Commentaries, Community, Khairu zaini, Main Stories - Saturday, March 13, 2010 15:20 - 6 Comments

Lonely out of the gravy train

By Khairulanwar Zaini

Compassion remains scarce in Singapore. The status quo prevails for the government: public transport concessions will remain elusive for the almost 120 000 disabled people.

Addressing the plight of the disabled was Workers’ Party Non-Constituency MP Ms. Sylvia Lim, who advanced in Thursday’s Parliamentary session that public transport concessions for the disabled are “a necessary step towards integration, to work, to socialise and to be consumers”.

The Responsibility to Include

Citing the “low earning capacity” of the disabled and their lack of bargaining power, Ms. Lim exhorted the government to live up to its rhetoric of building a truly “inclusive society”.

Transport Minister Raymond Lim however cautioned that mandating the provision of concessionary travel for the disabled as a licensing prerequisite for transport companies was not viable as the Ministry “would be very slow in stipulating (to operators) how best to run the concession policy”.

Supervising the expansion of the road and train network must have taken a toll on Mr Lim for him to comprehensively fail to empathize with a marginalized community already facing social estrangement from their lack of physical mobility and lack of access to public infrastructure.

However much pride the Transport Ministry derives from its engineering marvels in building underground MRT lines in urban-dense Singapore, they should similarly feel disappointed that they lack the capacity and resources to conduct a feasibility study to discern an appropriate concessionary plan.

Indeed, for much of the government’s communitarian eloquence, such a policy position is contradictory as it betrays the policymakers’ unwillingness to fulfill its moral imperative to provide for a marginalized segment of the community.

Our failure to ameliorate the burdens of the physically- handicapped suggests the dearth of our societal conscience, and the stranglehold of the corporatist logic that fails to acknowledge minority groups as legitimate stakeholders of society rather than vested interest groups – thus perpetuating their marginalization.

Reclaiming Welfare

Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Transport Teo Ser Luck reaffirmed the government’s laissez-faire approach, confirming that the government would not intervene in the commercial operations of the public transport operators, but merely “encourage” the operators to grant concessionary travel.

He further advised that financial help can be obtained by the disabled community through Workfare and Comcare. Asking the disabled to apply for the aid – instead of proactively providing the means of help – conforms to the government’s persistent diffidence with welfare. It is as though the proactive provision of aid would engender a sense of entitlement that erodes the meritocratic ethic that we so highly espouse.

It is unfortunate that our discourse of welfare and meritocracy has been severely distorted – for rather than being an incompatible element, welfare is in fact integral to sustaining a meritocratic structure. Political philosopher John Rawl has stated that ensuring a fair equality of opportunity requires society to be cognizant of, and compensate for, social contingencies. It is insufficient that we institute a formal structure of equal opportunity, as such a system would favour those who are already ahead in social circumstances.

Although Rawls demurs from extending this argument further, it is not hard to conceptually include compensation for the physical-disabled as a form of social justice. The absence of welfare for the physically-disabled inevitably results in ‘crass meritocracy’ – a system blind and unsympathetic both the unique needs of its constituents suffer and the individual talents they could potentially offer to  society.

In reclaiming and re-situating welfare as a necessary societal obligation, the half-hearted commitment in supporting our disabled is a damning testament to our collective deficit in morality and social justice.

Concessionary travel for the disabled is merely a question of moral imperatives that strikes deep into our hearts, and the answers in Parliament on Thursday suggest that we have none.

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Headline picture courtesy of Straits Times

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