Today’s (21 January 2011) Straits Times headlines “Will PAP
last?”. This is how MM Lee sees it:
” If the decline in standards happens gradually, an
opposition of quality will be launched. The public can sense it.” –
MM Lee
He does not see a problem for the PAP in the next 10 or 20
years. The issue for voters, as he frames it, is the quality and
talent of men the PAP is able to recruit. …so PAP will stay in
power as long as it has top talents and does not split up. I don’t
believe this is true and I’ll tell you why.
Warren Buffett once said that if people are not doing what you
want them to do, you do not want them to be motivated or highly
talented, you rather have them lazy, incompetent and unmotivated.
Do you want leaders who are highly talented at making you cheaper,
better and faster? …highly talented and motivated at increasing the
influx of foreigners…highly talented at finding ways like
increasing the GST to increase the govt surplus. What is more
important to voters is whether their interests will be served by
the men they vote into parliament. The video clip in the previous
posting, shows RP’s Tony Tan explaining the issue is not whether
the PAP can design and implement policies as they have the
competence to do that. The real issue is the intent behind
the policies. Even if the PAP remains as competent and qualified as
it has been, once people believe they are not acting in their best
interests, the PAP will be voted out.
In past few years, much of the trust people have for the PAP has
been eroded….I’ll take you through a number of examples and after
that reveal another reason why the PAP is in a more precarious
position that most people think in the coming elections.
Just after the last elections, the PAP govt raised the GST from
5% to 7%. GST is a regressive tax that hurts the poor much more
that the rich. The poor have to spend a greater portion of their
income on living expenses than the richer folks. In order to get
the people to accept the GST hike, the govt told ordinary citizens
that the primary intent behind the hikes was to help the old and
poor[Read the budget FAQ
here]. Many would accept the hikes if the poor people were
helped. However, most Singaporeans know from the past that GST
hikes were usually done to make up for shortfall in the corporate
tax cuts. For example in the 2003 budget when GST was hiked:
“4.3 From YA 2003, I have decided to cut the corporate
income tax rate from 24.5% to 22%. This 10% reduction will save
businesses $700 million a year.
4.4 Also
with effect from YA 2003, the top marginal personal income tax rate
will be cut from 26% to 22%, with corresponding cuts in all income
bands. This will reduce the tax payable by most taxpayers by 13% to
16%, saving them $620 million every year.
4.5 I have decided to raise the GST rate from 3% to 5% from 1
Jan 2003. The increase in GST is expected to raise an additional
$1.3 billion of tax revenue per year. ” – Lee Hsien Loong,
Singapore Budget Speech 2003[Link]
In 2007, the corporate tax which was among the lowest in the
world was cut from 20% to 18% [Link]and most
Singaporeans who understood the real intent of the GST hike were
outraged because it was done at a time when Singapore had the
biggest income gap among developed countries and corporate profits
as a % of GDP was at record levels. Knowing that the GST hike for
the purpose of corporate tax cuts would be unpopular, the PAP tried
to get the people accept it by saying it was done to help the poor
i.e. they tried to hide the true intent of the policy. They used to
be able to do this in the past when they controlled the media fully
but today with the Internet, it is no longer possible for them to
deceive ordinary citizens. I’ll give you another example before I
tell you how the PAP will lose its power.
In 2009, the PAP govt push ahead to implement CPF Life by
amending the CPF Act. The rationale given was that Singaporeans are
living longer and so on – I’m sure you’re familiar with those
arguments. CPF as a retirement fund is a already very strained
after all the liberalisation for investment, children’s education
and the purchase of HDB flats[51% of
Singaporeans cannot meet minimum sum]. During the CPF Life
debate, MP Low Thia Khiang came out with a suggestion which many if
not most Singaporeans would find reasonable. His suggestion was
that since Singaporeans already take most, if not all, the
responsibility of retirement, the govt should create a fund to take
care of tail end ‘extra longevity’ the govt project Singaporeans
will have and do away with more complexity, confusion and further
straining of the CPF scheme. It is a policy alternative the PAP
will never consider because they will not create a fund for the old
using taxes when they use the money to lower taxes for the rich and
corporate tax cuts. They would rather pass the burden to ordinary
Singaporeans because that is ideologically attractive to them.
However, the idea from Worker’s Party hardly leans to the left of
the political spectrum. Most countries take care of some, half or
all of the citizens’ retirement needs – and most, if not all, do
not have the vast resources in the form of sovereign wealth funds
and govt surpluses. Yet at a time when many Singaporeans’ ability
to retire properly is affected by the severe income gap and rising
cost of living, the PAP increased their burden and responsibility
when so many other workable policy alternatives exist. The PAP
cannot implement minimum wage when all other deveolop countries
can. We don’t have universal healthcare (some Singaporeans have to
go to Malaysia for healthcare[Link])
when it exists in all developed countries. We have the biggest wage
gap and a 3rd world wage structure. For this system that gives them
little in the way of safety nets, Singaporeans are asked for huge
sacrifices e.g. longest conscription in the form of NS after Israel
and reservist duties.
To answer the question of “how long will the PAP last”, the
question we have to ask ourselves how did the PAP last so long
given the harshness of its policies and system.
