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SINGAPORE’S general elections rarely draw much attention from beyond the shores of this tiny island-state. After all, the result is hardly in doubt. The People’s Action Party (PAP), founded by Lee Kuan Yew and his fellow “men in white”, as they are known, has won every election since independence—and usually by a huge margin. Indeed, in the last parliament the opposition won just two contested seats, and that was considered a good-ish result for them. So when the current general election officially kicked off on April 27th, anyone could be forgiven for struggling to stifle a yawn.

Yet now that we are into the short campaigning period, with polling day set for May 7th, the political atmosphere seems to be at least as intense and combative as in any British or American election. It’s almost as if the opposition parties think that they really can win a handful of seats! But surely not?

The big outdoor rallies, held between 7pm to 10pm in the evenings, are packed—one friend estimated that there were probably about 40,000 people at a Workers’ Party stadium rally that she attended. They are festive but well-ordered affairs. The thousands who go along listen carefully to the arguments put over from the podium; they really do want to hear about a viable alternative to the PAP. Indeed, some enthusiastically talk about this election being a “watershed”. Opposition politicians argue that now is the time for “change”—and many actually seem to believe in it.

Older and wiser heads however counsel me against taking too much of this too seriously. In a country where political debate is normally quite limited, the election campaign period serves as a safety valve, they say—people can blow off a bit of steam and then we can all return to a peaceful, stable, PAP way of life, just as before. The iron laws of Singaporean electoral arithmetic will prevail, as ever.

Maybe so, but there is undoubtedly something a bit different going on this time. Specifically, the opposition has altered its tactics, mounting an unusually concerted attack on the PAP. And there are real issues now that the opposition can exploit.

On tactics, the opposition is contesting more seats than ever before. In previous elections, such was the PAP’s lock on the Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs), each of which returns up to six MPs as a single-party block, that the non-PAP parties rarely bothered to contest even half. Now, only Lee Kuan Yew’s GRC will be unopposed. The Workers’ Party, the biggest of the six main opposition parties, is concentrating its firepower in just one GRC, Aljunied. Its five candidates there include all its top leaders, most prominently Low Thia Khiang, Sylvia Lim and Pritam Singh. Judging from the campaign so far, they certainly have the best hope in a long time of taking down a prized GRC. If they do manage it, that would constitute something of a political tsunami by Singaporean standards—and they would also claim a very prominent PAP scalp, that of George Yeo, the foreign minister.

All this clearly has the PAP a bit rattled, if Lee Kuan Yew’s comments are anything to go by. Fighting his own 14th election, the 87-year-old “Minister Mentor” (MM), as he is officially known, has been warning voters of the dire “consequences” of voting against the PAP. “You must expect the PAP to look after PAP constituencies first”, he told reporters. Thus if the unfortunate voters of Aljunied really do have the temerity to vote out the PAP, they will have “five years to live and repent”, according to MM. Asked if this sort of provocative language could cause a backlash against the PAP among voters, MM himself remained wholly unrepentant: “I am 87. I am speaking the truth. I do not want to be hypocritical.” So there.

The rising cost of everyday goods and services in an already expensive city is the main worry for Singaporeans, and this has become the main campaign message for many opposition politicians. Immigration has become part of the mix too; opposition candidates argue that the steady stream of low-cost workers coming to Singapore depresses wages for Singaporeans, thus adding to their worries about rising prices. Some parties argue for reductions in taxation, or special help for the elderly and other groups. The PAP argues that Singapore should stick to its traditional free-market, low-welfare policies, arguing that the best way to combat rising prices is to help the already flourishing economy grow even further. Last year Singapore achieved the second-highest growth rate in the world, after Qatar.

The PAP should still win comfortably. But given their past electoral hegemony, if they lose even one GRC—or, at the very extreme realms of possibility, two—that would be a shock. At the very least, this time round the PAP will know that it has been in a fight.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/20...l_election

Lets look at timeline what has happened since it was announced a week ago that opposition would contest all areas and campaigning commenced.

Surprise promise of no hike for GST for the next 5 years
Surprise promise to look into BTO income ceiling for HDB
First time apology ever made by PAP since forever.

And all these has happened just because opposition are contesting island wide a week ago .. they not yet even been elected omg

I think if they get elected it will only benefit our citizens interests.

just my views

After hearing the opposition, I do think there is substance within the opposition camp.
This is different from the opposition of the bygone era. Some of these folks(not all) are indeed capable, honest, sincere
and has a strong desire to help follow countrymen.

