Thoughts on the Coming Election

This will be the first General Election in Singapore since I turned 21, and I will get to vote as an overseas voter at the consulate in New York. It is certainly not the most convenient situation - it's a five hour bus ride each way between there and Boston, and I was worried that I would have to reschedule an exam depending on when the overseas polling would take place - but I think that it's both my right and duty as a citizen to cast my ballot, given that it's within my means to do so.

Watching the media coverage from afar, mainly through the establishment Straits Times and the 'citizen journalism' portal The Online Citizen, I'm removed from the hustle and bustle of the activity that surrounds the campaigning. I can't attend any rallies, can't see the candidates on their walkabouts, nor can I get a sense of what "the average Singaporean", who doesn't post his thoughts and opinions online, is thinking. This puts me in a position to be what the prime minister would consider to be the ideal voter, who is calm, rational, and unswayed by emotional rhetoric or crowd fervor. At least, this was the reason that the 'cooling off' day was implemented as a pause in campaigning before polling day, to allow voters to reflect 'coolly and calmly' on the issues.



Despite the distance between me and home shores, I've still been able to make my own observations. Even just viewing the news articles and videos on the Straits Times website, and this is about as pro-establishment as one can get short of the PAP's in-house newsletter, many things jump out if you read between the lines.

The usual mantra goes that the online Singaporean is loudly anti-establishment and anti-PAP while protected by his online screen name, but daren't put his real name to his views. I've seen it written that Singaporeans following the election through the online media will be sorely disappointed after the results are announced, because the online bluster doesn't match up to how people will actually vote, and while the opposition voices are loud, it isn't because of their numbers. "Just you wait," the cynic says, "after this it will be business as usual."

But it can't be.

This is the first election since donkey's years ago that almost all the seats are being contested (if we ignore the incident in Tanjong Pagar). At the very least it shows that Singaporeans are getting more engaged, and willing to put themselves forward for political causes. It's not just about the candidates. For every person who declares his candidacy on Nomination Day, there are hundreds of volunteers who put in the time to organize the rallies, print posters, update party websites, and so on. The influence of social media and the Internet is harder to pin down, but at the very least I can truthfully state that had I been trying to stay informed five years ago it would have been very much harder.

I've made a sincere effort (as much as I can between finishing my final papers, studying for exams, and preparing to graduate) to stay informed. I've looked over the candidates' biographies for both the teams contesting in my ward (East Coast), and looked over their party manifestos. I've watched videos of them on Nomination Day, and listened to speeches and other media on both party websites and news portals. Here's what I've gathered:

1. The Taiwanese Ghost, the Aljunied Regret, and 14 year old Boys
It was only a matter of time before someone brought up the Taiwanese parliament. It's a favorite example whenever the present government wants to illustrate why 'vociferous debate' in parliament is messy and undesirable. Look at them, they say, would you want that to happen in Singapore? Would you want lawmakers to trade punches and slap each other? We'd become a laughing stock! This time around it was brought up by K Shanmugam, the erstwhile minister for law, during his long ping-pong match with Low Thia Khiang of the Workers Party over the co-driver/co-pilot analogy.

Next up was Lee Kuan Yew telling the voters of Aljunied that they would 'regret' it if they voted in the Workers Party over the incumbent PAP team. His statement, as far as I've been able to tell from the video, left it at that. He didn't go into specifics as to what these regrets might be, though in part the implications need not have been spelled out: losing two cabinet ministers if the PAP team lost, promised HDB upgrading schemes not being carried out. But what else might happen? Will voters who make the 'wrong choice' especially on the scale of a GRC be proactively punished for their decision (on top of the upgrading issue)?

Finally the matter of Vivian Balakrishnan's attempted smear on Vincent Wijeysingha, with murky remarks about how Wijeysingha is on the side of pederasts and the so-called 'gay agenda'. The video that was the basis for his remarks is on YouTube, and you can see it for yourself. If you actually watch it then you'll realize that the smear was simply that, a smear with no basis in fact.

The video was filmed at a forum on repealing Section 377A, the law that criminalizes homosexual acts between men. There were presumably several speakers, and the video mostly shows someone identified as the lawyer M. Ravi speaking on stage. Wijeysingha never himself said anything about pederasty. Where the phrase "14-year-old" actually comes up is right at the beginning (the video begins right in the middle of a sentence, and this makes it all the more easier to take the speech out of context) where Ravi is discussing the discrepancy between different ages of consent in various countries - in Singapore it is 16, in some European countries it's 14 even between males. It was really a one-off example and he never revisits it. Wijeysingha later asks a question as a member of the audience, but on a different matter relating to the repeal of the law.

