Karen Tse /
“You believe the Workers’ Party is in Parliament to help the good of Singaporeans or to oppose the PAP?” – Straits Times, 9 May.
Before I answer MM Lee, I would like to pose MM Lee and anyone who shares a similar concern a question. Which person is more useful to you: the one who imagines why your idea will work, or the one who articulates why it won’t? As a prologue to this article, I must state that I continue to find the approach of voting out of plain party allegiance, blind loyalty and gratitude irrational and reprehensible*. Hence, my answer to MM Lee’s question outright: both.
In politics, it is dangerous to be looking for heroes; we should be looking for good idea. MM Lee’s statement necessitates an omniscient notion that white is the only colour that will help the good of Singaporeans. The PAP’s primary operating philosophy seems to be: all other parties hold illegitimate and evil reasons for pursuing seats in Parliament. Despite his experience and intellect, I doubt that anyone is all-knowing with the capacity to know everything infinitely. An objective person should hold any political parties to the same standard, and judge them with the same scrutiny – incumbent or otherwise. Blind faith to either sides results in subjectivity. For this reason, one could even ask the analogous: is the PAP in Parliament to help the good of Singaporeans or to oppose the opposition?
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, “Once you label me, you negate me.” The primary problem that Singapore is facing is not one of the ideological differences between the PAP and any of the opposition parties. The problem is that PAP has established itself to be the sole party capable of running the country with good intentions. A cursory glance at the state-controlled media reveals how labelling of “the opposition” by the PAP is problematic because it suggests an unruly quality in all opposition parties.
As witnessed in the past decades, either PAP runs on a deeply fused party line or they are used to settling their disagreements behind closed doors. Is there indeed true consultation of matters or do PAP members fall under the first archetype I raised in my question, a person who does not question and hence raises no objections? I do understand the motivation of an autocratic political system: to be fast, free of stalemate, and efficient. But I cannot comprehend the need to isolate immediately any alternative voice as dissent. On the contrary, I believe that sightless subservience by any members of Parliament will be unhelpful for the good of Singaporeans.
Let us evaluate some possible approaches of how the Workers’ Party could function in Parliament:
i) The scenario that the Workers’ Party opposes the PAP on every count for the sake of opposing is not quite likely. Firstly, it is simply not in their interest to do so. If their inputs are not constructive and do not reflect sentiments of the masses, voters will almost certainly remove them from Parliament come 2016. Secondly, based on my cogent grasp of mathematics, 6 against 81 carries relatively little weight. So even if the tenacity of the hammer is used for the wrong reasons, resistance is futile.
ii) If in the event that the Workers’ Party does not abuse its power, it is likely that unlike their PAP counterparts, they will not toe the glaring white party line. This would result in more ideas and alternative views, less groupthink. Their contributions would be beneficial to the good of Singapore.
I do not believe that any party sets out to be intrinsically evil. There is a need for MM Lee and the PAP to stop placing opposition members immediately in the ideological box of radicals who are essentially anti-PAP and anti-establishment. There is a need to pull away from autocracy, to eradicate this belief that “white is good, colours are bad”, and to ease over control to constructive members of the opposition. At the end of the day, one does not have to be pro-PAP to be pro-Singapore.
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*Note:
See the brilliant note “Thank You, Sir! – On the Politics of Gratitude” by Desirée Lim http://www.facebook.com/notes/desirée-lim/thank-you-sir-on-the-politics-of-gratitude/10150178935113774)
The writer is a sociology undergraduate. Her favourite Chinese proverb: 司马昭之心，小人眼里皆为小人.
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Let’s put our money where our mouth is. You are a venture capitalist looking to sink your money somewhere that will give you a handsome return on your investment. You have an entity that has a proven track record over 40 years. It is by no means perfect, but in the grand scheme of things, very successful. Who would you bet on? Now, be honest.
@ Robert Teh
If insider trading and price fixing are punishable by law I often wonder why no law exists to stop the mischief of pollies fixing their own salaries.
