CHANGES TO THE POLITICAL SYSTEM - PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 2016 January

The one thing that stood out in yesterday's Presidential Address was the remarks about possible changes to Singapore's political system.

As I have argued before, whilst the PAP still has its 2/3 majority, it needs to implement constitutional changes to safeguard the future of Singapore, and ensure we avoid the degeneration that Western political systems (and those who have adopted them) have seen.

Our own system is also largely based on the Westminster system, although we have important aspects that now differ. For example, LKY changed our system to prevent elected members from changing parties and still retaining their seats. More now needs to be done to ensure that we improve on our system even more to ensure the stability of our system.

Some changes I would like to see:

1) Elected Presidency - As I have argued, the elected presidency has become a proxy for partisan politics. Short of scrapping it, at the very least the bar needs to be raised to prevent unqualified populists from degrading the office of the Presidency.

2) Upper House? - Some academics have suggested an Upper House. I think this may be an overkill for a small country like Singapore. It is however worth discussing.

I think better to more deeply entrench the NMP system by increasing the numbers and making their term the same as elected MPs, instead of the half-terms currently. NMPs of the second session always see their terms cut short. The last cohort only served for a year as elections were called early.

Both an Upper House and the NMP scheme functions on the same principle - non-elected voices are needed to check populism and politicking amongst professional politicians.

As lessons from the West has shown, countries with unelected legislators like the UK are less likely to go down the populist route as it acts as a brake on demagoguery.

3) Age of Voting - I would like to see the age of voting increased to 25.

I believe that older citizens are more likely to have an economic stake in the future of the country. It is also with age that experience tempers the naive idealism of youth.

The Scottish National Party for example has proposed a lowering of voting age to 16 in the same vein of reasoning. They cynically believed that young kids with fanciful dreams and a tenuous grasp on reality was more likely to vote for an Independent Scotland, even if that dooms the country to financial ruin. The grassroots movements for Independence were mostly run by kids.

The kids in HK who took to the streets in Occupy Central are another example of youthful idealism gone wrong.

4) President Tan specifically mentioned that our system prevents narrow minority interests from gaining a foothold in our legislature.

This is why also the supporters of these interests have always clamoured for Proportional Representation.

In a country like Singapore where race and religion are important, PR would be a recipe for disunity.

Western-puppets in Singapore have also been pushing their rights-based agendas lately. Social media has amplified their voices, but fortunately they are still in the minority. We need to make sure they will always be.

PR and any form of PR should be constitutionally excluded permanently in Singapore.

CONCLUSION

Singapore has done well partly because our Founding Fathers were willing to move beyond the political system we inherited from the British. The West tries to propagate the lie that their political systems are universal truths that 'less developed' nations must adopt. This has been proven false in recent years. In order to safeguard our future, we must not trod down the same paths they have taken.

Most importantly, we need stability in order to constantly improve the lives of the people. Bread and Butter issues must ALWAYS come first. Not hifalutin ideals.

Final Thoughts On My Post on ISIS

This will be my final thoughts on the 'killing children of terrorists' matter and then I will let the matter rest.

It is ironic that when I decided that I would slow down posting about Singapore and Singaporean affairs that I would present an opportunity for the usual gang of TOC, TRE and individuals like Kirsten Han, Andrew Loh etc to attack me.

When I posted on Devadas's page, I had just read an article on CNN about ISIS grooming a whole generation of children as terrorists. I started with a provocative comment, hoping to tease out a philosophical discussion about the killing of children (and women) terrorists, a moral issue that we find hard to deal with. Some Republican presidential candidates for example  have asserted that the US has more of a chance to win the war against ISIS if they dropped their zero collateral damage policy. I also blogged about it here : http://beyondtheemotive.blogspot.sg/2015/11/killing-children.html

But before I could wait for the responses and start the debate, Kirsten Han screencapped my initial comment and shared it. Over the next few days, there was a concerted campaign to have me removed from the MLC. Kirsten posted about this, and her colleague Jolene Tan and her friends kept writing to the MLC Chairman to lodge complaints. So did Andrew Loh, the founder of TOC.

They all accused me of hate speech.

To cut a long story short, the MLC agreed with me that I did not engage in hate speech, but that as an MLC member I must practice higher standards of sensitivity than private citizens. I should not have started off with that comment and opened myself up for attack by people waiting for the opportunity to do me in.

I agree.

It is indeed ironic that I presented this opportunity on a non Singapore politics-related affair, when I have been taking this group on politically for the last 5 years.

But such is life.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to my fellow MLC members, the MDA and my supporters for not having been more careful as a public figure who has made many enemies online in these 5 years.

We all live and learn, and this has also been a learning episode for me.

Killing Children

Killing Children

That’s as stark as a title gets.

A few days ago, I wrote on a thread about liberalism and security that Devadas Krishnadas started on his page. He asked provocatively  “Where have all the liberals gone?”. A few liberals, including the Singapore Democratic Party-linked ` journalist’ Kirsten Han went to his page and started talking about amongst other things, the death penalty.

I waded in and said, “The terrorists are not common criminals, it's not about crime punishment and deterrence. They are a mortal enemy intent on killing and destroying. So you kill them before they kill you. And their children too in case they grow up to take revenge. It's as simple as that. Please don't complicate matters.”

People familiar with the discussions I start on Facebook, especially when I see a more intellectual demographic (which Devadas’s readers are), would know that often I would lead with a seemingly provocative and outrageous statement, that on cooler analysis, actually represents a deeper argument that is founded on logic, if sometimes uncomfortable logic.

This is one time. 

I went on to explain what I meant, but not before Kirsten Han reacted by screenshotting my comment and pasted it on her facebook.

This has I am told, led to outrage in some quarters – funnily enough, although it has been shared, it did not appear on my newsfeed and a grand total of 3 of my personal friends, out of the thousands I have on my personal account, asked me what it was about.

Shows how social media functions in echo chambers.

However, for those interested, here is a re-hash and an elaboration of the things I then PROCEEDED to say after Kirsten Han screenshot the comment.

Firstly, on the issue of killing children per se, one may react to it with revulsion but it is a complex moral question. A moral absolutist may say one may not kill children ever, just as moral absolutists believe that even the State should not take lives through capital punishment since killing is wrong, but this is not a moral stance that would hold water with everyone.

Take self-defense. If a child is holding a rifle and is about to shoot at you, do you have the right to kill him?

Most would.

A more morally complex issue is enemies using children as shields – this is a real issue faced by the Israelis in their conflict with the Palestinians, and an issue now with ISIS.

And this brings us to the current problem of ISIS grooming their children (as well as the children living in their ‘state’), as combatants. 

CNN has covered this extensively.

See this article especially, which calls them ‘cubs of the Caliphate’ - 

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/20/middleeast/isis-child-soldiers/

From the standpoint of self-defense, I think few would argue that one does nothing when confronted with children (and women) trained and intent to kill.

This already moves the majority away from the morally absolute belief that one should never kill children.

However, the problem is even more complex than that, and asks even more uncomfortable moral questions.

An analyst in the article above notes “The war won't end as quickly if ISIS can readily replace its fallen soldiers with brainwashed children “. "It will be a matter of generations," he said of how using child soldiers will affect the Middle East. "It will take maybe 20 years, 30 years. It's a long, long process and it's very dangerous."

This is important. An entire generation of children under ISIS including their own, have been ‘brainwashed’ to see anyone not subscribing to their ideology as enemies, and should be killed.  They fight like adults and replace the adults when they are KIA.  This leads to a 20 to 30 year problem, especially since “It takes a significant amount of time and money to rehabilitate child soldiers, experts say”.

