http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/2011/05/02/us1-3b-for-voters-is-it-boodle/
US$1.3b for voters: Is it boodle?
Maxwell Coopers
May 2, 2011
Depending of how one actually looks at it, Singapore authorities would have distributed some US1.3 billion to all its citizens by polling day next Saturday.
The total sum was promised in a parliamentary debate this year to help offset the ‘pain’ caused by persistently, high cost of living. The amount of monies to be distributed varies according to the age and income groups.
So regardless of whether it is a millionaire living in gilded and leafy Bukit Timah, or a struggling cab driver breaking the bonds of impecunious poverty in a three-room public housing apartment, the funds will be distributed all the same.
There is no distinction between income groups and no means tested mechanism to justify the payouts based on needs and wants.
The only thing that varies is the amount to be given out. Permanent residents who are disallowed from voting on polling day on 7th May will get nothing.
It always is tempting to label the ruling Peoples’ Action Party (PAP) as a clique with a ‘heart’ but that hardly seems to be the case.
If anything it amounts to grandstanding for the act of making huge payouts only happens whenever an election is called. It happened shortly before the 2006 elections and it also happened before the 2001 elections.
Predictably most in the country were not amused by the payouts which in the main are nothing more than symbolic gestures of supposed human fellowship and bereft of any real commitment to remove the real seeds of disaffection. Poverty in the country is artfully disguised and not made to show in official government statistics.
“It will be a shame if people think that this government is generous”, declared a professional living in the hotly contested electoral ward of Aljunied that is widely forecast to fall into opposition hands on Saturday and thereby reduce the ruling party’s parliamentary and poll majorities.
The rising cost of living, exorbitantly high public housing and the indiscriminate influx of foreigners who are ‘abetting’ in those increases are fuelling anger and alienation in the nation that since 1959 has only been ruled by the Peoples’ Action Party (PAP).
A defensive PAP
For the first time it now seems, it is beginning to appear it is the PAP that is now on the defensive with its back to the wall.
At most PAP rallies there has been no mention of how it plans to tackle the growing socio-economic divide in the country growing exponentially year after year. And there is also no mention of how the PAP plans to lower the rising cost of public housing.
“There is a real possibility of a bursting of the housing bubble in the years ahead if the government withdraws from providing assistance to opposition-held wards” intoned a businessman in the West Coast Group Representation Council (GRC).
(Singapore’s electoral precincts are divided in GRCs to allow minority race representation in parliament though critics have charged it amounts to gerrymandering to keep the ruling party in power).
He was referring to home owners defaulting on their bank loans because of the PAP’s threat to withdraw public assistance services and thereby cause the prices of their homes to tumble.
It is somewhat well documented that PAP resorts to ‘witch-hunts’ and ‘revenge attacks’ whenever and wherever it is voted out of constituencies; something the public first got an espy of in 1984 when then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew famously quipped of “changing the one-man, one vote” system and then telling his countrymen of a possible withdrawal of services to constituencies that voted against the PAP.
Lee had argued such a practice, i.e. withdrawal of public services, is necessary because it forms “part of the learning process”.
Indeed what has happened since then is a ‘converse’ form of learning. Opposition-held wards continue to turn in parliamentarians from opposition groups, as how it has been in Potong Pasir since 1984 and Hougang since 1991.
From an ideological standpoint it is not hard to understand the PAP’s entrenched aversion to welfare, or even any remote, watered-down or sanitised notion of it.
Bussed to rallies
It has always argued that welfarism weakens a man’s spirit and robs a nation’s of its productive potential.
That must have been the case back in the 1960s but the kind of welfarism or measures of it required these days, is far from the circumstances that prevailed in the 1960s.
That welfarism is ‘bad’ has always been the PAP’s guiding credo and if the Singapore public knows it any better, it first came to the fore when the city-state’s then Chief Minister, David Marshall was unceremoniously thumbed down in a parliamentary debate in 1963, when arguing for a tweaking of the nest egg savings institutionalised in the nation’s Central Provident Fund (CPF) for it to be applied for medical expenses for the young and aged sick.
Yet the perception is fast gaining ground that the PAP is running with its tail between its legs. They seemed resigned to losing Aljunied GRC and are also beginning to appear desperate.
Eye witness accounts say elderly citizens on evening jaunts were rounded up in Jurong and western parts of the country and herded over in buses to PAP election rallies that to the ruling party’s dismay have been seeing historically low levels of audience attendances!
Wonder if that too, is something of a boodle?
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