Of course, all that Balakrishnan had to do was to associate the words "paedophilia" and "homosexuality" with the name of "Vincent Wijeysingha" and that would have been enough to discourage many voters, even those who are pro-opposition, from ever voting for the man. On the Online Citizen website, for example, most online comments to the articles are strongly anti-PAP, but whenever articles relating to gay rights or homosexual issues are published, a large proportion of the comments show a strong aversion to homosexuality.

These examples show suggestion and insinuation without direct statements of fact being used. For a party that prides itself on being the party of reason and cool rationality, the PAP is very savvy at using insinuation and emotional suggestion to sway the uncertain voter.

2. Getting into Parliament - a ladder or an escalator?
Anyone watching Singapore politics from afar would think that "talent" was this magical aura, and that to spot new talent requires an expertise akin to choosing the next Dalai Lama from among a hundred wailing infants-in-arms. The paucity of talent is the argument used by the PAP to defend its supposed monopoly on talent. We've got them all, they say, because there are so few, and if you vote us out you'll be asking for trouble because these upstarts don't have the same talent.

Yet if one looks up the backgrounds of the candidates the striking thing is that the PAP candidates are mostly people from "within the system" - ex-civil servants, ex-military, doctors, NTUC people - whereas the opposition candidates are much more diverse, including a large proportion who are self-made entrepreneurs. The institutional types of the PAP could be said to have gone up a fairly straightforward escalator in their careers - always protected by the institutions they belong to, whether the civil service or the army, whereas the entrepreneurial types of the opposition have known and tasted uncertainty and risk before their biggest gamble yet in the elections, climbing up the ladder, so to speak. The question is which type we would want more in our parliament? Ideally a mix of both - people who know how 'the system' works and can work with it, and those who bring in experiences on the ground and in the private sector.

It is interesting how Lee Kuan Yew endorsed his former principal private secretary, and said that he had the ability to be a cabinet minister. This is perhaps something that could only happen in Singapore - before he is even elected to parliament, he gets tipped to be in the cabinet! Unfortunately this epitomizes for me what is wrong with the PAP's assertion that it has monopoly on talent. This supposed talent comes from a small pool, that is very much inward-looking. Such introspection can easily turn into myopia, or worse.

3. The language of patronage
What also disturbed me was the close link between the PAP and the NTUC and the so-called labor movement. There is a well-rehearsed rhetoric and scripted language used by the PAP that I gleaned from videos of its rallies and events, that to me seemed almost ritualistic. When I watched one party event where the new candidates were being introduced to the party, I was jarred when they addressed each other as 'comrade'. In speeches and statements about the NTUC, cabinet ministers and PAP candidates keep on referring to this thing called the 'labour movement'.

In his rally speech to the unionists, Lim Swee Say spoke to his 'brothers and sisters' in the 'labour movement'. Just because one calls something a 'movement' doesn't make it so. This seems to me almost a sort of linguistic wishful thinking. We have to keep up the show that the 'unions' in Singapore have continuity in more than name with the same unions of the 1960s and 70s, that they are still workers' organizations devoted to workers' interests, run by workers whom they represent. If the career trajectory of Lee Kuan Yew's former PPS is anything to go by, this is not the case. He was 'headhunted' from the civil service to a leadership role in the NTUC. To assert that its leadership is representative of its membership is misleading.

Lim also argued for a close relationship between the PAP and the NTUC. Dismissing concerns about a 'conflict of interest', he said that on the contrary, having cabinet ministers as heads of the 'labour movement' instead allowed them to advance the NTUC's agenda at the highest levels. This is the language of patronage, not of democracy. The same language of patronage is used when prospective MPs assure the voters that they will 'take care' of the ward (and opposition candidates use this manner of speaking too). Singapore is so small that ward boundaries are pretty much arbitrary, if the shifting electoral boundaries hasn't made that clear already. The idea that we are choosing our patrons rather our representatives sums up a lot of what's wrong with our political rhetoric.

The end of the rally was an eye opener. Clenching their fists, the guests of honor at the May Day rally, who included much of the present cabinet, shouted in unison with the crowd: "Majulah NTUC! Majulah PAP! Majulah Singapura!" There isn't even the attempt to defend their nominal autonomy and independence from party interests, like in the case of the PA. In their minds, these three entities are one and the same. They sink or swim together, the only issue being who sinks first.

4. The threat of populism and the need for civic engagement
The issues that the opposition parties are fanning during this campaign season are mostly bread-and-butter issues. Those which come up over and over again: excessive reliance on foreign workers who have no loyalty to the country and who supposedly take our jobs and depress our wages, the need for a minimum wage, the rising cost of living and health care, and excessive pay for cabinet ministers.