Moral absolutism and rights are not the only moral paradigms available to us. 

Moral absolutism, as I have argued, is untenable for most people, who would claim a moral right of self -defense when faced with an armed child intent on killing.

There is however another familiar moral theory many of our laws are based on: Utilitarianism. It says that the morally right outcome is the one that maximizes the welfare of everyone. 

A thought experiment that students of philosophy are often asked to think about is this:  imagine you are stuck in a cave with 50 other people. The only entrance is blocked because a fat man who tried to climb out is stuck in it. You are quickly running out of air. The only way to escape is to blow up the fat man to clear the entrance. Kill one person to save 50 including yourself. Would you do it?

Many of modern society’s laws are already utilitarian. This is no surprise as it is one of the oldest moral creeds.

Therefore, given a problem of a whole generation of children that are already trained to kill, and given that rehabilitation is difficult, and given that this will lead to 20 to 30 years more of strife and suffering for many, many more human beings, what is the utilitarian thing to do?

Kill some to save many?

Would you do it?

That’s my point. 

So rather than accusing me of all sorts of wicked and evil things, perhaps it is better for us all to think properly about this complex and real issue.

Your conclusion may well be uncomfortable even to you.

An Act of War

President Hollande has finally called the Paris attacks what they really are - an act of war.

It is inane to characterise these and similar attacks as mere acts of terror or the acts of religious extremists. ISIS has grown into a state that both operates within a physical, geographical domain in the Middle East, but also through the aid of the internet, a warped Caliphate whose tentacles reach around the world.

We should not dismiss ISIS as a mere terrorist organisation.

Whilst it may be comforting to paint this war in purely Manichean terms - ISIS is evil and thus its enemy must be good - like in all wars, things are rarely morally black and white. 

The US, Europe and their allies have been in denial that their foreign policy in the Middle East have spun out of control. Aiding and abetting the destabilisation of the Middle East during the ‘Arab Spring’, the invasion of Iraq, and the toppling of the Middle Eastern strongmen they called dictators have not ushered in an era of peaceful, liberated democracy that Western naive ideologues believe it would. 

Instead, what has filled the void has been something far worse.

It is also terribly naive for the Western powers to believe that airstrikes and drone attacks are all they need to do to destroy ISIS. 

Today, this has been driven home in the most terrible of ways that whilst air strikes may reduce casualties amongst Western soldiers, war can also be brought into the heart of their own cities.

What do you expect in war? You bomb their cities, their people, and they are not going to find a way to exact vengeance on you?

That is the nature of war - it is cruel, vindictive and innocents suffer for the power games that their rulers play.

If the Western Allies have finally woken up to the fact that they are not merely fighting a terrorist organisation but fighting a war, then they have two options. 

One, surrender and stop their half baked and failed interventions in the Middle East. 

Two, stop pussying around, quieten the soft, liberal segments that plague all Western democracies and end what they helped start by committing resources and unfortunately, the lives of their soldiers to destroying their enemy. 

An enemy that has shown today that they will do whatever is in their means to fight back.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world has also been dragged into this war and Singapore is no exception.

There are a few things that we must do, things that Western societies, hogtied by naive liberal ideas have shied away from doing.

Firstly, freedom of speech must not be extended to hate speech.

During the Charlie Hebdo attacks I saw that some Singaporeans, whose brains have been befuddled by the same disease that Western liberals suffer from, expressed solidarity with the comic book authors who spread hate speech.

In Singapore, we must stand fast and unwavering in banning extremist speech that exploit religious, racial and foreigner-local fault lines. 

Those that do not listen must be punished harshly, and jailed with no compunction.

Secondly, we must not in the misbeliefs of human rights activists shy away from detaining without trial those that want to commit violence against us, and those that want to join our enemies. 

Real freedom is founded on the security for the majority, and if the freedom of our enemies and those that want to do us harm must be taken away, and the keys thrown away forever, so be it.

In the coming days, we will hear people asking for understanding, and serving us platitudes about values, freedom and culture. 

In war, there is only one value. Either you survive, or your enemy survives. 

And in order to survive, in order to protect the lives of Singaporeans, our Government must be ruthlessly strong, and mercilessly tough.

And we the citizens of Singapore, must stand shoulder to shoulder and support our Government in this.

The Final Chapter

In the last few days, the reality is finally setting in that Mr. Lee Kuan Yew is entering the final moments of his life. When the news began to filter to me on Wednesday that the media were gathering at the Singapore General Hospital, and there were sightings of next-of-kin arriving, I too thought that the time had finally come, and a wave of sadness overwhelmed me; knowing that he didn't actually pass that day has not helped because I think deep in the hearts of many, we know that even if the final chapter of the life of our Founding Father has not closed, we are certainly on the last few pages.

Many have been moved to write down their thoughts about the man who has left such a large imprint on modern Singapore, and for those born after Independence, we have never lived in a Singapore without Lee Kuan Yew. Much has already been said, and more will be said in the coming days of the gargantuan achievements of Mr. Lee. It is not the purpose of this piece to repeat these things. Some have also been writing to criticise Mr. Lee; I have also no intention of refuting them or arguing with these critics because even at the peak of his power, a good quarter of voters never voted for Mr. Lee. Also, it is my belief that any person who has actually stood for something and has done great things in his life would always make enemies - and that is why Mr. Lee in life or death can never be the kind of universally-loved figure like Nelson Mandela, who unfortunately spent most of his active years in prison.

What has struck me more than the outpouring of emotions of Singaporeans is that the entire world seems to be holding its breath when news of the critically-ill Mr. Lee was announced. All over the world, media was constantly updating on the news on Mr. Lee's condition, with even the ill-judged hoax of his death erroneously reported on the American CNN and the Chinese CCTV. The irony was not lost on me that the main broadcaster of the two most powerful nations on this planet were so gripped by the news of Mr. Lee that they both simultaneously reported the same (false) news.With all the navel-gazing that has been afflicting our country in recent years, especially amongst our young, I wonder whether they realise how significant it is that even the hoaxed death of Mr. Lee was reported on both CNN and CCTV.

We are a nation of 5 million people.

5 million.

A small-red dot whose population is not even that of a district of Beijing, or even a small town in America.

And the whole world is writing articles about the passing of our first Prime Minister! In the last few days, commentaries about Lee Kuan Yew has been published in the leading newspapers of the US, China, Britain, Indonesia, Hong Kong and many more.

Hilary Clinton once said that there are few countries that punch as far above their weight as Singapore, and it will do us well to remember that.

And there is nothing that will remind us more of that, and WHY we do, then when the final chapter finally closes on the man that led this nation for the first 25 years as an independent country.

#thankyouLKY

A Deadly Serious Election

PM Lee has said that the next General Election will be 'deadly serious' as each constituency would be fought on national issues, not local issues. Each constituency will fight a National Election and not a By-Election.

In my humble opinion, PM Lee is by and large correct. Singapore is so uniformly run that we cannot say that the residents of East Coast GRC have overwhelmingly distinct and different issues from the residents of West Coast GRC. Local issues will not win and lose elections in PAP wards - as Aljunied GRC found to their dismay in 2011. They fought a local election (laying down municipal plans for residents) whilst the WP fought on a national slogan ("First World Parliament").