We have heard enough of the ruling party so there's no need to highlight anything. But after hearing Tan Pei Ling speak, my goodness...
I don't know what to say. What is 'Pein Ah Pek' thinking when they roped her in?

I do hope pap lose marine parade grc...

Interview with Mr Ngiam Tong Dow, former Civil Service Head, in 2003

A "must" read.


"I suspect we have started to believe our own propaganda. There is also a particular brand of Singapore elite arrogance creeping in. Some civil servants behave like they have a mandate from the emperor. We think we are little Lee Kuan Yews."

Interview with Mr Ngiam Tong Dow, former head of the civil service, in 2003.


Q. With all this pessimism surrounding Singapore's prospects today, what's your personal prognosis? Will Singapore survive Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew?

A. Unequivocally yes, Singapore will survive SM Lee but provided he leaves the right legacy. What sort of legacy he wants to leave is for him to say, but I, a blooming upstart, dare to suggest to him that we should open up politically and allow talent to be spread throughout our society so that an alternative leadership can emerge.So far, the People's Action Party's tactic is to put all the scholars into the civil service because it believes the way to retain political power forever is to have a monopoly on talent. But in my view, that's a very short term view. It is the law of nature that all things must atrophy. Unless SM allows serious political challenges to emerge from the alternative elite out there, the incumbent elite will just coast along. At the first sign of a grassroots revolt, they will probably collapse just like the incumbent Progressive Party to the left-wing PAP onslaught in the late 1950s. I think our leaders have to accept that Singapore is larger than the PAP.


Q. What would be a useful first step in opening up?

A. For Singapore to survive, we should release half our talent - our President and Overseas Merit scholars - to the private sector. When ten scholars come home, five should turn to the right and join the public sector or the civil service; the other five should turn to the left and join the private sector. These scholars should serve their bond to Singapore - not to the Government - by working in or for Singapore overseas. As matters stand, those who wish to strike out have to break their bonds, pay a financial penalty and worse, be condemned as quitters. But it takes a certain temperament and mindset to be a civil servant. The former head of the civil service,Sim Kee Boon, once said that joining the administrative service is like entering a royal priesthood. Not all of us have the temperament to be priests. However upright a person is, the mandarin will in time begin to live a gilded life in a gilded cage. As a Permanent Secretary, I never had to worry whether I could pay my staff their wages. It was all provided for in the Budget. As chairman of DBS Bank, I worried about wages only 20 per cent of the time. I now face my greatest business challenge as chairman of HDB Corp, a new start-up spun off from HDB. I spend 90 per cent of my time worrying whether I have enough to pay my staff at the end of the month. It's a mental switch.


Q. What is your biggest worry about the civil service?

A. The greatest danger is we are flying on auto-pilot. What was once a great policy, we just carry on with more of the same, until reality intervenes. Take our industrial policy. At the beginning, it was the right thing for us to attract multinationals to Singapore. For some years now, I've been trying to tell everybody: 'Look, for God's sake, grow our own timber.' If we really want knowledge to be rooted in Singaporeans and based in Singapore, we have to support our SMEs. I'm not a supporter of SMEs just for the sake of more SMEs, but we must grow our own roots. Creative Technology's Sim Wong Hoo is one and Hyflux's Olivia Lum is another but that's too few. We have been flying on auto-pilot for too long. The MNCs have contributed a lot to Singapore but they are totally unsentimental people. The moment you're uncompetitive, they just relocate.


Q. Why has this come about?

A. I suspect we have started to believe our own propaganda. There is also a particular brand of Singapore elite arrogance creeping in. Some civil servants behave like they have a mandate from the emperor. We think we are little Lee Kuan Yews. SM Lee has earned his spurs, with his fine intellect and international standing. But even Lee Kuan Yew sometimes doesn't behave like Lee Kuan Yew. There is also a trend of intellectualisation for its own sake, which loses a sense of the pragmatic concerns of the larger world. The Chinese, for example, keep good archives of the Imperial examinations which used to be held at the Temple of Heaven. At the beginning, the scholars were tested on very practical subjects, such as how to control floods in their province. But over time, they were examined on the Confucian Analects and Chinese poetry composition. Hence, they became emasculated by the system, a worrying fate which could befall Singapore.