Populism is an easy card to play, because people get really riled up when they feel that they are being dealt an unfair hand. It is even more potent when a clear enemy can be identified: the foreign workers, the ministers who don't deserve their pay, etc. It is also very dangerous, because the economy sometimes works in non-intuitive ways. As the PAP argues, importing foreign workers may actually bring a net benefit because they stimulate the economy, and the impression that they are stealing our jobs is an illusion born of resentment and a poor economic situation in general. Populist policies of redistribution taken to extremes could wreck an otherwise thriving economy. They also fan the flames of class divide and resentment, which had severe social consequences in Thailand, for example.

On the other hand, just because your policies are populist doesn't mean that they're dangerous or destabilizing by definition. Likewise, minimum wage could be a good thing for Singaporeans, if we could implement it properly. This is where the media and political commentators should be stepping in to weigh the different sides of the policy divide. We can listen to the politicians give their proposals, but are there 3rd-party voices who aren't politically invested, whom we can trust? Unfortunately Singapore seems to be lacking this capacity in our media. We certainly have the people who can crunch the numbers and offer an assessment, but several things stand in the way.

The statistics required for us to evaluate things fairly are not generally made available to the public, such as in the pricing of HDB flats and the costs of their construction over the years. This prevents any quantitative evaluation of policy, and stunts Singaporeans' ability to discuss policy and politics on a fairly primitive, qualitative scenario-based level, which of course is much more susceptible to insinuation and fear-mongering. Those who could also don't want to speak up and 'get in the way'. If they're for the opposition's policy proposals, they stand to be shot down publicly by the establishment's heavyweights or simply ignored in the press. If they are for the establishment, they get labeled 'government stooges' and aren't taken seriously by supporters of the alternative. The lack of a culture of civic engagement in our country, so carefully fostered by successive PAP governments, is a serious deficiency and a stark irony, given how well-educated our population is.


I watched Lim Swee Say's May Day speech to the NTUC, and in it he asserted that minimum wage was not for Singapore. This was a rally speech, and not a white paper, so he needn't have gone beyond assertion. The problem for us is that in the absence of a culture of political and policy commentary that goes beyond assertion, Singaporeans cannot choose rationally and are all the more poorer for it. The PAP's stand so far has been 'trust us, we know better', presumably because its ministers and MPs have access to government statistics that the opposition (and the public at large) does not. This is dangerous. Because if voters choose a populist government whose populism is not guided by the hard data (because it has been denied them over the years by the current government), we all stand to lose. By trying to make itself indispensable, the PAP has harmed the interests of Singapore as a whole.

5. The race card
The most dangerous and polarizing of all the issues, if Lee Kuan Yew's pronouncements are to be believed, and I certainly do believe him. At the same time, the racial lens through which our state sees the populace (summed up in the acronym CMIO - Chinese Malay Indian 'Other') is a self-fulfilling situation. If we want to keep putting Singaporeans into these immutable boxes, and talking about a "Chinese community" or "Malay community" as if they were real people with personalities and predispositions (technically speaking, to 'reify' them), then we'll never put the danger of racial polarization behind because we're always thinking about it in those terms. I was struck by Lee Kuan Yew's comments on the WP team in Aljunied. To paraphrase him, he said that there's Low Thia Khiang, Sylvia Lim, one celebrity (Chen Show Mao), and two unknowns, one Indian and one Malay. Why was it necessary to bring up the races of the two remaining members of the team (Pritam Singh and Muhamad Faisal Manap)? Unfortunately this is a recurring theme in Lee's view of the universe. His recent comments on the Malay community attracted a lot of criticism online. Government policy also treats Malays differently from the other racial groups, e.g. in military postings.

The sum effect is that one is being labeled by race first, before anything else, especially if one is in a minority group, before anything else about one's person. One can't just be an MP, one is forever labeled 'a Malay/Muslim MP', or a 'Malay-Muslim doctor'. If Malays and Muslims are being regarded as their own separate constituency, then all their other concerns - as Singaporeans interested in issues of the economy, in law, in education - are subsumed to 'Malay-Muslim issues' which the government supposes must be their top concern simply because of their race and religion. Hence its representatives can say hubristically such statements as "Malay-Muslim voices are heard in unison", for example.

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Am I an opposition supporter? I don't hesitate to say that I am, because it is high time that we start building a mature political system in our country where a plurality of views is respected, and the social and cultural infrastructure for debating them in public is in place. If not, we are on the path to potential disaster. The PAP points to its track record, but we are electing a parliament for the future, not the past. The rapid economic development and transition to first world status, without which of course I would not be where I am, was enabled by the specific historical circumstances of our country's birth. These conditions are not at play now, and the same kind of top-down politics could hamper us more than it helps us, as our country grows and matures, with or without the nanny that saw it through its infancy.