The WP will do the same again in 2011 - telling residents of Aljunied GRC that if they lose, the PAP will again be in control of all GRCs and the historic gains of 2011 will be lost. They will emotionally appeal to the residents of Aljunied to keep the fires of democracy burning. They will repeat the same in other constituencies, again telling voters that they are not ready to be an alternative Government, but please give them another GRC so they have a stronger mandate to 'check' the PAP in Parliament.

Ironically, the PAP's best strategy in Aljunied is to employ their losing tactic in 2011. I am surprised the WP has made such a hash out of managing the Town Council.

The PAP should ask the residents of Aljunied, and other residents this: even if Western-style democracy is an ideal, are they willing to continue paying the price so other Singaporeans - those that vote the PAP - can enjoy a 'check-and-balance', whilst they continue to suffer from terrible town council administration? Are they willing to be guinea pigs so that other Singaporeans can have their cake and eat it as well?

These are the issues that will decide the next GE.

Let The Vanquished Tell Their Tales

Every Singaporean should agree with the MCI Minister Yaacob Ibrahim that it was fortunate that the Communists lost the battle for Singapore in the early days of our state; as it turned out Communism proved to be a fatally flawed political system that eventually collapsed. Even China is now only nominally communist, having adopted capitalist reforms that have brought it prosperity that communism could not. Cuba and North Korea are mere dictatorships operating under the facade of communism, and are all but failed pariah states.

The victory of Capitalism over Communism is so utter and so final that it is hard to imagine a communist revolution taking place anywhere in the world today; as a beacon of capitalist success, Singapore is no different. A bourgeois nation such as Singapore is hardly fertile ground for the communist provocateur. It is thus extremely strange that the Government would ban the documentary 'To Singapore, With Love' on the grounds of national security concerns.

Comintern, the organisation tasked with spreading communism in the world can now only be found in history books; young Singaporeans are unlikely to have even heard of it. The Communist Party of Malaya, an armed revolutionary group was no doubt guilty of many deaths in its decades-long insurrection - but with it's surrender to the Malaysian government in the 1980's, they are also a relic of history.

Many of the exiles from the 60s are also octogenarians in the twilight of their lives; unlike the detainees of Operation Spectrum of the '80s, they have little or no hope of making a comeback.

The argument of the government however is that some of the interviewees have distorted the truth by denying that they were ever communists.

I fail to see how this matters. Even if they were not communists, there is no doubt that most were left-leaning activists whose vision for post-colonial Singapore was a at least a socialist one; however, no post-colonial country which adopted left-leaning, socialist policies has prospered. Every of the 4 Asian tigers, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea have developed first-world states by embracing capitalist, market-economies. Socialism, on the other hand, proved to be a bankrupt ideology for poor, new nations that had nothing to re-distribute.

Whether they were communist revolutionaries or socialist radicals, everything they have stood for has been proven wrong by the passage of time.

Throughout history, at the birth of every nation, there is always a gigantic struggle between competing ideologies and their adherents. Often, blood is shed. In Singapore's case, the losers were exiled and the victors, the PAP government have cemented their victory with fifty years of prosperity, taking its people from third world to first.
The triumph of its vision versus those of the exiles could not be any more absolute.

It is precisely because of this that I feel that the Government should be secure enough for the stories of those it long-ago vanquished to be told. Almost 50, Singapore is no longer a new nation and understanding what-could-have-been, if things turned out differently half a century ago, may well help a new generation of Singaporeans better appreciate the achievements of the PAP government.

Reply to TOC's Facebook Page re-post of Andy Wong's article on MDA Regulations

Some of these points I have already put on my Facebook Page, but I think it is useful to re-post on my blog, and add some clarifications.

Firstly, I have never said MDA regulates companies. That is the job of ACRA. Neither have I said that MDA is only interested in regulating companies. I have also NOT said anywhere that companies are special, as Andy Wong alleges.

My point is that in the case of The Independent and The Breakfast Network, after it was deemed that they were involved in the "promotion, propagation and/or discussion of political issues”, it was clear their mode of operation was through a corporate entity and so this entity was the subject of regulation. When the corporate entity The Breakfast Network Pte Ltd refused to register, then any social media platform it owns, be it website, Twitter and Facebook should be shut down. However once the corporate entity ceases to exist, the subject asked to register is inactive and thus regulation at this point is moot.


I don't know how to make it clearer.

Specifically, there are three simple points I can make to rebut 'blogger' Andy Wong, and The Online Citizen who claim he 'took apart' my reaction to Free My Internet Movement.

1) Andy Wong and TOC still claim that in Breakfast Network's case, it was the website and not the company the MDA was regulating.
These are the important parts from MDA's press statement:
"as we had assessed that as a corporate entity providing political commentary and news, they could be susceptible to foreign funding."
"MDA has informed Breakfast Network Pte Ltd that the company should cease to operate its online services"
"Should Breakfast Network Pte Ltd remain active as a company, it must not operate any iteration ofwww.breakfastnetwork.sg on other Internet platforms as doing so would contravene MDA’s registration requirements. These other Internet platforms include Breakfast Network’s Facebook page and Twitter Feed."


I do however agree that the first sentence in the press release is confusing

It says "MDA had required www.breakfastnetwork.sg, operated by Breakfast Network Pte Ltd, to register under the Broadcasting (Class Licence) Notification, as we had assessed that as a corporate entity providing political commentary and news, they could be susceptible to foreign funding."
"www.breakfastnetwork.sg" is a URL. It is not a corporate entity as the statement grammatically implies. It is the Pte Ltd that is the corporate entity, as the rest of the statement says.

MDA should clarify.

2) Andy Wong then says the legislation does not say that MDA ONLY regulates companies.

As I said above, nobody said such a thing. I certainly did not.

The regulation allows MDA to regulate companies inter alia, which IN THIS CASE, MDA has chosen to do.

3) Employees and senior management can also be taken to task for the malfeasance of a company. A Pte Ltd

For example, the CEO, CFO of Enron were jailed even though Enron was a public listed company.

We are not talking about financial responsibility here, where a Pte Ltd shields even the shareholders from the debts of the company.

4) There are several ludicrous statements in the article which is not worth responding to including

"Strictly speaking, companies are not set up for commercial or profit-making reasons."

Reply to The Online Citizen on MDA Regulations

I refer to the op-ed by Mr. Howard Lee “MDA regulations – Still no clarity, just another questionable voice”. 

In this rebuttal to my article on the Free My Internet’s statement, Mr Lee raises several points which I will clarify below.

Firstly, my comparison of the Breakfast Network and the Independent was never based on mere statistics. Instead I clearly stated that it is untenable to keep asserting that with respect to the Breakfast Network’s demise, “it was the regulatory hurdles that killed it, rather than a lack of managerial expertise and depth.” 

One of the fundamental mistakes that FMI and like-minded detractors keep making is the misunderstanding that it was the website that the Media Development Authority was trying to regulate, rather than the company set up to operate the website and other related social media. This has led to the absurd accusation that the MDA (and I) do not understand how websites operate. 

A company is set up in order to establish a commercial, profit-making enterprise. A company has directors and senior employees also have to take responsibility for the actions of the legal entity. (thus needing all senior management of the company to sign off on the forms of the MDA – if a company is relying mainly on volunteers, then one has to wonder how serious that company is in being a sustainable business).

A successful company also needs a strong management team and sufficient financing, especially in the start-up stage to not only survive the competition, but also to ensure that the start-up complies with the law – regulatory or financial.

It is thus my opinion that looking at the two management teams, the primary  reason for the Breakfast Network Pte Ltd’s demise was NOT that the regulations were too onerous, but that its team (being essentially consisting of the founder and a team of volunteers) was too weak to navigate and set-up the necessary internal processes in order to comply with the regulatory environment. 