People when given a free choice anywhere else in the world will
rarely choose a govt like the PAP.- it is so far right on the
political spectrum as reflected in its policies. Nowhere else among
developed countries do people choose this type of govt and keep
them in power when they have a choice. Occasionally they do vote
them in for short periods when there is a treat of war or when the
economic conditions are extreme but vote them out when conditions
improve. The PAP lasted for several reasons. In the earlier years
1960s-1980s, the PAP was actually very popular due to the one-off
rapid economic transformation.
Once the rapid economic transformation was over, people naturally
wanted an alternative and the PAP’s votes started declining.
However, to maintain power, the PAP 1. controlled the media and
limited the freedom of people to speak up 2. repressed of the
opposition 3. modified the one man one vote system with GRCs and
linking votes to upgrading. The control of the media is necessary
to hide the intent of policies, make alternative approahces look
unattractive and spread its propaganda. Control of the media alone
is insufficient and so they repress the opposition to generate a
climate of fear to make it hard for a strong alternatives to
emerge. Even with these in place, the PAP is unable to halt the
decline in support. For increasingly large number of Singaporeans,
their support goes to”anyone but the PAP”….they don’t need the
opposition to have higher paper qualification or successful
corporate careers but are willing to accept someone who will look
out for their interests…… something Singaporeans cannot trust the
PAP MPs to do anymore – their goal is the development of Singapore
Inc not improving the lives of ordinary Singaporeans and in many
areas this goal is divergent from the interests and needs of
ordinary Singaporeans.
How long the PAP lasts depends on how fast they can change and
move away from their ideology relative to the erosion of their
ability to control information & spread propaganda and repress
the opposition. The last 4 years has actually been a lost
opportunity for the PAP govt. When Lee Hsien Loong took over from
SM Goh, a carrot of change was dangled in front of Singaporeans. In
2004-2006 PM Lee spoke often about change & “remaking of
Singapore” raising hope and expectations just as Badawi did in
Malaysia when he took over from Dr. M – in 2004, Badawi’s National
Front actually collected 64% of the nation-wide vote comparable Lee
Hsien Loong’s 66%. 4 years after the elections, Singaporeans
discover not much has change – change, if any, was in the direction
they did not want – hike in GST, hike in Minister’s pay, means
testing for the sick, CPF Life, increase foreign influx, rising
cost of living etc. Not only did the PAP fail to remake itself when
it needed to, MM Lee came out to remind us how unchangeable the PAP
is with his book on “hard truths”.
.
“You have to die for each other” – MM Lee.[Link]
.
A blogger on the Internet pointed out that it is rather
melodramatic and ridiculous for the MM to ask ordinary Singaporeans
to sacrifice their lives for each other when he can’t even get his
ministers to accept anything lower than the highest pay for leaders
in the world.
“We are a nation in the making. Will we make it? Am I certain
we’ll get there? No, I cannot say that….I do not deceive myself for
one moment that our differences of race, culture and religion will
disappear” – MM Lee.
The MM Lee talks about the importance of nationhood and how hard
it is to make Singapore into a nation from diverse groups of
people…yet is it not the goal of the PAP to import people to grow
the population? It is hard for locally born Singaporeans to bond
with each other because of cultural differences but integrating
hundreds of thousands of immigrants whose numbers will soon surpass
that of locally born Singaporeans in a few years is okay?
“…successful transformation from a tiny fishing village to
one of Asia’s — if not the world’s — most modern cities…” –
[Link]
Don’t you find it strange and insulting that Straits Times
reporters write about Singapore being a tiny fishing village before
the PAP was in charge of the place? Our forefathers came all the
way from China and India braving the dangerous voyage to look for
opportunities in a “tiny fishing village”? There are no tiny
fishing villages in China and India? Our forefathers had no brains?
Just one example of the “truth” they are trying to spread with this
new book…the real truth about Singapore in the 1950s before the PAP
is found
here.
The book is 450 pages thick…..based on the extracts I’ve read,
it will impress only those who have lost the ability to think.
Along with the myths about the PAP leadership that they want to
perpetuate and the justification (more like excuses) for every
wrong that the man has been done…(bankrupting and jailing opponents
simply because he felt they were ‘duds’) is this distorted view
that Singapore’s success is due primarily to the PAP. Today
economic miracles are not so rare among East Asian countries e.g.
Taiwan, S. Korea, Japan. Taiwan & S. Korea succeeded under
authoritarian govts and continued to thrive after they became full
blown democracies debunking the myth they could succeed only under
strong dominant one party leadership. The book Hard Truths tries to
pay up the myth that Singapore has succeeded because of a small
group of elites and ideas of one man. In doing so, they tried to
washed away the contributions of millions of ordinary citizens who
formed the number 1 workforce in the world for many decades – a
hardworking workforce that never went on strike, a workforce that
accepted low pay, little benefits and long hours. This collection
of myths released just before elections are held is a feeble
attempt to persuade Singaporeans to continue supporting the man and
his ideas….. the longer the PAP cling on to these so-called
‘hard-truths’, the faster it will be voted out….because a growing
number of Singaporeans can see through the propaganda and know what
needs to be done to have a better future for themselves and their
families.
.
Lucky Tan
* Lucky Tan is a popular Singaporean blogger who likes to
“study the thoughts of Singapore leaders and the laws of
Singapore”. His blog is located at
http://singaporemind.blogspot.com.