In Australia recently, Wayne Swan, the deputy PM and Treasure scolded the Reserve Bank of Australia for increasing the Chairman’s salary to a mere $1 million which is about twice the salary of the Australian PM.
But this is peanuts compared to what we, the taxpayers, pay our ministers, junior ministers and ministers of state, plus bonuses based on GDP.
This is another conundrum as the GDP is affected by increased taxes for goods and services, COE, fares, customs fees and duties, more FWs and FTs which impact Singaporeans negatively.
In Singapore the pollies are supposed to be our servants but in reality which servant gives herself/himself a million dollar plus salary?
There must be reforms as they have gone completely overboard. To redeem themselves some rich ministers should donate their salaries to charity.
This was what a prescient ex-Chairman of the HDB, Mr Ngiam Tong Dow had to say in 2003 :
Let’s look at Sparta and Athens, two city states in Greek history.
Singapore is like Sparta, where the top students are taken away from their
parents as children and educated. Cohort by cohort, they each select their
own leadership, ultimately electing their own Philosopher King.
When I first read Plato’s Republic, I was totally dazzled by the great logic of
this organisational model where the best selects the best.
But when I reached the end of the book, it dawned on me that though the starting point was meritocracy, the end result was dictatorship and elitism.
In the end, that was how Sparta crumbled.
Past 40-year performance does not guarantee future success.
Worms are seen crawling all over but one can pretend no to see the worms.
The last round of tech ventures saw big scames like Enron and Worldcom attracting venture capitalists like honey.
They have bankrupted many venture capitalist firms. GIC and Temasek jumped into Shin Corp, Citbank, and others failing to see the can of worms.
Put the people’s monies to produce jobs for citizens. Do not jump into the black holes. Unless ministers have the talent of Warren Buffett, or Jack Welch of GM or CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, they should not boast to be world’s best. Be humble.
They are only good in legalistic wrangling paying themselves the millions in salaries but doing cashier job of collecting, taxing and privatizing driving up costs of living and housing killing off our economic competitiveness since 1980s.
Many MNCs have moved out because of our highest costs of housing and doing business.
Top leaders are lawyers, technocrats and accountants. How do such people know about strategic master planning to gain back our losses in economic competitiveness in technology start-ups and en masse knowledge applications. Look at what Korea and Taiwan do to see how they lead in creating world-beating products like DVD, flat TV screens, value-added cars, and industrial appliances, internet devices and games etc.
Let’s not try to claim success because of legalistic wrangling and tweaking to keep people under control. Go for en masse innovation and knowledge application at all levels, so that we will have more Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and not just self-glorified elites with straight-As who can only be professors or teachers.
@Pui-Lit Philip Lee
Robert Teh is correct. ‘Past 40-year performance does not guarantee future success.’
Take Lehman Bros. They had over 100 years of solid track record but in the frothy housing market in the United States they went overboard on toxic assets like sub-prime mortgages and went belly-up for good.
The policy that Singapore should adopt is that in a rising tide, all boats must rise.
It is heart-rending to see that though Singapore has one of the highest per capita reserves in the world and a developed-world GDP, there are still little old ladies collecting trashed cardboard, in pitiful carts, in the streets of Singapore or cleaning toilets at the airport.
Why can’t our ministers be more caring and give them a modest pension and get them off the streets and toilets?
What happened to the promised Swiss standard of living?
That did not materialize and to add insult to injury we now have a Swiss cost of living instead and a million FWs competing for low-paid jobs with us.
Furthermore, we’re talking about a country. Not an MNC. While we need foreigners to invest in Singapore, there is a need to balance such a monetary need with civil liberties each Singaporean should be allowed to practice as a given birth right. There can be no trade-off.
Perhaps in the days of yore, the ruling party was able to garner votes with this ideology but honestly, with a brood of internet savvy kids, i can’t say this will remain or even has remained. People who probably never had any lectures on politics and policies, are able to access articles online and review lectures from esteemed universities worldwide. Singaporeans are beginning to question why they are being deprived of their right to question the government, when the government is technically working for them and not vice versa.
