Farmer Brown, I'll just address your last point - I'll hop over
to your other thread to address the others.
I'm in a rather interesting position at the moment - after ten
years in Australia, I'm actually spending this year in Singapore to
attend to some family issues (along the way, I turned down a $85K
job in Oz - I'm kicking myself! :mrgreen
. My current situation makes for interesting comparisons,
not only between Singapore and Australia, but between the Singapore
of 1994 and that of 2004.
A comparison with Australia's form of government, by virtue of its
great difference to the Singaporean system, highlights a number of
interesting things about how Singapore is run.
First and foremost, there is the relationship between the
Government and the opposition. As you would be aware, the two main
political parties is Australia are the Liberals and Labour, with
smaller parties like the Democrats playing a smaller but
nonetheless significant role. Currently the Liberal are in power,
and Labour is in the opposition. Unlike Singapore, Australia has a
shadow government, which constitutes of a cabinet formed by the
opposition party. For almost everything that the government says,
the shadow government will throw its two cents in to sway the
public opinion. On top of that, each state has its own government,
and this Government may be from a different party to that of the
federal government, with its own views on how things should be
done. My first thought when I came across this ten years ago was
"How the devil does this country get anything done if there is
opposition to everything?". God only knows how they do it, but they
do manage to move along. In contrast, we have a virtually one-party
system in Singapore, where the Government makes autocratic
decisions and the people gripe about it.
Which system is more workable? There is no straight answer because
of the differences between the characteristics and circumstances of
the Singaporean and Australian populations. In particular, speaking
in relative terms, the Australian people are more prepared to think
for themselves, and are also in a better position to do so.
As Singapore Tyrannosaur stated, the PAP system worked well, and
was perhaps even necessary in the days when Singapore was
struggling to stand on its own feet. This situation has changed,
but neither the government nor the population have kept up with
these changes. That said, given the fragility of Singapores
situation as a small nation with no natural resources, the
governments approach is not entirely without its merits. There are
some days when I hear of the Australian peoples whining about
something that the government has done and I think Well, your vote
for them was your message we trust you to run things now shut
up and let them do the job. There are always going to be some
tough and unpopular decisions that a government has to make, and
this I best done without undue interference by the people.
A classic case in point is the issue of National Service. The idea
has been raised time and again in Australia, and the public outcry
has always prevented its implementation. However, all the way
through university, I used to sit back with an Australian
ex-infantryman and watch the kids in the class, and we both agreed
that some service time would knock the decadence out of these
kids.
The previous government in Melbourne made a lot of autocratic
changes to the state. I agree with the way teachers were made more
accountable for their own jobs, but cutbacks to the medical and
public transport systems were a disaster. On the other hand, the
current government has done jack squat. Overall, the effects of the
changes would have taken place faster if the governments had not
changed, and the changes to the medical and public transport
systems may have been developed to a workable point. This
highlights one key advantage of the government situation in
Singapore the government actually stays in place long enough to
do what it needs to do.
Of course, there are drawbacks to the Singaporean system, and these
have been covered in other posts already. My two cents worth of
observation is that the average Singaporean is not very politically
aware, owing to the one-party system that has existed for so long.
However, looking at snapshots of Singapore taken ten years apart,
there has been some progress in this department, albeit slow and
way too late.
One key disadvantage of the one-party system is that it has
precipitated groupthink everybody has had to toe the company
line, so inappropriate decisions have gone through unopposed. I
agree with what ST said about the government living in the past.
Back in 1994, it already occurred to me that Singapore was well on
its way to overpricing itself for manufacturing, and that it needed
to shift to the intellectual capital game. At the time, I was
already hearing stories of Indian and Thai workers getting jobs
because they could perform the same tasks as Singaporeans but at a
much lower price. Ten years later, the government is just starting
to catch up with the facts. Certainly there are likely to have been
a number of reasons for this, but groupthink prevented the
government from performing a reality check, and that is why we are
behind the game.
The government has also overestimated its position in relation to
the people. As a group, Singaporeans are ruled by the government.
However, as individuals, they have much more freedom to do as they
see fit. To entice them back into the fold, the government calls
such individuals quitters. Go figure a government saying fine
I wont play with you either, much as a five-year-old in a
playground would.
Do I support the government for what it has done for Singapore? In
a limited sense, yes. However, one needs to question what kind of
country this government has created in the process of building up
its infrastructure. Oscar Wilde once said, America is the only
country that went from barbarism to decadence without
civilization
in between, and I think the same can now be said of Singapore. In
putting out its fires, the government has now flooded Singapore
the level of control that the government needed to get Singapore up
and running is now stifling the countrys growth. It is time they
got with the program.
