Article before the Punggol East By-election

A Test Of Maturity, Not Unity

The Presidential Elections in 2011 pointed to a polity characterised by a diversity of approaches to

how we should be governed. The candidates brought a plurality of perspectives to the table, asking
Singaporeans to reflect deeply on their personal aspirations in a rapidly maturing socio-economy.
They carried out a principled fight: the number of candidates compelled each to move away from the
traditional PAP / non-PAP binary and enter more deeply into a contest of ideas.

President Tan’s weak victory was less a measure of his personality for he is well-liked. It was
testament to the multiplicity of campaign platforms and styles than to the superior strength of his own,
focussing almost entirely as it did on his record in government.

If one goes back to the parliamentary debates preceding the Constitutional amendment which
brought in the Elected Presidency (EP), one would come away with the distinct impression that the EP
was intended to be compassed at sufficient distance from the Executive to ensure a further separation
of powers, all the better for democratic accountability.

All three EPs have in fact been so close to the government as to diminish the strength of the
original objective. The eligibility provisions were narrowed so tightly that only those most closely
associated with the establishment stood a chance of having their candidacy approved. The selection
committee is also composed of establishment types who perhaps – at least until the selection process
in 2011 – would have been unlikely to irritate the government by approving, say Mr J B Jeyaretnam,
who indicated his intention to stand in 1993. The late President Ong Teng Cheong, in an Asiaweek
interview in March 2000, himself noted the undue stringency of the eligibility criteria.

Editor: This is the link to the abovementioned Asiaweek interview:

http://www-cgi.cnn.com/ASIANOW/asiaweek/magazine/2000/0310/nat.singapore.ongiv.html. You can
hyperlink it.

Many citizens were unhappy with the PE2011 result for they believed the number of candidates
resulted in another PAP victory, despite the non-PAP vote, as it were, being 65%. If only there had
been one non-PAP candidate, they felt, the Istana would today be occupied by a candidate more likely
to hold close to the truer intent of the elected presidency. As the late President Ong Teng Cheong said
in the same Asiaweek interview, “The issue [is] whether they [want] a PAP man as president to check
on a PAP government, or whether it would be better to have a neutral independent”.
 But the argument is persuasive that the real test of an electoral candidate is not his or her
proximity to the government of the day (or indeed any other imperative) but the willingness to view
his role in terms of the service of the people and the nation rather than of the government itself.
President Ong Teng Cheong was the first and sadly to date only example of a President who tried to
fulfil the role according to the yardstick of service.

Despite the likeability and dignity of his predecessors and successors, including President Tan,
none has taken his role of guardian so seriously as President Ong who twice wrangled with the
government on matters clearly within his Constitutional purview but which the government
considered should not be placed under his hand: the first, his request to be advised of the extent of the
reserves which are protected by his office and the second, the sale of the POSB to DBS. (POSB, being
a statutory board, fell within the purview of the presidency).

In the 2011 PE, citizens faced precisely this question. In effect, each voter had to stand alone
and search his or her conscience which echoed what John Adams, the sixth US president said,
“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection
that your vote is never lost.”

And why? Because despite losing his key battles with the government, President Ong
established the principle that public servants have a duty to serve the people not the government. The
President showed, through his insistence on the parameters of his office, that people have a right in
their government and that the better objective of public office is the good fortune of Singapore and her
citizens. A principled loss in not a loss but merely a gain postponed. We have yet to take the true
measure of President Ong’s acts while in office.

We have become habituated in our country to a binary form of politics: PAP or non-PAP. This
should not surprise us given the longevity and ubiquity of the PAP. It’s founding Secretary-General
once said, “I make no apologies that the PAP is the Government and the Government is the PAP.” Dr
Lily Rahim, writing in Bangkok’s The Nation on 3 March 1999, noted that the PAP had fashioned
itself into a self-defined “national movement” as far back as 1982.

Editor: This is the link to the abovementioned The Nation interview, reprinted in Singapore Window:
http://www.singapore-window.org/sw99/90303na.htm. You can hyperlink it.

The PAP has used many creative means to establish itself as the sole decider of Singapore’s
path. It came to power on a democratic socialist platform of improving the people lives. In the
subsequent years, riding on Singapore’s natural advantages; its place in the global economy; the
economic infrastructure bequeathed by the former colonial power; and geopolitical developments like
the Vietnam War, it was able to deliver on its promise, in the process, augmenting and securing its
position in the polity.

As its credibility expanded, whether through a belief in its fundamental rightness, a recognition
of its electoral advantage, or a natural inclination to authoritarianism, it gradually moved to stamp its
power on the nation through a series of tactics designed to intimidate the population; extinguish the
political opposition; disestablish alternative sites of policy determination; neuter the universities; and
control press and broadcast.

In each subsequent decade, it carried out an instructive purge of selected adversaries, the better
to embed its tactical advantage. In the 1960s, we had Operation Coldstore, where more than a hundred
politicians and trade unionists were imprisoned under the ISA. In the 1970s, it was the so-called Euro-
communists and in the 1980s, a Marxist conspiracy. The lessons were well learnt: for almost fifteen
years a silence descended upon civil society.

The mood was reiterated in 1994, when the celebrated writer, Catherine Lim, wrote an article in
the Straits Times entitled, ‘PAP and the People: A Great Affective Divide’. She suggested that the
PAP “establish[ed] the primacy of economic development and link[ed] it with political security to
form a tight, incontrovertible equation of national survival, so that whatever fitted into the equation
would be rigorously promoted and whatever threatened to disrupt it would be slapped down
ruthlessly”. Senior members of the government roundly condemned her, using the oft-repeated but
flawed argument that to criticise the government is to undermine it and to undermine it is to engender
instability. PAP founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, used the clumsy but no less threatening metaphor of
knuckledusters and cul-de-sacs. His idiom would continue to haunt the PAP, for better and worse in
the decades to come.

