This is a report put together by some
members of the audience at Friday (Political Dialogue @NUSS)’s
forum who wish to remain anonymous.
Last Friday we joined a happy and well behaved crowd at a
lively debate organised By NUSS as guest of the Reform party
The debate titled, Fresh Challenges & The New Political Playing
Field was debated by representatives from The PAP, WP, SDA, SDP and
an NMP. Despite being open only to NUS alumni members and invited
guests the auditorium was packed as we joined the 400 strong crowd
in the audience. What a great night we had. Truly
awesome.
The speakers spoke in alphabetical order starting with an NMP Mr
Calvin Cheng who spoke about the changing demographic brought about
by young voters and this internet generation. Interestingly Kenneth
Jeyartenam later also spoke about this, bringing up the statistics
for first time voters and those under 35 this coming GE.
Whereas RP believes that will bring a new aspect to this
election as that generation are not easily hoodwinked
the NMP was of the opinion that they aren’t interested in
bread and butter issues and furthermore there isn’t any new playing
field.
Next MP Chris De Souza spoke for the PAP waxing lyrical about
all the marvellous new highways byways and hospitals that the PAP
has built or is planning. He also demonstrated with slides and
statistics how Singapore has recovered from the economic crisis of
2008 whilst those poor lesser nations such as America were still
languishing. There was no mention of lift upgrading
projects.
Dr Chee Soon Juan spoke for the SDP, focusing on their
alternative economic plan for increased egalitarianism . He
gave a good talk as usual, evoking all the right emotions in his
audience. His talk on the SDP manifesto was well received by the
audience and whetted our appetite to see the full version in
print.
Mrs Lina Chiam spoke for the SDA. in her first public debate.
She started off hesitantly but spoke well in a down to earth way
that the audience clearly connected with. She is to be admired for
standing and not taking the easy life and this is in itself an
indication of how robust the desire for plural democracy is in
Singapore. It also bodes well for the democratic process
within the opposition that they forwarded two Women speakers. The
PAP we note, has only one woman minister after 50 years in
government. Mrs Chiam threw light on her experience of the
political playing field and the challenges facing the opposition
gleaned from supporting her husband MP, Mr Chiam See Tong.
Ms Sylvia Lim, NCMP, spoke for the WP. She focused on the
tilted playing field manufactured by the PAP and the need for an
alternate voice in parliament. Amongst ourselves we felt this
the same as asking for more NMPs and a rather disappointing
argument for a party which is a veteran of so many campaigns.
There is no denying that she spoke well and smoothly, as
befits her experience as the Grand Dame of the opposition.
Kenneth Jeyaretnam spoke for the Reform Party. His
speech can be found at:
http://votingrp.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/fresh-challenges-and-the-new-political-playing-field/
He started by demonstrating how dysfunctional the political
system is and therefore how skewed the political playing
field. He went on to talk about the challenges. In
complete reverse to the PAP speaker he felt that the playing field
had changed whilst the challenges remained the same although
worsened. His main thesis for a changed playing field was his
experience that Opposition are beginning to move towards a
manifesto based campaign style rather than a personality based one
and that clear divisions can start to be seen between socialist
agenda parties and the RP which has a liberal free market policy.
He used the analogy that Singapore is often likened to a
corporation but showed us how run by the PAP it is the worst
type of corporation with no management accountability that dilutes
its shareholders just as PAP increases our population. He said
immigration was a hot button issue but wouldn’t be hot enough to
burn if we had an accountable and responsive government. In the Q
& A session Calvin Cheng wrongly referred to the RP as
Libertarian and Kenneth quickly corrected him, briefly explaining
the difference between Liberal and Libertarian and RP policies
which make it at odds with a libertarian stance.
The Q&A session kicked off with;
“Would the PAP would consider reforming the
political system so as to encourage more seats to be contested and
for more Opposition MPs to be elected to Parliament?”
