Before election, ministers pretended not to talk about
ministers' intention to increase their own salaries and getting
more free lunches.
The ministers must have thought about it and decided that once they
are elected and with power in hand, they can take any amount of
salaries as afterthought and no one can stop them even with
wrongful benchmarking with lottery winners in the private
sector.
So even if there is no such thing as free lunch as Mah Bow Tan
always said to HDB flat buyers he could get free lunches - it is a
matter of getting them after election when with power in hand there
will be no one able to object to such free lunches.
Remember he has got free lunches too when HDB acquired the lands
using the people taxations to do so and yet he could sell the HDB
flats at market prices less a bit of discount when lands were
obtained free from acquisitions and URA already makes big bundles
out of these free lands.