by Joseph Nathan

“Work hard, keep quiet, save for retirement and buy a HDB flat” was how our Public Housing Policy was used politically by the People’s Action Party (PAP) to keep generations of Singaporeans subserviently vested with them, as shared by Lee Hsien Yang when he offered some insights into the working of the PAP recently.

Being the son of Lee Kuan Yew and the younger brother of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, he obviously knows something more than us and has been trying to do his best in enlightening us as to why he fears that the current 4G PAP has lost their way.

The Election Mantra Of The PAP

Since our separation from Malaysia, we have been sold an Election Promise of a better future but only if we play along with the PAP by voting for them blindly and without question.

But like a mirage in the desert that vanishes into thin air, a growing number of Singaporeans are starting to realize their past follies of blindly voting for the PAP.

As more Singaporeans get tired of being left in a state of perpetual “needs & wants”, having to keep working harder than before just to get by and having to swallow the Bitter Truth that we will never get to taste or touch the dividends of our economic success, which is being craftily reserved for the political-elites.

To make matter worse, we were served a double-whammy when truckloads of new immigrants and foreign workers started to compete unfairly with Core Singaporeans for literally everything — for our flats, for our jobs, for seats in our buses & MRT, for our community clubs, for our governmental grants and even for our heritage districts like Chinatown or Little India, where Singaporeans, our local businesses and local street foods are being displaced.

So where have we gone wrong as a nation?

Were we sold “A Pack of White Lies” by the PAP all these years?

In retrospect, isn’t all this a major default on our original Social Compact?

Shouldn’t we have a national conversation to discuss just how untenable our Public Housing policy has become and why any attempt to violate our Original Social Compact should not be tolerated?

So what are the key salient points that we need to review?

#01 – When Public Housing Was An Intrinsic Part Of Our Original Social Compact:

The original purpose of the HDB was to further the original objective of the Singapore Improvement Trust “SIT”, and that was to provide affordable housing for the masses so that we can urbanize and sanitize our country forward.

To create the HDB, the Labour Front was instrumental in the pushing for the Housing & Development Bills to be deliberated in the Legislative Assembly, from the mid-1950 until it was passed to form the HDB on February 1960, at a time when the PAP was still a part of the opposition.

For those who are still in doubt, the PAP did not create HDB.

So when the PAP came into power, and with Goh Keng Swee tenaciously driving the economy of our country forward while Devan Nair was actively bringing unions into the fold of the NTUC, Lee Kuan Yew knew back then that public housing will be a major pillar of the modern Singapore and uses it as a dividend-play to bond & bind Singaporeans to the country’s success.

As long as Singaporeans were to do what the PAP says, they can look forward to some handsome dividends at the end of the rainbow.

In all fairness to LKY, he did honour his end of the bargain when he stepped down as Prime Minister in November 1990 as the price of an executive HDB flats then were still affordably hovering around about S$100,000 (despite massive increases in the late 1980s) while resale executive flats were treading around S$250,000, all these at a time when our economy was growing progressively and new HDB flats were readily available for the masses.

#02 – Is BTO Being Used As A Capitalistic Control To Generate Pent-Up Demand?

But when HDB was allowed to unilaterally adopt a capitalistic approach and replace the dividend-play of the original Social Compact with its new “business-play”, all hells start breaking loose.

Instead of the Just-In-Time (JIT) supply of flats to meet the projected demand used previously, HDB is now using BTO to aggregate finalized orders, where Purchase Options were signed & paid before the aggregated supply are build.

By delaying the supply to create a pent-up demand, we have seen how the prices of new flats have gone up through the roofs.

Isn’t it sad that a lady, when asked on live TV last month about what her National Day could be, candidly shares that her wish was for her BTO-application to be successful.

This is a sad reality of our current Public Housing policy and we should all be concern about its adverse implications on our children and future generations.

#03 – Is Incompetency Being Rewarded At HDB?

It requires deep skill-set for HDB to plan its supply ahead of demand but with BTO, you don’t need any skill-set because even if you should put a bunch of “blur sotong” and let them mess up the planning, demand will still exceed supply exponentially and HDB will probably be the most profitable business in the world.

Is that why the Building & Development Division of the HDB was privatized into Surbana International Consultants in 2003, then further commercialized by Temasek, first in a joint venture with Jurong Town Council (JTC) to jointly form Surbana Jurong in June 2015, only for it to become a wholly-owned entity of Temasek a year later?

Whenever the government needed a few additional billions to balance its overall Balance Sheet, guess these Squid-Gamers at HDB can be count upon to deliver, no?

It may be worthwhile to ask Temasek on just how much of projects is Surbana Jurong getting from the various Town Councils, from HDB, Ministry of National Development (MND) and our Government Linked Companies (GLCs) these days, and how many of its 13,000 employees are Core Singaporeans these days?

#04 – The Perfect Storm When HDB Is No Longer Affordable & When Wages Got Depressed:

Alas, when the left side of the PAP did not check to see or know what the right side of their party is doing, a Perfect Storm was inevitably created out of their follies.

Years of artificially depressing the wages and income for Core Singaporeans to fuel the profitability of our GLCs and related entities like the NTUC have gotten out of hands.

So when the price of new HDB starts escalating to cost more than half a million while resale flats were going for more than a million, all these happening at a time when the wages and income of the majority of Core Singaporeans are stagnating or got further deflated by runaway inflation and the perpetual increase in the cost of living, affordability naturally become a pressing issue.