On the other hand, The Independent’s team consists of a successful entrepreneur with a track record of success, a founding partner of a law firm and a veteran journalist who also owns shares in a leading PR firm in Singapore.   It is also my belief that given the financial circumstances of the founders of The Independent, and strength in numbers, the company that owns The Independent was in a stronger financial position to ensure that the company is able to comply with regulatory requirements moving forward.

The failure of The Breakfast Network Pte Ltd was thus not a regulatory failure, but a business failure. To blame its demise on ‘onerous forms’ is thus to ignore the fact that its rival has managed to survive and maybe even flourish, arguably as a result of a stronger management team and finances.

Secondly, FMI’s and similar detractors’ inability to differentiate between social media, and the company that operates social media, has further led to their confusion and unjustified anger towards the MDA’s insistence of regulating the Breakfast Network Pte Ltd’s (the company’s) Facebook and Twitter feeds, even after the website was shut down. 

(Mr. Lee, in his Op-Ed, on the other hand mistakenly believes that the MDA wanted to regulate the Facebook and Twitter feeds after the COMPANY was shut down. This is false).

It does not matter what new media the Breakfast Network Pte Ltd (the company) uses to publish its socio-political views – be it website, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. It is the COMPANY that MDA seeks to regulate, not the media per se.

Now that the company is in the process of being liquidated, there is no company left to regulate. If the volunteers of the Breakfast Network continue to run the Facebook page as a hobby, this is a different matter.

Mr. Lee’s points regarding Yahoo and The Broadcast Act are also egregious examples of a stubborn refusal or inability to understand the difference between class licenses, individual licenses, the responsibilities under the Broadcast Act, and the registration required of the companies that own The Independent and The Breakfast Network.

To apply for individual licenses (that for example Yahoo are regulated under), is in fact more onerous than the requirements needed under registration under class licenses. For example, Yahoo has to put up a 50,000 Singapore Dollar bond, that The Breakfast Network and The Independent were not required to do. They are also subject to the 24-hour take-down clause, which again The Independent (having registered) is not required to do.

The Broadcast Act’s provisions, are also more stringent than the class license registration. For example, the Broadcast Act allows the MDA to declare a foreign broadcasting service to be interfering in domestic politics and have their business restricted. This is a provision that The Independent is not subject to.

The parts of the Broadcast Act that regulate SPH and Mediacorp also allow the Government to ratify the appointments of their CEOs and object; again an additional layer to ensure that whatever foreign advertising they receive are bona fide. The Independent is not subject to this.

Therefore, by allowing the companies that own The Independent and The Breakfast Network to receive bona fide foreign advertising, and requiring them to ONLY register under a class license (rather than obtain an individual license), and to give an undertaking not to receive foreign funding, is in fact a LESS onerous regulatory regime than all the other examples Mr. Lee has brought up.

I recognise that the Broadcast Act and the various distinctions between class licenses and individual licenses are complicated and phrased in legalistic terms. If  Mr. Lee, the FMI movement and similar detractors have problems understanding them, they should seek expert advice, instead of insisting on the ridiculous accusation that the Government has failed to explain itself.

Response to Free My Internet statement and Breakfast Network’s Shutdown

In the wake of the shutdown of the Breakfast Network, the Free My Internet movement issued a statement questioning the Media Development Authority’s ability to act as a Media Authority.

This is not only an overreaction, it was a statement based on several logical fallacies.

To begin with, the shutdown of the Breakfast Network has been held up as an example of how the MDA’s regulations have caused the demise of alternative media, and the first new media martyred by actions of the MDA.

Although it is true that the Breakfast Network had to shut-down because it did not register, it is a leap of logical reasoning to say that it was because the registration was too onerous that it did so. This is especially when its rival, The Independent, not only chose to register, but did so without raising a hue and cry in cyberspace.

It is curious why the Breakfast Network could not follow in the footsteps of The Independent when both are helmed by print media veterans, Bertha Henson and PN Balji respectively. Both individuals, as respected journalists with years of experience, would also have intimate knowledge of the Government’s longstanding objections to foreigners, through funding or otherwise, interfering in Singapore politics. It is even more perplexing why The Breakfast Network would find the legal commitments too onerous, when the Independent, whose co-founder is a senior lawyer, was able to navigate the same regulations.

There would be a stronger case for the Breakfast Network if both it and the Independent, had both been unable to register, especially since arguably, the Independent has the stronger team with years of entrepreneurial, legal and journalistic experience in its founding team. If it also foundered at the regulatory stage, then the Breakfast Network, arguably a one-woman company, could argue that it was the regulatory hurdles that killed it, rather than a lack of managerial expertise and depth.

But this is not the case. Instead, the Independent has, by being able to deftly manoeuvre throug  the regulatory space, put itself in the position of being the only overtly commercial alternative media covering politics in Singapore, which stands it in good stead of becoming Singapore’s Huffington Post. 

The basis of the Free My Internet Statement – the Breakfast Network’s demise - is thus a weak example to base their criticism of the MDA upon.

There were also other egregious examples of a failure to understand the current regulatory framework.

Firstly, print and broadcast media has always been subjected to rules discouraging the interference of foreigners, including funding, in local politics. Yahoo, brought up as an example of inconsistency by the FMI movement, is already covered by the Broadcast Act. There are no double-standards.

Secondly, Facebook and Twitter feeds owned by individuals that cover political content, which are prima facie not commercial or commercialised, cannot reasonably be asked to commit not to take foreign funding. Being non-commercial, many run as a hobby, they do not need any funding in the first place. It makes no sense for any regulator to ask an individual hobbyist to register a company so that they can regulate him. That is just twisted logic.

Overall, a lot of the misunderstanding about and distrust over MDA’s regulations, and the apprehension regarding the impending updating of the Broadcast Act, can be dispelled if one fundamental principle can be understood: that Cyberspace is not a separate world, but part of our real world.  The internet is just another media, and should be subject to the same laws that cover all media, be it print or broadcast. It is not special. 

Most of all, the emergence of a new technology is insufficient reason to re-evaluate fundamental principles a society has been based on successfully for years. The Internet is no different.

Litte India Riots: Has the Population White Paper Also Gone Up In Flames?

Any hope the Government still harboured of the electorate accepting the "6.9 million" Population White Paper may have just gone up in flames.

One must not underestimate the shock to the Singaporean psyche in seeing images of burning police vehicles, crowds attacking ambulances and rioting masses; for Singaporeans born post-independence, these things just do not happen in Singapore. They see them on the TV, or the internet, or the papers -- but not in their own backyard.

When news of a riotous crowd attacking police vehicles started filtering out, the reaction from Singaporeans, online and on the streets, was one of utter disbelief.

People do not attack police vehicles in Singapore, much less set them on fire. The most difficult situation ambulance drivers have to normally handle is unruly patients; never in their wildest dreams have they imagined themselves running for their lives from an angry mob.

The Government may try its best to deny that the riot has anything to do with immigration policy, but it will fail. It may exhort Singaporeans not to politicise the issue but it will fail too. The Government may rail against xenophobia but it will also fail, because I fear reason cannot overcome the images from Sunday's riot already burnt into the mind's eye.

Cost of immigration
I have written elsewhere that I support the Government’s immigration policy because I have seen the statistics, the facts and I know that if we do not take in immigrants, we would be faced with a rapidly ageing population and a shrinking workforce. I also know that we need a foreign migrant workforce because in order to build more homes and infrastructure for a growing population, we need these foreign workers to do the jobs Singaporeans are not willing to do at an economically feasible wage – construction, building sewers, paving roads.