Also, we see now with a keen eye the effect the burning desire for civil liberties in the Middle East.
When one looks at political stability of a country as a decisive significant factor for foreign investors, you must also realise that investors want to invest in vibrant societies, and nothing is less vibrant than stifling political views. An example can be seen with the difficulties China has had to deal with in keeping prized western companies in their land. Google, Microsoft and so on.
I believe Singapore as a society has grown to be more sophisticated and as such, the government must recognise this. Political sophistication doesn’t just display itself as a person speaking the Queen’s english, but rather its platform is found in everyone, from the Ah Beng to the Mat sitting at the kopitiam drinking Teh C peng.
Lee Kuan Yew = LIE
Lee Kuan Yew = CHEAT
LIE + CHEAT = Singapore Government
Though democracy, given its form of one-man-one-vote fair election is a more just and equitable system of government, by comparison with dictatorship, authoritarianism and other systems, it is not perfect.
It is liable to tweaking and gerrymandering of laws and regulations to serve the people in control of power. Much groundwork needs to be done to translate the form or intention to change-order dualism to facilitate getting things done through people in a fair, and equitable manner.
There is a lot of talks about need for check and balance, transparency and accountability of government. Otherwise, these are only the form or intention as well.
Until form is translated to orderly step-wise actions it will continue to be at the whims and fancies of people in control of political power who can easily gross over mistakes and shortcomings with hypocrisy and justifications.
All over the world, people are obsessed with power, resorting to ruthless and unsympathetic behavior to get their way in the name of democracy.
Parliament becomes the rubber stamp of the political master who are able to tilt the rule of law and whole judiciary system to their advantage to stay in control and power. Societies are divided by individualism, self-centeredness and self-interests.
The new parliament has the task to change such a command and control rubber-stamp parliament. It is a recipe for divisiveness and disasters unless appropriate change is made the sooner the better.
An interesting report on Singapore GE 2011 by Michael Barr is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Flinders University.
QUOTE: Singapore went to the polls on 7 May 2011 and delivered the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) Government its worst result since 1963, both in terms of the proportion of votes and the number of seats taken by the Opposition.
Despite all the institutional advantages that guaranteed a PAP victory, the party’s vote went down to 60.14%, from 66.6% in 2006 and 75% in 2001. The Opposition’s capture of seats went up to six, from two in 2006 and 2001. For only the second time since 1963, a Cabinet Minister lost his seat; two ministers, actually, plus the candidate slated to be the next Speaker of Parliament.
So why was Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong smiling so broadly afterwards? Because he knew that it could easily have been much, much worse. His party won one constituency by a mere 114 votes and another by 382 votes, and the feared wholesale collapse of support in a four-member constituency (Holland-Bukit-Timah) failed to eventuate, so net losses were restricted to four seats.
A bad result does not look so bad when compared to a disastrous result. It also does not hurt that he managed to increase his personal vote to the point where he can avert a lot of criticism that might otherwise be directed towards him.
Yet there is no doubt that the little world of Singapore politics changed on 7 May. The world’s most successful marriage of modern capitalism and electoral authoritarianism has just been tripped up.
One of the most significant institutional blows landed by the Opposition was that, for the first time, they won a Group Representation Constituency (GRC). The introduction of these multi-member constituencies in 1988 is one of the most notorious mechanisms at the Government’s disposal for throttling opposition challenges.
Up to six candidates have to stand as a team in each GRC in a winner-take-all election. Apart from relatively normal institutional barriers presented by the GRC electoral system such as teams of candidates having to pay deposits of $64–96,000 (as of 2011), GRCs are broken up and reshaped in the Prime Minister’s Office just before each election in ways that seemingly have no purpose other than to undermine any inroads that the Opposition might have been making in an area.
So strong is the assumption that these boundaries are set capriciously for the purposes of favouring the PAP that, when the announcement of the 2011 boundaries included the surprise creation of a new Single Member Constituency in Punggol East, the local PAP MP proudly announced that his ‘key grassroots leaders’ saw it not as the result of anything so mundane as population shift, but as ‘an affirmation and confirmation of the good work they are doing’. No journalist questioned the assumption that the new constituency was created as a function of partisan politics, nor did any Government spokesperson deny it.