Q. But aren't you an exception to the norm of the gilded mandarin with zero bottomline consciousness?

A. That's because I started out with Economic Development Board in the 1959. Investment promotion then was all about hard foot slogging and personal persuasion, which teaches you to be very humble and patient. I learnt to be a supplicant and a professional beggar, instead of a dispenser of favours. These days, most civil servants start out administering the law. If I had my way, every administrative officer would start his or her career in the EDB. Hard foot slogging.


Q. YOUR idea of creating an alternate elite is not new. What do you think of the oft-mooted suggestion of achieving that splitting ranks within the People's Action Party?

A. Quite honestly, if you ask me, Team A-and-Team B is a synthetic and infantile idea. If you want to challenge the Government, it must be spontaneous. You have to allow some of your best and brightest to remain outside your reach and let them grow spontaneously. How do you know their leadership will not be as good as yours? But if you monopolise all the talent, there will never be an alternative leadership. And alternatives are good for Singapore.


Q. In your calculation, what are the odds of this alternative replacing the incumbent?

A. Of course there's a political risk. Some of these chaps may turn out to be your real opposition, but that is the risk the PAP has to take if it really wants Singapore to endure. A model we should work towards is the French model of the elite administration. The very brightest of France all go to university or college. Some emerge Socialists, others Conservative, some work in industries, some work in government. Yet, at the end of the day, when the chips are down, they are all Frenchmen. No member of the French elite will ever think of betraying his country, never. That is the sort of Singapore elite we want. It doesn't mean that all of us must belong to the PAP. That is very important.


Q. What do bad times mean for the PAP, which has based its legitimacy on providing the economic goods and asset enhancement? Is its social compact with the people in need of an update?

A. Oh yes. And my advice is: Go back to Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew's old credo, where nobody owes us a living. After I had just taken over as the Housing Board's chairman in 2000, an astute academic asked me: 'Tong Dow, what's your greatest problem at HDB?' Then he diagnosed it himself: 'Initially, you gave peanuts to monkeys so they would dance to your tune. Now you've given them so much by way of peanuts that the monkey has become a gorilla and you have to dance to its tune. That's your greatest problem.' Our people have become over-fed and today's economic realities mean we have to put them on a crash diet. We cannot starve them because there will be a political explosion. So the art of government today is to wean everyone off the dispensable items. We should just concentrate on helping the poorest 5 to 10 per cent of the population, instead of handing out a general largesse. Forget about asset enhancement, Singapore shares and utility rebates. You're dancing to the tune of the gorilla. I don't understand the urgency of raising the Goods and Services Tax. Why tax the lower-income, then return it to them in an aid package? It demeans human dignity and creates a growing supplicant class who habitually hold out their palms. Despite the fact that we say we are not a welfare state, we act like one of the most 'welfarish' states in the world. We should appeal instead to people's sense of pride and self-reliance. I think political courage is needed here. And my instinct is that the Singaporean will respect you for that.


Q. So what should this new compact consist of?

A. It should go back to what was originally promised: 'That you shall be given the best education, whether it be academic or vocational, according to your maximum potential.' And there will be no judgment whether an engineer is better than a doctor or a chef. My late mother was a great woman. Although illiterate, she single-handedly brought up four boys and a girl. She used to say in Hainanese: 'If you have one talent which you excel in, you will never starve.' I think the best legacy to leave is education and equal opportunity for all. When the Hainanese community came to Singapore, they were the latest arrivals and the smallest in number. So they had no choice but to become humble houseboys, waiters and cooks. But they always wanted their sons to have a better life than themselves. The great thing about Singapore was that we could get an education, which gave us mobility, despite coming from the poorest families. Today, the Hainanese, as a dialect group, form proportionately the highest number of professionals in Singapore.


Q. You say focus on education. What is top of your wishlist for re-making Singapore's education system?

A. Each year, the PSLE creams off all the top boys and girls and dispatches them to only two schools, Raffles Institution and Raffles Girls' School. However good these schools are, the problem is you are educating your elite in only two institutions, with only two sets of mentors, and casting them in more or less the same mould. It worries me that Singapore is only about 'one brand' because you never know what challenges lie ahead and where they will come from. I think we should spread out our best and brightest to at least a dozen schools.


