The recent election results in Singapore have been termed water-shed for the ruling party People Action Party (PAP), opposition parties especially Workers Party (WP) and all voters. The outcome can mean many things to many some of which includes:
- time and tide might NOT heal everything and over time, people might NOT forget. Politics is no longer a once in 5 year event during election campaigning,
- whether there is a need to revamp the voting system especially the Group Representation Constituency (GRC) system towards a system that moves us towards a more direct form of democracy,
- what messages are the voters telling both PAP and the opposition parties on the brand of democracy they want to see in Singapore not only in the future but also in the near future within reasonable bounds,
- last but not least, voters were politically emphatic about the voting scene due to the lack of choice in credible alternatives opposition parties in the past but is begining to realize that every vote counts and it starts with their own vote now that we have more credible, brave and altruistic opposition parties.
My position is not a binary one that runs along party lines of PAP or the opposition but how we as citizens of Singapore can participate more actively in the political process rather than treat it as a once in 5 year event. The fault for current state of democracy lies both with PAP as well as our political empathy in the past 30 years or so creating a vacuum of political power dominated by PAP. Perhaps the one party rule in the last 30 years by PAP has been an accidental fortune in that sense. A focused non-partisan rule could have been one of the major ingredients for our phenomenal economic and social growth achieved mainly by well tried and tested economic development model based mainly on foreign investment, regional service centers and export led of certain industrial clusters likes petrochemical, electronics, disk drive, wafer-fab, pharmaceutical and bio-technology. Leveraging our labour cost advantage, investor friendly policies and good industrial infrastructure, the unemployment problem was plugged by PM Lee Kuan Yew and his team. The foresight and gumption of the second generation leaders lead by PM Goh Chok Tong with the advantage of Lee and his team supporting Goh. The single party enabled Goh to execute a unilateral risky but calculated strategic move away from labour intensive to skill intensive by raising wages, skills and infrastructure in one bold orchestrated move and it worked again.
PM Lee Hsien Loong son of Lee Kuan Yew took over the reign from Goh. Lee jr started his reign with an unfair disadvantage having to defend nepotism right from the start. His father's generation was equated to building the hardware. Goh's dispensation built the software. Now that we have a complete solution in computer speak, Lee jr now is now charged with building the heart-ware to bring it from 3rd world to 1st world. Besides nepotism, Lee jr did not have a good economic and political developmental template to depend on unlike his dad and Goh. His team actually did not have the full mandate with his dad and Goh still looking over his shoulders closely most probably until recent past with his dad and Goh stepping down by exiting the cabinet formally.
Lee jr filled his team with capable technocrats that mostly graduated in the top tier of ivy leagues and I believe that most were well meaning in wanting to bring Singapore to 1st world. Besides the unchartered water that Lee jr and his team were maneuvering into, they also had to face an aging and dwindling population as the total fertility rate headed south to reach 1.2. The technocratic team went into short term mode to cure it in a measurable manner that they knew best and with dated advice from his dad and Goh. Tax incentives and more child friendly policies were put in place to very little effect and the team sent in the crash cart and tried to revive the dying patient by immigration on a massive scale. Being a relatively young emigrant country, it was in the process of building a common identity. The mass immigration created a whole host of issues like depressing the wages of the lower strata of society and lead to a growing GINI index that accompanied good news rise in GDP. All was not exactly rosy on the domestic front for example health care cost faced by the population escalated because of a combination of aging population and public healthcare policies like mean testing. The escalating price of private housing spilled into public housing. Transport system was also facing congestion on public roads as the Electronic Road Pricing and Certificate of Entitlement meant to curtail usage and ownership respectively were not only unable to curb the congestion but lead to an increase in transportation cost overall. Public transportation was faced with sardine packed mass transit railway during peak hours mirroring the situation in Japan.
Many initiatives were put in place in the arena of heart-ware like giving the arts and cultural scene a lift and liberalizing censorship laws. These initiatives not only take relatively more time than hardware and software to show results but is also less measurable.
- this symphony was the piece that launched the composer Anton Bruckner career into stardom. I sincerely hope that this particular water-shed election results will lead to a right angle turn for our country as a whole,
- the second movement Adagio was used to announce 2 historically significant turning points like when Admiral Karl Dönitz announced Adolf Hitler death on 1st May 1945 and also just before announcing his defeat in Stalingrad on 31st January 1943. On this note, I do hope that the election results as a clarion call for danger ahead if we maintain status quo and dismiss the election results as noisy crying babies that can be easily pacified and forgotten.
For those that like to have a deeper understanding of Anton Bruckner and Politics, there is a book "Bruckner's Symphonies-Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics" by Prof. Julian Horton. Cambridge University Press (2004) ISBN-13 978-0-521-82354-8. I have not read the book personally but a cursory browse says it can be quite academic.
Cheers,,,,, Peter Lye
Safe Harbor
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