be:
IMHO, if you are not comparing why then the benchmarking?