But the best way for the Government to convince the population of these facts is not to merely present its vision for a rosy future, but to be honest about the costs involved.

And one of those costs is that immigrants need to be assimilated, and foreign migrant worker populations do not just disappear during weekends after toiling the entire week to build our homes and roads.

It may, however, be too late.

Even if the amateur psychologists and sociologists on the internet may all be wrong in speculating why the foreign workers rioted, their narrative is a powerful one.

The Government may like to frame the issue as simply a law-and-order matter, but no amount of briefings will make people forget the fact that the people who rioted were foreigners. There is no way that the Government can make the events of Little India disappear from the psyche of an electorate already skeptical about its immigration policy.

Two alternative scenarios

It now has two choices.

First, it can roll out all the bar graphs and pie charts again and show the people the bleak future Singapore faces with an ageing population, minus immigrants. But this time, it must be completely honest about the costs of this policy.

The Government needs to show how it intends to work with Singaporeans to ameliorate these social costs. These include a plan on assimilating new immigrants, as well as that of dealing with an ever-increasing foreign migrant worker population, needed to build infrastructure for a growing population.

With a bigger foreign worker population, the Ministry of Manpower will also have their work cut out, policing cases of exploitation and employer malpractice, as well as finding ways to house the foreign workers. Trade-offs have to be made with businesses having to commit financial and human resources to ensure foreign workers hired are treated well and paid fairly; these increased costs to businesses means highers prices to consumers, which makes raising productivity even more urgent.
The population at large will also have to expect these migrants workers to be in their midst and adjust to it.

This is not an easy ask: as can be seen in Little India, enclaves of foreigners can form, and we can neither expect them to assimilate (since they are transient workers) nor to completely follow the norms of a foreign culture.

Thus, the Population White Paper may be anchored on irrefutable facts and figures, but the costs and challenges of implementing the policy paper must be made clear to the electorate.
It may well be that the electorate find these costs too much to bear, even in the face of a dire population problem.

The second option then is for the Government to abandon the Population White Paper and come up with a Plan B.

Plan B

What is Plan B? It is certainly not some watered-down version of the Government’s plan that the Workers' Party has presented.

Plan B has to deal with the other alternative -- that of an AGED (rather than ageing) population, with a small work force, but a small immigrant population.

Plan B is an economy less reliant on foreign workers, with Singaporeans taking up jobs in construction, and all the other manual work that we now take for granted.

In this, critics of the Government, as well as opposition politicians, need to be honest too.

There will also be social costs to plan B, and these costs will also be painful for Singaporeans to adjust to.

Firstly, Singapore will need higher taxes from a smaller active work force to support an aged population. There will also be a less vibrant Singapore, with old people making up a larger proportion of society. We may even have to draw down on our reserves, if taxes on the work force are not to become prohibitively high.

We will (as we are already presently) have to get used to more old people taking on work that the young do not want; retirement age also has to go up. The entire economy has to be re-configured to adjust to an aged workforce, a task that will be fraught with risks and no guarantee of success.
In order for more Singaporeans to take up the jobs that foreign workers are now doing, wages have to go up. But that means prices may have to go up as well.

If bus drivers are to be paid more in order for Singaporeans to take these jobs, then bus fares will either have to rise, or taxes have to rise in order for the Government to subsidise fares. Homes may be built less cheaply, even if productivity rises. That means either HDB flats will either cost more, or again, more tax revenue has to be raised for bigger subsidies.

Singaporeans have to learn to do a lot more household maintenance jobs, like in some developed countries, where blue-collared jobs are highly paid. These are also not easy challenges to adjust to.
Plan B is a possible scenario, but it is not enough for detractors of the PAP to criticise its immigration policy and not present the alternative with the trade-offs. There is no perfect solution and both sides in the debate must be honest about the costs of the options available.

The problem I fear is that the shock of the riots of Little India has irreparably tarnished the PAP’s immigration plan. Every conversation it will have from now on will consciously or subconsciously be associated with images of foreign workers flipping over a police car and setting it on fire.

The Committee of Inquiry will not be as important as the Government presenting to the population how it intends to manage the growing foreign migrant worker numbers, needed to build the infrastructure for a larger population.

And it needs to be a convincing story.

Otherwise, it is time to seriously consider Plan B.

MDA Licensing, Foreigners and our Sovereignty

Despite my differences in opinion with several leading Singaporean bloggers and blog-site owners on the MDA licensing rules, I have always respected their views and tried to engage them. I have also endeavoured to try to assist them in bridging the gap in communication between them and the Government. One reason is that for the majority of the bloggers that I have met, despite their differences with the Government, it is still my opinion that they are loyal Singaporeans that are passionate about building a better future for Singapore. Our differences in envisioning what this future might be does not change this fact.

It is however different when foreigners and foreign organisations wade into the picture.

On July 10 2013, the US Government State Department issued a statement that it was deeply concerned  with the new MDA licensing rules and that it closely monitor(s) and often speak(s) out... on both Internet freedom and media freedom throughout the world. 

This followed very closely a statement by the US internet companies Facebook, Yahoo and Google (under the lobby group the Asian Internet Coalition) expressing their objection to the new MDA rules, and claiming that it would affect Singapore's business image, hinder investment in the Internet industry, especially in start-ups.

To begin with, this holier-than-thou attitude by the US government is laughable and highly ironic in the light of Edward Snowden's revelations about US internet companies working with the US government in spying on their own citizens as well as foreigners; make no mistake, the US government continues to hunt Snowden down as a fugitive whom several of its leading politicians have branded a traitor.

Like any other country, there are limits to the freedom of speech even in the United States of America. It is up to each and every sovereign country to decide where these limits lie; it is certainly not up to the USA to dictate to other countries these limits, especially when it is grappling with the same problems in their own country.
Singapore needs to very strongly rebut the US State Department, and put it in as diplomatic language as possible what could be summarised in four words - Mind Your Own Business.

I do not hold much hope that the USA in particular and Western countries in general, will heed this advice. Their penchant for preaching to other cultures, and trying to impose their values as universal values on the world, remains unabated even with the end of Empire. 
More reprehensible is the tying of financial interests to issues of value, which Western countries like to couch under the umbrella term of universal rights. 

This is implicit in the statement made by the US internet companies.

Not content with blocking off internet legislation in the US through powerful lobby groups that these corporate giants fund, these same internet companies continue to poke their noses in the affairs of foreign countries they operate in.

In the statement by the Asian Internet Coalition, implicit is the threat that if the Government does not re-consider these regulations, these US internet companies may re-consider investing in Singapore and jobs may be lost.

Apart from the open question of how much these regulations would actually hinder the businesses of these Internet giants, I have two points to make that Singaporeans should be aware of.

Firstly, these companies are no champions of freedom of expression. They are billion-dollar profit- making enterprises. It is my contention that Facebook, Google and their likes are more concerned about how these regulations will affect their bottom line and their operations, rather than the right to freedom of speech for the average Singaporean. 

Secondly and more importantly, Singapore should never succumb to the threats of foreigners and foreign companies that infringe on our sovereign right to decide our social norms for ourselves. If the price to pay for protecting our right of self-determination is that these companies will pull out of Singapore (an unlikely event), or they cut back on investment and jobs, then so be it. 

The US internet companies are in all likelihood still engaging in lobbying the Singapore government to change the rules according to their views.

They should stop now.