Editor: This is the link to the abovementioned ST article, reprinted in Lim’s blog:
http://catherinelim.sg/1994/09/03/the-pap-and-the-people-a-great-affective-divide/. You can hyperlink
it.

Alongside its more unsavoury methods, the government carried out a campaign to build consent
through the PAP Community Foundation providing kindergartens which many have claimed to be a
platform for the promotion of PAP attitudes; through the network of community centres which fulfil
the same function and are directed from within the bowels of the Prime Minister’s Office; through a
press that – with the advent of the internet – has been shown up as an unashamed promoter of
government positions; and through a programme of national campaigns.
 The message has been clear. Take on the government at your peril. Criticise policy at your
peril. Mount an opposition to the PAP at your peril. It was only the advent of the internet facilitating
citizen journalism and online activism that enabled the people to express their views, create
solidarities in NGOs and the political parties, and begin to hold government to account. The debacle
surrounding the sale of a taxpayer-funded computer system to a company owned by former PAP
Members of Parliament, on whose real issues the mainstream media has chosen to remain silent, is a
case in point.

But in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as Singapore inches closer to its fiftieth
anniversary of independence, politics is being repositioned and the government forced to play catch-
up. It is no longer sufficient for the political theatre to merely oppose the PAP and wish for its
immediate replacement, both in individual constituencies and in government.

When the socio-political discourse was founded upon the threefold dimensions of prosperity,
stability and efficiency, the political argument did not seek to challenges the PAP’s policy hegemony.
The political opposition would allow the PAP to continue to govern and opposition MPs would
critique and refine government policy. This so-called by-election strategy developed in the 1980s was
born of this impulse so as to assure the people that voting in as many opposition MPs as possible was
sensible political behaviour since the PAP would be returned to government. The Workers’ Party co-
driver policy and the NSP’s approach of interrogating the policy framework while not yet producing
alternatives are a remnant of this impulse.

However the waters are choppier now. The economic environment is entirely different to what
it was in previous decades; the political framework is more complicated; the socio-cultural construct
vastly changed with influences, ideas and people coming from elsewhere; and global fundamentals
shifting from the pre-war settlement in which the PAP’s philosophy was defined. Citizens can no
longer be content that PAP governors appreciate the world in which we live, insulated as they are
from the everyday concerns of the people. They must seriously ask of themselves if PAP policy,
entrenched and reified over fifty-eight years, can weather the storms ahead despite its erstwhile
durability.

In the last few days, the government has announced poor economic growth and a technical
recession. The response has been to reiterate economic fundamentals and call for productivity gains,
despite the abject failure of productivity measures over the last several decades. The response to the
rising prices of public goods is more subsidies. The response to galloping inflation is to lay the blame
on escalating commodity prices worldwide. No new philosophy, no new approach has emanated from
the PAP in a long time.
 No doubt, the test of the PAP’s continuing ability to govern is a matter for the next General
Elections to be held at the very latest by early 2017. But it is, in any case, within these parameters that
the role of Members of Parliament should be tested. And that test will no doubt come to the fore when
the Prime Minister decides to call the by-election in Punggol East, which the courts say he need not
do but which his courage and moral authority emphatically dictate.

Whichever parties stand for election in the Punggol East by-election, including the SDP which
announced our candidacy last week, the question that must occupy the voters is not the tactical
potential to shift an MP from the government to the opposition benches. It is this: that the candidate
should be elected who can be trusted both to represent the people’s views in the House and which,
therefore, impose on him or her the concomitant ability to present alternative proposals which the
House can debate.

The word parliament comes from the Old French parler which means to talk. It is a long-
established principle of human civilisation that the prosecution of any question of human wellbeing
can only result from the best quality discussion that can be raised in the nation’s representative
congress. It is the very function of civilised, modern government that policy determination, execution
and review be covered by the most learned and erudite debate leading to the refinement of policy. No
other way is possible, particularly when the giants of the old PAP like Dr Goh Keng Swee have
departed the political scene, the political-economic climate so uncertain, and the basic demographics
of our nation given to so much flux and change.

An MP equipped to serve both his constituents and the wider population of Singapore must be
attended by two handmaidens: a backroom research base composed of competent experts and a series
of policies able to counter the deteriorating status quo. We should be under no illusion that a lone SDP
Member of Parliament can change policy overnight. But policy cannot be improved, let alone changed
if we do not have these two prior resources that our MP can take to the House on our behalf.

But most of all, the policies of the parties which come to the nation’s congress must be
underlined by a key factor without which no politician can claim an entitlement to serve the people: a
basic compassion for the wellbeing of the people. For without a value base to guide our Members of
Parliament, politics becomes, in that memorable phrase, merely the art of the possible. The art of the
necessary is rather what the people require.

The needs of our people are urgent and the needs of the nation imminent. No party can afford to
wait until it has replaced the PAP before it begins to govern for then it would be too late. And no
party can afford to proceed through the enterprise of government merely on the basis of a tactical
calculation of converting PAP votes into votes for an alternative party.
 President Ong, a lone voice speaking from the relative distance of the Istana, may have been
ignored at the time when he spoke. A lone SDP parliamentarian, speaking from a similar distance on
the backbenches of Parliament may also appear to have a very thin voice. But a voice that speaks from
a position of compassion through a framework of constructive policy guided by competent research
will begin a process of re-turning the nation’s government from its traditional objective of entrenching
and stabilising its own fortunes to one that puts the people’s needs before all other purposes. A vote
for an SDP candidate in Punggol East will be a vote for every single citizen of this republic.