Things Dr Balakrishnan
himself might want to suppress
While he attempts to discredit and
smear Dr Wijeysingha by with the accusation of hidden agendas and
motives, we would do well to remember that Dr Balakrishnan himself
has a track record which he probably would prefer voters to forget.
But let’s not. Here are some of the things that Dr Balakrishnan has
yet to answer for:
1. “Hawker centre, food court or
restaurant”?
In 2007, when Dr Lily Neo, MP for Jalan Besar GRC, asked for extra
financial assistance for the poor and needy, Dr Balakrishnan
dismissed her by saying, “How much do you want? Do you want three
meals in a hawker centre, food court or restaurant?”
This in itself is an elitist,
classist, uncaring statement. Coming from the Minister of Community
Development, Youth and Sports, whose job it is to take care of the
people Dr Neo was speaking up for, it is downright
unacceptable.
Again in response to a question
from Dr Neo this year, Dr Balakrishnan said that there was no need
for a permanent and constructive safety net for the needy in
Singapore.
2. The homeless
issue
“If you were a poor person anywhere
on this planet, Singapore is the one place where you will have a
roof over your head. Where you will have food on your table. Even
if you can’t afford it we will deliver meals on wheels to you.”
Not long after Dr Balakrishnan made
those comments, Al-Jazeera English (AJE) did this story on
homelessness in Singapore:
After this video was released, AJE
was suddenly dropped from SingTel Mio’s line-up of channels due to
a lack of viewership. Dr Balakrishnan stood up in Parliament and
not only accused AJE (and “irresponsible websites”) of not
“ascertaining the facts”, he also disclosed the featured homeless
couple’s financial details to the public (see
here). The Online Citizen later
showed that he had
presented the couple’s finances in a misleading
way. All this while the homeless couple was
STILL homeless. I wrote about this issue
here.
3. YOG, three times over
budget
Who can forget the fiasco that was the Youth Olympic Games (YOG)?
The budget ballooned to over $400 million, the volunteers got food
poisoning, the marketing was terrible, the seats were empty, the
certificates were wrongly signed and the F1 racing tickets for the
volunteers arrived only after the actual event. Although everyone
was immensely proud of the young athletes who had trained hard and
performed well, the actual management of event was labelled an
“EPIC FAIL“.
To date, there has been no
accountability of the over-spending, only flimsy justifications and
a “look, the Summer Olympics were even more expensive!”, when the
YOG was nowhere near the scale or standard of the Summer Olympics.
There has been a commemorative book of the YOG, though,
telling us how many sandwiches were
served. Because, you know, it’s much more
important to do a sandwich count than to tell Singaporeans where
their taxpayer money went.
“Rattled”?
Dr Balakrishnan’s efforts have not
been well-received by the online Singaporean community. A new
hashtag, #PAPsmear, has popped up on Twitter to refer to his cheap
shots against Dr Wijeysingha and the SDP. With any luck, the
section of the electorate who do not use social media will also see
through these fear-mongering, cowardly tactics.
Dr Balakrishnan has clearly been
spooked, or “rattled” (as Dr Wijeysingha put it), by the team that
the SDP is fielding against him. I can understand that. If I were
him, I would be looking at my own track record, then the
credentials of the SDP team, and getting very, very “rattled”
indeed.