There is a limit to consulting foreign-based interests in deciding our domestic policies. If these companies feel they have to reduce their investment in Singapore and cost us jobs, it is their right to do so.

This should not and cannot be used as leverage against us.

The sovereignty of our nation is not for sale.

This article was first published on www.singapolitics.com

Keep Calm and Carry On Posting

The drama that has unfolded over Singapore’s Media Development Authority’s  decision to license some news websites in Singapore is tragic: On the one hand, we have a government completely bewildered over the reaction towards what they see as a minor update to its regulatory laws. On the other hand, we have freedom-of-the-internet advocates going apoplectic over what it sees as a major policy decision that amounts to a censorship of free-speech and the death-knell of alternative news websites in Singapore.  The two positions, and the reactions, are so far apart and so irreconcilable, that the call for dialogue seems futile.

One reason for the divide is the difference in timeframe from which the two parties view the decision: the Government is looking at the situation now, and its opponents, the possible impact in the future.

The Government’s decision is actually made on very simple logic. 

Current print newspapers at the moment are owned by only two state-owned media groups: SPH and Mediacorp. These old-media newspapers are licensed and regulated. The exact same version on the internet is not. This is a regulatory anomaly given media convergence. Therefore, the regulation was refreshed to cover the online versions. 

Therefore, when some of my blogger friends asked me who I thought was the target of the regulations, the answer is right before their eyes - it is precisely the list of 10 that the MDA has released.

It does not make sense that the Straits Times is regulated but the Straits Times online is not. It does not make sense that TODAY is covered under the Newspapers and Printing Presses Act but TODAY Online is not. It was a regulatory black-hole that did not take into account the invention of the Internet and it needed to be plugged.

Yes, it’s that simple.

The only anomaly was Yahoo which have in recent years assembled a journalistic team that covers Singapore news.

But Yahoo is no independent blogger or internet start-up. It is a multinational, billion dollar media company that hires teams of personnel to deal with Governments in every country they operate in. $50,000 is chump change to Yahoo and it is absurd to think that Yahoo Singapore would shut-up shop because of this bond. It is also naïve to think that Yahoo Singapore is not already ready to work with the Singapore Government and abide by Singapore laws. Make no mistake – Yahoo is not an activist website set up to promote freedom of information but a billion dollar listed Corporation looking to make profits. The regulations in fact puts it on equal standing with SPH and Mediacorp’s online news sites and enables them to operate a fully-fledged, well-financed online newspaper that is not state owned.

The internet advocates are on the other hand not completely unjustified in being concerned, even if some of the reaction borders on hyperbole. ‘Draconian’, ‘Disaster’, ‘Extreme’ and claiming that these regulations will end free-speech on the internet, are surely epithets better reserved for regimes that truly seek to control the internet, like China or North Korea. 

However, it is true that the regulations are drafted so widely that it could foreseeably be used to regulate more than the initial 10 sites in the future. 

These fears are however in my opinion, exaggerated.

Firstly, if a rogue government wants to shut opposition up and censor its alternative views, it does not have to rely on such weak regulatory laws. It already has far harsher laws it can use, such as the Sedition Act and the Internal Security Act. Surely charging someone for sedition, which technically means subversive acts that incite insurrections, is going to strike more fear than asking someone to put up a $50,000 bond? Surely the threat of being interrogated by the Internal Security Department is scarier than being asked to take down objectionable content?

I am thus perplexed when critics argue that the new laws are draconian and drafted to strike fear into Singaporeans.  Are they arguing that it is preferable to rely on the existing laws and charge a website owner with sedition when hate-speech is published, rather than use the new regulations to require him to take it down? That’s quite unbelievable.

Secondly, what some freedom-of-the-press advocates are asking for does not exist. Censorship and regulation of the press is not a choice between two extremes. It is not a choice between complete censorship and no regulation. Every country on this planet regulates their press in some way, either through press complaints departments, independent watchdogs or through press commissions.  Civil and criminal legislation (such as defamation laws and anti-pornography laws)  circumscribe complete freedom to say what we want in every jurisdiction on earth. 

Thus, between the option of complete censorship and complete freedom of the press lies policy options that each State has to decide for itself, not by dogmatic adherence to liberal ideology, and least of all by ‘press-freedom’ rankings compiled by foreigners with no stake in our country. 

Thirdly, even if there are no state regulations on press, the press is hardly free. In the West, the Press is not the independent, morally-upright defender of democratic rights and truth that some would have us believe. Instead, most of the major newspapers and TV stations are owned by media barons whose objectives are to make profit.

I have been seeing the Latin quote Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes (“Who guards the guardians”) quite frequently in the current debate. Some freedom-of-the-press advocates would have us believe that the Press plays this role, and that an independent, free press is the only guard against a rogue government. That is, the American notion of the Fourth Estate.

This is a terrible corruption of democratic values.

The Government in a democracy is elected by the people but who elects the Press? Who elected the media barons who own the press that purport to guard the Government? The question – who guards the guardians – should not be asked about the Government, but instead of the Press. It is the People who guard the Government, and it is the Government who must guard the Press and the unelected, unaccountable corporate interests that own the Press. If Governments are not responsible for regulating the Press than who is? Billionaire media-owners like Mark Zuckerberg? The answer is clear, and getting it the other way round is not only undemocratic, but indeed is a corruption of democracy.

Fourthly, the fear of having our behaviour regulated is exaggerated. Newsflash: our behaviour is already regulated every day by something we call Laws. If people could regulate themselves, human societies would not need laws. I am sure it is nice to believe as some liberals do, that everyone can judge right and wrong for themselves, that good behaviour will crowd-out bad behaviour, and it is politically incorrect to state the opposite. It is however not only politically correct to point out the fact that we already live in societies governed by laws that punish those that are unable to judge right and wrong for themselves, it would be self-delusional to deny it. What is up for discussion is thus not whether the Internet should be regulated, like many aspects of human life in ALL societies already are, but how much regulation there should be.

Finally, the new licensing regime is a massive opportunity for alternative media. One reason for the shock in reading the definitions (e.g. of what constitutes news) in the new licensing regime is that nobody has read the old regulations that regulate print media (the definitions are the same – which is why the Government is also bewildered as to why the fuss). 

The protests against the online regulations are barking up the wrong tree. The problem up until the advent of the Internet has never been the licensing requirements but the licenses themselves. The Government has never issued a license to publish a newspaper other than to the two state-owned media companies, which is why nobody, but the executives of SPH and Mediacorp has ever bothered reading the requirements. (which they probably know by heart)

Now for the first time in history, a non-state owned company, Yahoo has been licensed as a news provider. This is a massive milestone that not only has political implications, but business ones. 

The Government has been forced to recognise that with the Internet, it can no longer choose who to grant the license to, but in fact, has no choice but to license whoever has the ability to write compelling news content that can reach at least 50,000 unique internet users monthly.

This throws up a very interesting and crucial question: if media has converged, and the Government has introduced this licensing regime to treat online news as the same as print news, will it also treat print news as the same as online news? Can Yahoo now, a licensed online news provider, print a paper-edition of its online news (if it wanted to) and finally challenge the duopoly of SPH and Mediacorp? If it cannot, then the Government will be called-out on its decision to treat online and print news as the same. If it can, it will be a seismic development that can finally destroy the monopoly the Straits Times has over print news.

If I had a leading alternative news website that reaches more than 50,000 readers, instead of blacking out my website and going to Hong Lim to protest, I would be right now leveraging off the brand recognition and raising finance to start the Singapore equivalent of Huffington Post. Once I finance such a website, I would be looking forward to hiring a team of full-time professionals to launch an online newspaper instead of relying on volunteers who quit every few months. And if I had such a website, I would be looking forward to fundamentally disrupt the news industry in Singapore by first creating a successful online news website, and then launching a print one based on the same content (since the Government says it is the same).

