http://forums.delphiforums.com/3in1kopitiam/messages?gclid=CPKp083N-5YCFRcJbwodw1ksZw
Are you paying
attention LKY?
Right, I'll begin
then...
by Neo Yu
Wei on Sunday, 24 April 2011 at 22:14
You guys were once my heroes. When I was young, I was so proud
that I had a government that was indeed one of the world's best, if
not, THE BEST. Although LKY was (and still is) portrayed as a
fearsome, if ruthless leader, he was much respected. When he
appeared as our PM on the world stage, my heart never failed to
swell with pride because it was obvious that he was also someone
other world leaders respected.
But not now. The problem is, you are victims of your own
success. And the world has changed,
yet you remain stuck in the 1960s. This is why your
once-fantastic branding is being eroded, why I find it hard to
support you like before.
1) You were too successful
First, there was LKY and he was a great leader. He was like a god and [is] still being treated
like one. He "miraculously" transformed a small, poor,
resource-less little island into a country that now has one of the
highest GDPs in the world, where other countries are now trying to
learn from. No one can take that achievement away from the first
PAP team and indeed, I would guess that this is also the main
reason why many in the older generation are still your loyal fans.
I may not agree to all the strategies you've used then (and some
were downright questionable) but I can't deny that you had some
very good reasons to do so.
But unfortunately, when you've set the standard of governance so
high, every other subsequent PAP team that comes along can only
look worse and worse. And it doesn't help that you constantly try
too hard to be perfect. The higher the bar is set, the more
difficult it is for the PAP teams that come after to match
it.
In a way, I think LKY only does his own team a great disservice by
publishing so many personal memoirs, recounting again and again how
good he was. Because the more god-like he is, the more voters like
me will wonder, how can we ever have another "god" like him to lead
us? And the answers you propose will always be a disappointment.
Because, against a god, everyone will look like a mere mortal.
Didn't anyone tell you that you can't replicate a god using your
same old cookie-cutter?!! Great leaders are first of all rebels,
don't you know (and LKY was one too!)?
2) You were too smart for your own good
No one can or has been able to rival you in terms of your
(mostly) rational and well-thought through, sound policies.
Especially in terms of our economic policies. You're so darn good
with your cost-benefit analyses, your economic forecasts, your
financial planning. Every policy you rolled out is justified using
very rational arguments that the opposition and the public find
hard to counter argue. You are top-notch, because you have a very
brainy team, all with impeccable qualifications from world renowned
universities.
Unfortunately, this made you
assume that only you have the brains and everyone else is just an
idiot who needs only to listen and obey. The game of
politics cannot be played by cold logic alone. And it certainly
can't be won by treating your voters as morons.
An example of this would be the issue of bringing in the
IRs. Yes, your cold, rational argument makes very good economic
reasons for having casinos in Singapore. No one can argue against
that. But not everything can or should be measured by dollars and
cents or by the amount of GDP it will generate for Sg. We're no
longer the generation in the 1960s that constantly had to worry
about money or material matters.
We've moved up the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In fact, most
Singaporeans work ridiculously long hours, are constantly too
stressed to even go on dates or have sex (hence the low marriage
and fertility rate) that we're all very very disillusioned with the
constant drive for wealth. Increasingly, we want to slow down, have
time to smell the flowers and be with our families.
And having casinos that will bring in more crime (organised ones
too), encourage more addictive behaviour and increase broken
families will not sit well with a population who now values quality
of life rather than personal wealth. Yet, you bulldozed these
concerns and won yet again with your cold, rational, economic
arguments because there wasn't enough opposition in the parliament
to stop you.
While people may buy into the cold logic of your policies
now, your lack of empathy and human touch are
slowly alienating voters. The breaking point may not
be now, but you can be sure that the disconnection is getting wider
by the day. It's a time-bomb that will go off at some point.
3) You forgot evolutionary laws, history and your own
past
While you're very brainy, you're mostly all technocrats and
specialists. You've scorned the social sciences and the humanities,
you think these are only for sissy people whose A Levels don't
qualify them for specialist degrees. Yet, if you had been more
well-informed in these areas, you might have learnt some valuable
lessons about power. History, for example, is the best teacher that
could have taught you that power never ever ever ever lasts
forever. Indeed, the more you try to hang on to it, the more it
will invite adversity.
History would also have taught you that every regime was once in
opposition. As Marx could have told you, the history of mankind is
all about class (or power) struggles. You may be in power now, but one day you'll be
overthrown. However, you have hope of leaving your great
legacy behind if you take a leaf from the pages of human evolution,
which would have taught you that it's human diversity that has
helped the human race to overcome the odds, to survive this
long.
But instead of embracing diversity, you tried your hardest to
kill off any form of alternative views, whether these come from
within your party or externally. You only wanted to hear your own
voice or voices that are exactly the same as yours. This inbreeding
will eventually be your demise. Most of all, you forgot your own
roots, where you were once an opposition party too. You focused so
much on hanging on to your power, you forgot your original vision,
you forgot your voters and you forgot
why you are governing Singapore.