This is getting more profound as more parents realize that their children and grandchildren may well be enslaved in perpetual debts by the PAP.

The alternative is to rent, or migrate, or stay single so that they can continue to stay with their parent for free.

Like South Korea or Japan, we are already on a slippery slope of unfettered consumerism caused by poor governance and ill-designed public policy.

#05 – Implications Of Loopholes & Opportunists:

Unlike some opportunistic New Citizens & Permanent Residents (PRs) who are out exploiting the many loopholes of our public housing policy, the majority of Core Singaporeans do not really benefit from flipping their older HDB as they still have to buy another replacement flat at inflated price to put a roof over their families, thus adversely reducing the financial incentive to do so in the first place.

When you start counting the interest-rate incurred and the crawl-backs by the government and CPF Board, what is there really left for the little people these days?

But for citizens or PRs who are opportunistic, they can sell their flats when prices are inflated, pocket every cents, totally free to withdraw their CPF in full and just relocate to a cheaper destination to live like kings & queens, while older Core Singaporeans have to go clean tables at hawker centre or go pick up cardboard for exercise, as some PAP politicians want us to believe.

When so much monies could be potentially be carted away (drawn out of the system) by these opportunists, someone has to ultimately pay the price when the music stop playing and we have to reconcile the Balance Sheet of our Public Housing Policy, just as the stock market self-correct itself during recession.

Guess how the HDB or MND is going to find the billions needed to plug all these big holes?
Another alternative is to find more rich foreigners to prop up our real estate and keep the music playing, and isn’t this what the present 4G government is doing?

#06 – Is Our HDB Investment An Inferior Asset-Class That Decay In Value?

The original idea of LKY to use our public housing as a dividend-play can no longer be sustained by the present 4G PAP and this was most evident by the recent SERS at Ang Mo Kio where existing leases of affected flats were treated like some inferior asset-class of investment with talks of Lease Decay, despite prices of new flats and other Resale flats continuing to escalate out of control.

As such, it may be timely to ask the HDB if our public housing an Inferior Asset-Class as compared to other 99-year private condominiums like Eunosville, Tampines Court, Mayfair Gardens or Landmark Tower that were successfully sold enbloc?

If not, then why can’t owners of a precinct come together to forge their own Collective Sales instead of waiting hopelessly and helplessly for SERS or be forced to accept ridiculous low offer from the HDB?

As such, isn’t it imperative for both HDB & MND to provide greater development detail about the land, its boundary lines, and the land cost and development charges that are being levied by the government of each HDB precinct?

It is totally absurd for both the HDB & MND to suggest that older HDB flats must be subjected to Lease Decay should HDB owners have been billed for their land cost at market price.

Just think about it for a moment.

A Lease Decay is like a “forced discount”, similar to when an equity investment goes into default and investors were forced to accept a Hair-Cut loss or risks ending up with nothing.

Just think of those investors who got burnt in investing in Hyflux and getting an offer that comes with a deep haircut loss that was offered by some allegedly “White Knight”.

This begets a question – if there is no default on our investment in HDB flat, why then must HDB flat owners accept Lease Decay as an ultimatum?

#07 – Is Affordability Still An Essential Element Of Our Public Housing Policy?

This brings us back to some unanswered fundamental questions — what is the role & purpose of HDB these days?

If affordability is still an essential element of our public housing policy, then both MND and HDB will have a lot of work to do in order to demonstrate in real term that our investment in HDB flats are indeed of a same superior asset-class to the private sector and that the prices of BTO-flats will remain affordable in real term, after taking into consideration the high cost of living, accrued interest and other inflated essential costs.

But this still leave us with one unanswered question — if Singapore is indeed land scarce, why then did the PAP grow our population so drastically since our independence?

#08 – Is Land Scarce A Fact Or A Ruse?

Since our independence, we have been told that being land-scare, Singapore needs to keep recycling our land to meet the population demand of future generations, at a time when we have a population of just 1.886,900.

But if we are really so short of land, why did the PAP-led government still bring in so many new citizens to grow our population by a factor of 3.15 since our latest population count as of August 2022 now stands at 5,949,565?

As such, we need to ask the current 4G PAP government to explain why despite being land-scarce, why did they still allow so many new citizens over the years until it created a terrible Urban-Squeeze that overstretch our infrastructure and causes terrible traffic jams that leads to an increase in ERP and COE prices, displaces Core Singaporeans from quality employment, got us jam-packed on our trains & buses, explain why there is so many homeless in a First-World country like ours and if there is an increase in suicide rate.

Shouldn’t we be asking our parliamentarians just how can we go “forward” from here if all these uncertainties, ambiguities & absurdities are not addressed holistically?

As governing a country is not a game of “game of cards” as wisely pointed out by Lee Kuan Yew, we cannot allow the present 4G PAP to hoodwink us with more bullshits as any violation of our original Social Compact is a serious breach of a “Sacred Promise”.

There was a time when it pays to be a Singaporeans but these days, we can only lament the poor quality of the 4G PAP politicians and how they have messed up the lives and opportunities for Core Singaporeans and future generations.

How to “Forward Singapore” when the PAP can no longer deliver on its key promise?
Core Singaporeans must wise up if we still believe that we, the Core Singapore, deserves better…

This commentary was first published on Joseph Nathan’s Facebook page and republished with permission