But I don’t have such a website. Which is why I can only follow the same advice that I would give individual bloggers and netizens who do NOT qualify for such a license:

Keep Calm and Carry On Posting

This article was written for Yahoo Singapore 6 June 2013

More thoughts on Model Price/Wage Fixing - A further reply to the Competition Commission

The Competition Commission responded to an interview with me about the price-fixing decision against the Association of Modelling Professionals of Singapore.

The interview is here:

http://news.asiaone.com/print/News/Latest%2BNews/Singapore/Story/A1Story20130506-420591.html

The ST Forum response is here:

http://www.straitstimes.com/premium/forum-letters/story/modelling-agencies-price-fixing-had-adverse-effect-market-20130509

I have always found public battle of words on the pages of Forum pages unseemly and have chosen not to write in a reply.

I will blog a reply here insteaad.

I have said what I wanted to say in the interview - that the goals of the association was to raise wages, which we succeeded in. It was a pity that it was interpreted as price-fixing.

Two further points in response to CCS's letter.

First, on commission. CCS stated that the higher wages also increased our commission. This is a true but trite fact. Agency commissions are a fixed percentage that did not change; and given the 75-25 split to the model, the bulk of the wage increases went to the models.

More importantly, if the agencies really wanted to price-fix, they would have colluded to fix commissions, not wages. In fact, US agencies colluded to fix commissions and were taken to court in a class-action suit and also investigated by the Anti-Trust authorities there. This was something the Singaporean agencies did not do.

Secondly, CCS said that there was an "appreciable adverse effect on the market."

The question is: who makes up the market? Who was adversely affected?

The answer will surprise readers.

The modelling association was found guilty specifically of fixing 'prices' (wages to models) for fashion shows and fashion shoots.

The major client of fashion shoots are: SPH and Mediacorp.  The government-linked, Temasek-owned media duopoly. 

In a duopoly, the wage/price setting power lies with them, not the supplier of labour - in this case, models.

For years, the models have been paid a pittance until the association bargained for higher wages.

So who was adversely affected by the price/wage fixing? Answer: the 2 big magazine companies who can very well afford to pay more per hour to these young people.

Who are the biggest clients of fashion shows?

The two biggest employers of show models were the Singapore Fashion Week and the Singapore Fashion Festival.

Who are behind these two national events?

The Singapore Fashion Festival is backed by the Singapore Tourism Board, and the Singapore Fashion Week by IE Singapore.

Yes the Government.

So who was adversely affected by the rise in fashion show wages (prices) - Government Agencies.

Therefore in summary, the biggest 'clients' that were 'adversely affected' by our 'price-fixing' (which increased the wages of poor young people) was not some poor man on the street, but government owned media monopolies and government agencies themselves.

Enough said.

The PAP and Unfair Elections: Is the ruling party guilty as charged?

On the morning after the Malaysian General Elections, I posted a status update on my Facebook Page saying “I hope people who say the PAP is unfair now have a better reference point. Today you know what unfair is”. This elicited a flurry of rebuttals, many indignant that I was trying to excuse the PAP just because the Malaysian elections are allegedly more unfair; some used all sorts of inappropriate analogies of crime to basically argue that one greater crime should not absolve a lesser one. 

This would be true if I thought the PAP was unfair or even worse, complicit in fraudulent electoral behaviour.

I believe no such thing.

My point was the contrary - if the allegations of electoral fraud in Malaysia were true, then we have a clear example of what political unfairness is, because in my opinion, much of the allegations of electoral fraud or unfairness towards the PAP are completely unjustified.

One shining light amidst all the usual nasty comments, personal attacks and fake FB accounts were rebuttals from a group of young undergraduates, in particular a Mr. Lim Jialiang who was upset enough to post a full, well-written FB rebuttal note that can be found here: 

https://www.facebook.com/lim.jialiang/posts/10151709560456844

I am extremely happy that we have in our youth today people who have a strong sense of idealism and fairness. In fact, having lived in several countries, I think that our young people have some of the strongest notions of equity and fair play in the world, which ironically may put them at a disadvantage in the wider world where such high standards are seldom adhered to. But I digress.

The point is that most of the sense of unfairness is to me completely misplaced.

Take GRCs for example. This is one bugbear that I have never ever understood. One can question the motives behind the GRCs – whether it is to ensure minority representation as the PAP says, or to introduce weaker MPs on the coattails of Ministers as their opponents allege. But regardless, the rule to contesting a GRC remains that one has to put together a team of 3 to 6 candidates, including an ethnic minority person.

I do not see for the life of me how this rule could possibly be unfair to the opposition, unless one further assumes that the opposition is too weak to put a good team together to compete with the PAP.

There is absolute nothing to stop the opposition from forming a team of good candidates and take down a GRC, including heavyweight ministers, as the Workers Party has shown in 2011 in Aljunied GRC.

More, it is my opinion that the experience of 2011 has shown the PAP that running as a team means you either win as a team or lose as a team, and you could win 5 seats in one fell swoop but also lose everything. Further, even if some argue that heavyweight ministers make it harder to compete (which may not be a bad thing as in order to take them down, the Opposition team also needs to be stellar), I believe that a chain is as strong as its weakest link.

It is my contention that if the weakest member of the GRC team is sub-par, the whole team should be voted out, even if the anchor minister is none other than the Prime Minister. If the anchor Minister makes a bad judgement in choosing his teammates, and the opposition team is stronger, then the electorate should vote for the latter, regardless if the PAP team is helmed by an important Cabinet Minister.

Absolutely nothing unfair about that.

People should really stop complaining about GRCs being unfair, because there is nothing inherently unfair about requiring each party to field a team of 5 or 6 strong candidates to compete together – the same rule applies to both the PAP and the opposition. In fact, Aljunied 2011 has taught the PAP enough of a lesson that I predict there will be smaller GRCs in 2016, purely because the PAP does not want to risk losing more Ministers to an opposition A-team.

Electoral deposits are widely accepted in many established democracies. What varies is the amount and the percentage of votes needed to take the deposits back. On the most basic level, this rule is fair given that it equally applies to the PAP as well as the Opposition – we do not have the PAP paying a lower tariff or needing a lower vote count to get their deposit back. Therefore, one can only argue that it is unfair if we make two further suppositions: firstly, that the Opposition is too poorly funded to corral the requisite deposits. Second, the Opposition should somehow play with a handicap such that they should be held to LOWER standards than the PAP, such that their vote-count hurdle should be lower than the PAPs.

I find such arguments to be absolutely insulting to the current major Oppositions parties in Singapore. Firstly, what I consider to be the two major Opposition parties, the SDP and the WP have an established enough membership base to be well-funded enough to raise the deposits required. More importantly, these deposits are returned once the candidate(s) receive above 12.5%, a level that is quite in line with other democracies such as the UK. For a major opposition party to lose its deposit, whatever the amount, is considered an embarrassment in most countries, and something I do not see happening to the SDP and especially the WP in 2016.

The next three most common complaints are slightly more controversial.

Firstly, let’s look at the tying of upgrading and estate improvements to election results.

Such tactics are commonly known as pork-barrel politics. Wikipedia gives this definition: “Pork barrel is the appropriation of government spending for localized projects secured solely or primarily to bring money to a representative's district.”