Chris de Souza answered first and proceeded to speak for so long
that we thought the Q&A would be over before anyone else got to
speak! Finally someone stood up and actually asked the moderator to
get him to sit down! Despite speaking for so long he added
nothing new. He pointed out how kind the PAP had been to
allow alternative “voices” into Parliament in the form of NCMP
scheme even though these were all candidates who were technically
losers. (Mr de Souza, one of the MPs in the Bukit Timah-Holland GRC
got into Parliament last GE through a walkover and therefore didn’t
lose a single vote.) Sylvia Lim said that she had
spoken in Parliament about how the PAP had introduced further
antidemocratic “safeguards” whose aim was to make life difficult
for an Opposition government should one come to power. These
included an ostensibly “elected” president (but only candidates
vetted by a government committee would be allowed to run).
Kenneth pointed out that the system had been engineered to
distort the will of the electorate as elaborated in his speech.
Minimum Wage Policy
There were quite a few questioners asking about the minimum wage
policy. Chris de Souza tried to make some issue over whether
minimum wage would apply to Singaporeans uniquely or both
Singaporeans and foreign workers. He repeated the old arguments
that it would create unemployment.
KJ spoke up for RP’s Minimum wage policy proposal saying it was
necessary to stop the wages for low-skilled workers being driven
down to the lowest levels in Asia. In response to the PAP’s
argument about unemployment he said that the RP wanted to build a
high-wage high-productivity economy, one like Switzerland rather
than just pay lip-service to this as SM Goh did some years back
when he talked about Singaporeans attaining a Swiss standard of
living. If we lost those low wage, low value-added jobs
that were largely done by foreigners to neighbouring countries he
added, then so be it! As an interesting side note for historians:
Dr Chee said that the SDP had been the first party to propose a
Minmum Wage policy but Kenneth informed us that in the 1980’s
he used to write the economic policy for his father and
remembered being asked to write an article for the Hammer on
Minimum Wage. People often criticised JBJ for being too
focussed on Human rights and not on bread and butter issues and so
it is fascinating to see that he had a handle on minimum wage
policy even back then.
Opposition Unity
Other questions touched on why the Opposition could not unite to
fight the next GE. KJ said that these continual calls for
Opposition unity were misplaced as one could not expect parties
with very different ideologies to unite. In his opinion the
political playing field was changing and it was becoming
increasingly manifesto based. Sylvia also agreed that it was
difficult to ask parties with different agendas to Unite. KJ felt
that calls for unity were designed to make the electorate think
that the parties were all the same and therefore interchangeable.
This would allow PAP to tar them all with the same brush and
obscure the Reform Party’s radically different message of manifesto
and policy-based politics.
A young woman in the audience said that her Social Science
textbook failed to contain any information about Opposition
parties. This caused a lot of merriment in the audience. She
asked where she could get information on them and KJ pointed her to
RP’s strong and growing online presence and listed our website, the
VotingRp blog, our FB pages and our Twitter account as places she
could go to for information.
At one point Chris de Souza tried to bring out that old chestnut
again, that only the PAP had the competence and
the policy experience to govern. Kenneth shot back
immediately with, “that is what the Civil Service is for.” He
added that RP possessed no inferiority complex about the quality of
our first slate of candidates and the intellectual foundations of
our policies and manifesto which were superior to the PAP’s.
Freak election result
Towards the end Dr. Wong Wee Nam asked what would happen in the
event of a hung Parliament. Kenneth replied that he saw no
reason to think that the Opposition parties would be unable to
cooperate and form a government and pointed out the UK precedent
where the Conservatives and Lib-Dem Parties, despite being sworn
enemies before the election, had united to form a coalition
government. Also the Malaysian Opposition parties had shown they
could work together effectively despite vastly different
ideologies.
The debate couldn’t have ended better for the Reform Party as
Chris de Souza jumped in at that point.
Christopher de Souza:” It would be a sad day for
Singapore if a freak result happens.”
Kenneth Jeyaretnam: “How could it be a freak result if
it is the will of the people?”
This was met with a round of wild clapping and cheering and on
that note the Q&A ended.
.
John & Jane Doe