4) Power breeds fear and paranoia
In the beginning, you used power in order to stabilise the
political situation so that you can give the masses homes, food,
clean water and their livelihoods. That seemed a justifiable use of
power even though it involved some ruthless and ugly tactics. But
over the years, you started to crave
power for itself.
Again, you forgot the story of Macbeth (see, I told you the
humanities are important!!) - where an originally good leader was
so obsessed with his new power that he saw everything as a threat
towards it. He became so paranoid that he even killed his best
friend whom he thought was after his throne. He only heard what he
wanted to hear from dubious soothsayers (which turned out to be
half-truths). Needless to say, Macbeth eventually had a tragic
end.
Like Macbeth, you've become so obsessed with winning
overwhelmingly in every GE that you use every weapon you have,
every trick up your sleeves to clobber the opposition to
smithereens. Smear campaigns, legal suits, changing electoral
boundaries, raising the cost of candidature, forming GRCs,
threatening the electorate with upgrading...it's like watching the
Brazilian football team beat the Singapore team by 82-2, except in
football the rules are fairer and the referee neutral. Why do you need to resort to such gangster-like
ways? You could have won overwhelmingly anyway with all the
talent you have! I'm not sure how long this bullying strategy can
go on but sooner or later you'll become the thug that the
electorate can't wait to get rid of.
5) Power corrupts absolutely
Power is not power without money. And in this aspect you've
outdone yourselves by pegging your salaries to the private sector.
You're the highest paid politicians in the world and your income is
>40 times that of the median income of the general population
(only less than Kenya). Of course, you justify it with yet another
one of your cold, rational arguments of attracting and retaining
the best talents in the government. But seriously, how can you
compare public sector salaries to the private sector? In fact, many
of your candidates have never worked in the private sector before
and one wonders if they'll survive even for a day in a private
company.
Yet, they are paid private sector salaries, paid not from
profits but from taxpayers' money. And though I fully agree that
politicians must be paid their worth, don't you think getting 40x the median income is
crossing into the lines of corruption? Ok, even if all our
Ministers and PM are worth every cent of their $4m annual salary,
it also means that they have to perform much much much better than
any other government in the world.
Again, you have set the standards and expectations so high, you
only have yourselves to blame when you cannot meet those
expectations from the ground. And the more you fail to meet their
expectations, the more the electorate will think you're not worth
your astronomical salaries. It's a vicious cycle that you've
started and it's going to be very hard to stop now.
You talk about the so-called "crutch-mentality" of the
poor, yet this same mentality can be applied on yourselves. When
you've used money as the main means to attract people into your
party, you've basically recruited people who value money above
serving the country in the people's interest. These politicians who
are in it for the money will not have the incentive to think
independently or to represent the people's interests because
they've got millions to lose if they don't toe party lines. Because
they're paid millions, what incentives do they have to empathize
with someone struggling with 2 jobs to make ends meet? Very soon, the voters will feel that you're just
a bunch of corrupt officials, no different from those in many
3rd-world countries.
The way I see it, you only have yourselves to blame for
this situation you're in. The only way you can somehow reverse
these trends is to learn from Madonna (see, you never thought
popular culture could teach you anything right?). She keeps herself
relevant not by sticking to the same old formula again and again.
That would have killed her career long ago as it did to countless
of other pop stars. Rather, she keeps re-inventing herself and her
image to keep them relevant to the current times. And she pushes
the boundaries. She's always ahead of her time and like a true
leader, she sets the trends not follow them. She's a rebel.
Yet, all you have done is to remain exactly the same as you were
in 1960s. The electorate is increasingly tired of your same old
scare tactics using HDB upgrading as a stick, tired of you saying
that Singapore will go to ruins if the opposition wins, tired of
you always using smear campaigns against opposition candidates,
tired of your arrogance and lack of empathy, tired of you giving
out inconsequential hongbaos before elections only to increase your
own salaries by millions after.
You keep encouraging us to think out-of-the-box, yet you're
perpetually stuck in the same adversarial mindset towards the
opposition. If you can only start to think of your relationship
with the opposition as a mutual symbiosis - you share a portion of
power with them in return for your longevity and credibility. Power
is always temporary, but your legacy needn't be.
Just look at the current Conservative Party of UK which traces
its roots back to the Tory Party in 1678. Do you think they could
have survived this long without any meaningful opposition, no
defeats, no radical internal reforms? Are you so politically
shortsighted that you can only see your future in the next 10, 20
or 50 years?
C'mon, think further!! And didn't anyone tell you that in other
to be the best, you need to have competition? Otherwise, how can
the electorate be sure that you're indeed the best, if they can't
compare you to any other party?
I'm no military strategist, but I do think that sometimes, you
need to lose some battles first in order to win bigger battles
later. It will not be a bad thing for you to lose a few GRCs in
this GE. In fact, if I were you, I will be celebrating. Because
nothing gets people going like failure.
Rather lose some small battles now than to wait for the big bomb
to explode later. By then, not only will you disappear into the
dust heap of history, so too will Singapore. That will be your ultimate betrayal to this
country that you so painstakingly and successfully created
out of a little red dot on the map.
LKY is telling Disney bedtime stories to those who want to
listen.
He misses his late wife too much.