In the context of the US, this would mean for example, a Republican federal government giving priority of federal funding to Republican states; in the context of the UK, this would mean, for example, a Labour Government giving priority of government funds to Labour town councils.

Why I think it is controversial is because there is no reason to think that just because everybody is doing it, it is okay.

However it is my contention that it is precisely democracies that practice pork barrel politics as politicians have to win votes (if you are a one party dictatorship you don’t), and it is reasonable to expect them to keep promises to the people who have supported them, rather than those who did not. Is it not a bit strange if, after a General Election, the winning party decides to spend money first on the constituencies who did NOT vote for them rather than on the people who agreed with their vision and voted for it? If they did this, what exactly is the incentive for its supporters to vote them in the next election? If I voted for you, because I agree with your vision, but you put me at the bottom of your priority list and instead decide to reward those who rejected you, why should I vote for you the next time?

The tying of upgrading and estate improvement is thus not only commonly practised in many developed democracies, it is fair – you make promises, and you keep them to people who support you. The PAP in this instance in my opinion is not guilty of unfairness, but rather of being overly vindictive. Pork-barrels only work for so long; the people who are denied the ‘pork’ after a while may grow so resentful that they may decide to reject you even if they go ‘hungry’. This I feel is what happened in Hougang and the resentment against the PAP there is so entrenched after years of being victim of petty and vindictive politics, they will vote against the PAP even if they ran against Mickey Mouse.

The final most common complaints are related: Gerrymandering and the lack of an independent election commission. Again, the same points apply as pork-barrel politics: Gerrymandering is common in systems where parliamentary seats are allocated by geographical areas, and Singapore is not the only developed country without an independent electoral commission. 

Gerrymandering was arguably invented in America when Governor Elbridge Gerry re-districted Massachusetts in 1812 to benefit his own Democratic Party. It is still a practise common in the US and the article on Gerrymandering on Wikipedia gives several good examples of Gerrymandered districts in the US still existent today.  

The most blatant examples of Gerrymandering in Singapore have been in my opinion firstly the re-drawing of Cheng San and Eunos GRCs, and the disproportionate sizes of Tanjong Pagar GRC (helmed by Lee Kuan Yew) and Ang Mo Kio GRC (helmed by Lee Hsien Loong). Arguably, if Eunos and Cheng San did not have their boundaries re-drawn, Aljunied (the successor GRC to these two) may have fallen faster. 

Yet, the PAP so far has resisted re-drawing the districts of constituencies they have lost, in particular Potong Pasir and Hougang. 

Gerrymandering may be however one of those things that can never be fully eradicated in any country that allocates seats according to geographical regions. This is because any electoral commission tasked to draw up electoral districts can never be fully independent of political interference.

The point is this: even if you remove the electoral commission from the control of the Executive, who appoints the members of the ‘independent’ commission? The answer: Politicians.

In the UK, the electoral commission has become a tragi-comedy with politicians vying to place their own preferred political appointees into the electoral commission. Gerrymandering still occurs but in a different form: bargaining between the political appointees happen behind closed doors.  Basically, you let me Gerrymander this district and I let you Gerrymander that other one. Even if this provides some form of check-and-balance, voters can still legitimately feel cheated as their choices become subjugated to opaque political bargaining.

What is therefore more important than the ‘independence’ of the electoral commission is the transparency of these institutions. No matter if electoral districts are drawn up by politicians or political appointees, they should make clear the reasons for re-districting. Gerrymandering through political appointees is no better than gerrymandering by the Executive. Instead, Singapore should make sure its Electoral Commission give clear reasoning for re-districting and justify these with statistics e.g. change in demographics. If these rules are not clearly implemented now, if the PAP should one day lose power, one should not expect the new ruling party to behave any differently. Better to establish clear rules for transparency now than suffer the same fates as Western democracies that pontificate fairness and democratic values, but subvert the same values with hypocrisy.

Finally, on the matter of law-suits: I think this is a matter of what we want our political campaigning to be like. Personally, I think that if normally, rules of slander and libel prevent us from telling lies about people, then there is no reason that this should not apply during campaigning. Better this than to have a situation like in the US where somehow the law is suspended during political campaigns, and one can take out advertisements on TV blatantly lying about your opponents e.g. the Republicans taking ads to say that Obama was a Muslim and not born in the US. Much as I disagree with the Workers Party ideologically,  I have utmost respect for its candidates, especially Low Thia Kiang, for campaigning with integrity. If you go on stage and call someone corrupt without evidence, then you deserve to be sued, and politics is the better for it.

At the end of the day, it would take a radical to assert that the situation on Singapore is in any way comparable, even on a matter of scale, to the shenanigans that allegedly happened in Malaysia. There is a huge difference between gerrymandering, pork-barrel politics and rules against irresponsible campaign speech (which happens to varying degrees to all advanced democracies), and the stuffing of ballot boxes and phantom voters (which is outright electoral fraud). The electoral system in Singapore is not perfect, but in my opinion, not any more imperfect than in most advanced democracies. There is always room for improvement, but to compare Singapore to despotic regimes that commit outright fraud is not only inappropriate, it is very unfair.

Cheaper, Better, Faster ?

The question that has always bothered me is why people think that Singaporeans are losing jobs to foreigners merely because they are cheaper.

Why would an employer hire a foreigner merely because he is cheaper? If he is cheaper but worse, I wouldn't hire him.

At the very least, he needs to be cheaper but just as good.

If he is cheaper AND better, than it's a no brainer.

If Singaporeans are losing jobs because they are more expensive but not better, then the problem lies not with the Manpower Ministry but with Education.

If our education system is churning our workers that cost more but perform worse (or merely as well as a foreigner), than it has serious problems. It is the Ministry of Education that needs to soul search rather than Manpower.

By tweaking manpower policies we may be attacking the symtoms rather than the causes. Wrong medicine for the wrong disease.

We may be barking up the entirely wrong tree.

HDB Loses 1 Billion Dollars a Year - Why We Should Care

http://www.moneysmart.sg/money-talks/hdb-loses-1-billion-a-year-and-why-you-shouldnt-care/

Been seeing this article doing the rounds on cyberspace and needed to debunk it.

This blogger argues that HDB makes a loss because it buys land from SLA at market rates and it does not matter since it is from one government account to another.

The alternative to buying land from SLA at market rates is NOT buying land at market rates. Some have even argued that land costs should not be included in HDB prices.

This is fine if we are starting to build HDB flats all from new.

The challenge is that there are many existing HDB flat owners, especially from the baby-boomer generation who have benefited tremendously from their HDBs increasing in price. This asset price includes land price which has become increasing valuable as Singapore developed.

If we take away land costs or if HDB buys HDB flats at a discounted rate from SLA, the new HDB flats will cost a lot cheaper than existing HDB flats, whose prices include land cost.

This will also cost existing HDB flat prices to deflate leaving current HDB owners with massively devalued property.

Young people are understandably upset that HDB prices are spiralling upwards.

But those who clamour for massive deflation of HDB prices selfishly forget that this will be at the expense of the older generation who already own HDBs and whose savings and nest eggs are locked in their property, which can be unlocked when needed.

The government needs to balance the needs of people who have yet to buy homes who need them to be affordable, and those who already own homes who do not want to see their assets deflate in value.

People who argue that it shouldn't matter that HDB loses 1 billion a year are extremely short sighted.

If HDB has to lose so much money buying land at market rates to build affordable homes , it means that it is increasingly difficult to balance the needs of the young generation with the older generation.

We shouldn't care? On the contrary - we should be extremely concerned.