Much of the significance of the electoral shift is seen in the severity of the blows to some of the most basic legitimating myths of the regime, and these came, not from opposition candidates, but from Cabinet Ministers as they floundered under withering opposition scrutiny.
Never before have Singaporeans heard a Prime Minister apologise for government ‘mistakes’, but they heard it in 2011, along with opposition candidates pointedly accepting his apology or sneeringly dismissing it. Nor had they heard a Senior Minister defend one of his Cabinet colleagues in terms of him not being as incompetent as some of the others.
But they did in 2011. They can never hope to regain the presumption of professional authority that they enjoyed before.
The main problem for the government was that it was being challenged on its own preferred terms and found wanting. It has set up an education and social system based on ruthless competition, but argues that competition is bad in politics. It proudly sets the pay scales for ministers by the standards of the CEOs of multinational companies, but then argues that neither individual ministers nor the Cabinet as a whole should be held to account when they make mistakes.
And this was an election where Government mistakes and its mishandling of issues were the main items on the agenda, manifest in issues such as cost of living, cost of housing, cost of health care, inadequate national infrastructure and public transport, budget overruns, the escape of a terrorist, insults to the Malay section of the population, immigration, foolish investments leading to the loss of national savings — and all topped off by Ministers’ lack of accountability.
In the past, these challenges would not have been a problem for the Government because information was being controlled assiduously at the centre and Opposition activists did not have the professional credentials or the political skills to mount credible challenges.
All this has changed, in part because the Government has lost control of the flow of information, due of the rise of the internet. But the internet is just a facilitator. These developments have been driven by real people and by the Opposition’s capacity building in terms of members, activists, leaders, candidates, money, ideas, causes, and outreach structures.
From my in-country research before the election it is clear that the Opposition has none of these things in abundance, and yet it is now obvious that they have all of them to a sufficient extent to make a real impact and provide a base for further development.
One of the clearest indications of this capacity building is the calibre of the candidates, not just in terms of their confidence, capacity to speak, willingness to work, and their intelligence, but also in terms of the seriousness of their curriculum vitaes (and in qualification-and CV-conscious Singapore, this has more significance than it would in most other places).
In 2011, the Opposition was able to run a selection of candidates who ‘should’ have been supporters of the Government: former winners of overseas government scholarships, former members of the civil service’s elite Administrative Service, a former Army officer, and even a former Principal Private Secretary to Goh Chok Tong in the days when he was Deputy Prime Minister. Add to this a few PhDs, one of whom has close family connections to the old establishment, and the odd high-flying corporate lawyer who has been working overseas for decades, and the frontline opposition line up is starting to look like a team that might have made the PAP proud.
Furthermore, some of these candidates are clearly more competent as politicians than most ministers — but this is setting the bar rather low, since none of these ministers has had to face serious adversarial interrogation or criticism for decades, if ever.
In the last days of the campaign, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong floundered around defensively, routinely wandering ‘off message’. Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong spent much of the campaign saying and tweeting off-beat messages that required either himself or his colleagues to use up precious air time explaining them or defending him or defending themselves against him.
Don’t expect a change of government or anything like serious democratisation in Singapore anytime soon, but nevertheless, the Lion City has changed, and there is no going back.
Photo by Flickr user dannyc.
We should be grateful that the PMO has clarified the ‘misinformation’ about the amount minister’s get as pension.
Now that it has been so clearly explained, I guess 1/10th of $2 million plus (plus medical) isn’t really that excessive.
The people of Singapore regret our misplaced outrage.
Pui-Lit Philip Lee, 11 May 2011
eh, our political leaders are using S’pore money to gamble. its more accurate to term is as compulsive gamble.
” You are a venture capitalist looking to sink your money somewhere…”
& “your” money is who’s money? be honest ley…