Q. You advocate a more inclusive mindset all around?

A. Yes, intellectually, everyone has to accept that the country of Singapore is larger than the PAP. But even larger than the country of Singapore, which is limited by size and population, is the nation of Singapore, which includes a diaspora. My view is that we should have a more inclusive approach to nation-building. We have started the Majulah Connection, an international network where every Singaporean - whether he is a citizen or not, so long as he feels for Singapore - is included as part of our diaspora. Similarly, we should include foreigners who have worked and thrived here as friends of Singapore. That's the only way to survive. Otherwise, its just four million people on a little red dot of 600 sq km. If you exclude people, you become smaller and smaller, and in the end, you'll disappear.


Q. What is the kind of Singapore you hope your grandchildren will inherit?

A. 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 elect 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. Yet, Athens, a city of philosophers known for its different schools of thought, survived. What does this tell us about out-of-bounds markers? So SM Lee has to think very hard what legacy he wants to leave for Singapore and the type of society he wants to leave behind. Is it to be a Sparta, a well-organised martial society, but in the end, very brittle; or an untidy Athens which survived because of its diversity of thinking? Personally, I believe that Singaporeans are not so kuai (Hokkien for obedient) as to become a Sparta. This is our saving grace. As a young senior citizen, I very much hope that Singapore will survive for a long time, but as an Athens. It is more interesting and worth living and dying for.

(05-05-2011, 11:53 AM)gutman Wrote: [ -> ][u][b]Interview with Mr Ngiam Tong Dow, former Civil Service Head, in 2003

Thanks for posting this. Ngiam Tong Dow is one of the most respected along with goh keng swee. I just hope he could contribute more by maybe running for President...alas it will never to be as he is on the other side of the river...what a pity

I'm not sure how useful it is to take a 2003 interview and try to put it into today's context.

NTD talked about LKY leaving the right legacy. I think he has done just that by stepping down as PM when he did and let GCT takes over. Of cos the cynics and the sceptics would claim he was just sweetening the ground for his son or still calling the shots in the cabinet and that it was just a farce. If he really want to cling on to power, then there was no need for him to step down when he did.

I'm not sure I agree with his analogy about Sparta and Athens but I need to mull over it a bit more. It seems a tad simplistic to me to suggest that Sparta crumpled because of well-meaning dictatorship and elitism.

I do like his comments about dancing to the tune of gorilla. Why do I get the feeling that the gorilla has grown to King Kong in the last 8 years since the interview??

(05-05-2011, 02:18 PM)lonewolf Wrote: [ -> ]I'm not sure how useful it is to take a 2003 interview and try to put it into today's context.

NTD talked about LKY leaving the right legacy. I think he has done just that by stepping down as PM when he did and let GCT takes over. Of cos the cynics and the sceptics would claim he was just sweetening the ground for his son or still calling the shots in the cabinet and that it was just a farce. If he really want to cling on to power, then there was no need for him to step down when he did.

I'm not sure I agree with his analogy about Sparta and Athens but I need to mull over it a bit more. It seems a tad simplistic to me to suggest that Sparta crumpled because of well-meaning dictatorship and elitism.

I do like his comments about dancing to the tune of gorilla. Why do I get the feeling that the gorilla has grown to King Kong in the last 8 years since the interview??

It is exactly how things have unfolded over these 8 years that we have to give it to this man, a true visionary.

I do see Elitism, Selfishness, Inflation impacting Lower and Mid incomers,threatening tone, Arrogance. This guy already sees it in 2003.
I wonder is it those talents with Moral are not willing to join their fold as they can also survive out well.

Astronomical Top Salary sure attracts people who loves money who may out compete those who are good but has lots of passion. Motivations can be very misplaced.


Cory

Mr Ngiam shared his wisdom by airing his views and he deserves be respected.
His views struck a chord with me, especially on growing our own timber and the state of our civil service.

We are in such a sorry state that we have to kowtow to angmohs to get a good paying job.
MNCs don't give a hoot about where they are located, so long as the location makes economic sense to them.
Once a major MNC relocates(usually to china/vietnam or other lower cost country, think Seagate/HP/etc), jobs will be lost, nothing we can do
will change their minds. Make no mistake about it, their aim is to make money. NOt even one of them will be rooted for good in Singapore. We need our own enterprises.

Onto civil servants, thinking they have a mandate from the emperor...Bingo.
Hired to administer the law? Or hired to be the law? You guys decide.