(as posted in reply to Mansonm at Feedback Unit on
12.4.2006)
I did not say in my previous post that the government are not
elected to represent the people so your point about government
being elected by the people to represent them are
superfluous.
The key issue I have raised include : whether it is right for the
government to pass laws to increase its ministers salaries and
bonuses or laws which have granted extensive discretions to civil
servants and judges to decide who and how much to punish people for
presumed wrongs.
In doing so, are our leaders still representing the interests of
the people.
Despite all our forumers' feedbacks with examples and facts,
leaders are so far still seen as very determined in persisting in
passing and enforcing such laws. See examples such as the
handcuffing of motorists for non-topping of his petrol tank to
three quarter mark at the causeway.
See many feedbacks regarding double-charging people on land and
triple-charging them for vehicle ownership or usage to create only
more and more surpluses only to allow them to claim superficial and
dubious success.
Many of us forumers have given many substantiated views on how the
government has under the past Goh Keng Swee doctrine consistently
pushed up their own wages thereby resulting in our whole country
suffering from high costs of living. Such assumptions seem to have
backfired for we have not succeeded in upgrading our economy to
value-adding or technology driven model nor have we succeeded in
creating better paying jobs for the people. On the other hand wages
have dropped considerably since 1970s even if the government wages
have doubled and tripled throughout this period.
Many of us have been urging the government to change such
autocratic rule and assumptions by making major changes to past
policies as posted.
Simple accounable corporate governance will tell the ministers it
is wrong to continue with NKF way of accumulating surpluses in the
face of high costs of living and our loss of competitiveness.
PM Lee should look into such feedbacks as basis of solving
problems. He could empower the younger ministers in solving
problems and not encourage them to justify old policies and pretend
they do not exist.
In particular, he should uphold the sanctity of the constitution
and not gerrymander it with GRC and electoral redrawing to gain
advantages for itself. He should see the bigger things and bigger
interests of the whole nation and not the narrow interest of his
own party succesion.
In particular he should set personal example of conducting a fair
and equitable administration of justice for all by pursuing genuine
creative and entrepreneurial technology-driven economic
restructuring to ensure our survival. The simpler solution is to
increase taxes and recover costs to the fullest will not create
jobs.
I will stop here by only touching on certain obvious and most
common problems raised by forumers here and not go on to bore you
or anyone.
What do people see of the changes made. We only see numerous
attempts to justify past policy errors with gerrymandering of one
kind or another. There is a lack of proactive or creative solutions
to problems.
Even if the whole media and TVs are presenting many good news about
job market recovering lately the fundamental problems are still not
solved and people are still suffering from unemployments and high
costs of living versus their dropping wages and property mortgage
debts.
Even if there may be first-class debates with MM Lee on TV with the
students and their constrained and controlled journalists, what
have been achieved in real terms?
Continuing gerrymandering of past policies and non-admission of the
above-stated problems is the most serious problem now facing our
whole country.
There is no more one-man-one-vote election to throw up the best of
our political talents to take up further up our sociosphere. The
whole system has been gerrymandered into a one-man-one-block system
which favour the incumbent party.
Our freedom of speech and electing the best representative from the
one-man-one-vote system has been radically altered.
Citizens may in due course lose their right even to post opinions
and views in blogs or websites may soon disappear.
So with the above-stated explanation of my various feedbacks, I
hope you will realise that it is not enough to claim that govenment
is elected by the people and thereby it can do what it likes and
claim that what it does was for the interest of the people.
What is certainly not true is the assumption the government has the
mandate to pass laws to increase its own ministers' salaries to the
highest comparable to bosses in the private sector without due
process of independent panel assessments of apple-to-apple study
and comparison and adoption of performance-assessment system.
Our autocracy is slowly becoming a farce with government even
putting up laws to increase their own salaries and bonuses.
If MM Lee or PM Lee like to debate with citizens to show his
policies are still working and relevant and not the cause of many
of our current problems, he should debate such real issues on TVs
with with some students or assembled panel of journalists who are
too constrained under the press licensing laws to give good
views.
Even if all the laws have been legally passed with due procedures
and processes, even if the leaders have been plausible in
explaining them, to the students, it remains their duties to serve
the people's interests and not the interests of their own
parties.
We can have good corporate governance only when the leaders are
able to stay accountable in passing good laws and implementing them
in the interests of the people as a whole and not of the
party.
If our leaders cannot correct their past errors, and do not admit
them as problems, they are simply not objective and creative people
to govern the country in the next election.