Nice:
A Letter to Sim Ann:
In Response to Her Article "Of Wrongful Pride and Prejudice" (Straits Times, 7 Sept 2012)
Oh Sim Ann,
How do we rebuke thee.
Let us count the ways
We despise you to the depth and breadth, and height
Our soul can reach while feeling out of sight
Our contempt for you and your ilk has reached a new low after reading your article in the Straits Times which shows up the utter hypocrisy and vacuity of argument that we have come to associate the PAP with nowadays.
First let us examine your career.
You see, Sim Ann,
you were "elected" in 2011 as part of the Holland-Bukit Timah team.
If you noticed, we have put a quotation mark on "elected"; for it is not unreasonable to posit that you entered the parliament on the coattails of the other established candidates chiefly a minister by the name of Vivian Balakrishnan.
So Sim Ann, we would like to ask: where do you draw the mandate or moral authority to lecture others?
First, using the Straits Times as your podium to throw potshots at your political opponent is disingenuous: the broadsheet dictates the tone and direction of the debate and decides whose views to give prominence to, as well as who to have the last word. As a newspaper beholden to the PAP with its Chief Editor being an overtly pro-PAP type and its Deputy Editor being the sister of the Minister of Information & the Arts, we all know who that would be.
Sim Ann, for you then to claim moral superiority over Gerard Giam therefore baffles the mind.
We cannot reconcile this display of moral uprightness with your acceptance of a fundamentally unjust state of affairs where every mainstream channel of communication to the populace is controlled and aggrandized by the PAP to constantly churn out propaganda and engage in fear mongering to the disadvantage of its opponents.
Where, may we ask you, Sim Ann, is the equality, justice and fairness?
Now Sim Ann, if the principles of justice and fairness are not being extended to this country's own citizens, on what grounds are we or you talking about being just and fair to the foreigners amidst us? Should you not be asking Lee and Goh to accept the $30,000 settlement offered by Dr Chee? Should you not be calling for a
committee of inquiry into the wrongful arrest of your 22 fellow Singaporeans in 1987 on trumped up charges of Marxist conspiracy?
Indeed, to further discover the vacuousness of your article, one only needs to look more closely at your pre-MP career record.
From 1998 to 2000, you served as the Assistant Director for Finance Policy and Planning at the Ministry of Health. We know that today, our public hospitals are facing chronic overcrowding.
At the height of the problem last year, some of these hospitals even had to place beds along the corridor for patients admitted to the A&E Department.
Overcrowding is just one of the problems afflicting our public healthcare system. Questions are also being asked of the adequacy of the PAP's 3M healthcare framework which has disadvantaged the poor and saw the burden on the middle class increased.
So Sim Ann, what were doing in her two years as Assistant Director for Finance Policy at MOH? Weren't top civil servants who are President's Scholars like yourself supposed to possess - as the PAP would have us believe - both helicopter vision and long term planning acumen?
In 2009, after various stints in a few other ministries, you became the Director of the National Population Secretariat, known today as the National Population and Talent Division (NPTD).
According to its website, the NPTD "strives to achieve a sustainable and cohesive population that supports a vibrant economy, with a strong Singaporean core." Its main mission is to drive "the coordination and implementation of population policies across Government agencies."
We note the word: "coordination".
As we have seen over the past decade, our population policy has been anything but coordinated.
While flooding this country with foreigners, you and your ilk failed to look at whether our public infrastructure and housing sector could support this influx. So Sim Ann, what were you doing in your two years as Director of NPTD?
Sim Ann, may we also ask you: where were you when the family of cab driver Cheng Teck Hock was in the depth of their grief over his death, murdered by the filthy rich rascal Ma Chi? Incidentally, Sim Ann, did you know that the Chinese Embassy was the one that issued a statement to its own citizens to respect lives and laws when overseas? Would you donate at least 10% of your MP allowance to Cheng's family please?
Now let's examine your article in detail.
First, we think it should be titled "A Paen to Lee Hsien Loong". This is only appropriate considering that the thrust of it is praising Lee for what you call "moral leadership".
But we beg to differ, Sim Ann.
Moral leadership is not a buffet spread where you pick and choose the items you like on your plate. True moral leadership involves acting right at all times; and the impulse to act right should always take preference over the need of the political leader to win at all cost. Hence, a person like the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi might have acted morally right at various points in his tenure but to call him a moral leader would be a stretch of imagination. The same can be said for George Bush.
In the same vein, we can say Lee acted morally right in this instance but we cannot say he has moral leadership. There are too many reminders of injustices - both historical and in the present - that are not morally right in Singapore's political landscape for us to ascribe moral leadership to Lee. What Kant calls the "categorical imperative" to act morally is and has always been sorely missing from Singapore's political development.
Moral leadership also presupposes the existence of leadership and as the common refrain goes, leadership is action, not position. On this count, has Lee succeeded? The conclusion is ambiguous. Thus far, Lee's approach to governing appears to be based on reactive as opposed to proactive politics.
Reactive politics essentially involves waiting for trigger events before making adjustments or introducing new measures. The analogy is that of a man who wakes up and starts reacting only when he sees the truck coming at him.
After praising the PM, you went on to throw potshots at Gerald Giam and the Workers Party.
According to your warped interpretation, Gerald Giam had tried to whitewash expressions of xenophobia with his argument that we needed to look beyond the online vitriol and examine the underlying reasons for this anger.
In your hurry to condemn Gerald Giam, you had perhaps failed to notice this simple two liner in his article:
"All this is not an attempt to justify any of the baseless insults against foreigners seen on some websites. Making prejudiced remarks against foreigners is objectionable and un-Singaporean, and should stop."
Now Sim Ann, if moral leadership is important to you and seeing that you have three children to whom we are sure you would want to part the right values, would you stand up and apologize to Gerald please?
Moving on to Workers Party, you noted that Gerald Giam's attempt to justify the online vitriol (according to you) was "disingenuous" for the Workers Party had only six months ago criticized the PAP's tightening of the availability of work permits on grounds that it was hurting the small and medium-sized enterprises.
Nothing could be further from the truth than this mischievous attempt to fudge the issue!
Again, in your over-zealous but poorly thought-out attempt to tar the Workers Party, you had ignored the fact that in its Manifesto, the Workers Party had not called for a stop on inflow of foreign labour. On the contrary, it had called for an attenuation of the policy.
Allow us to quote Chapter 10, Part B, Para 1 of the Manifesto:
"The inflow of foreign workforce at all skill levels should be calibrated for each industry, taking into account the suitability of Singaporeans for those industries, productivity targets and sustainability."
Now, Sim Ann, we see nothing disingenuous about Gerald's call to examine the underlying reasons for the online vitriol and the Workers Party criticism of the PAP's one-size-fits-all approach to foreign labour.
We at The Alternative View also share the same view as the Workers Party: there are jobs that Singaporeans just do not want to take up (for instance, construction work) and we recognize the need to import foreign labour in such sectors and we thank the foreign workers for their hard work.
We are not, by any stretch of imagination, xenophobic.
What we are seeking to bring forth is the argument that the foreign labour and immigration policies of the PAP have been deeply flawed: it has failed to inject an element of sensibility, proportion and sensitivity to our social fabric. Most crucially, it has failed to place Singaporeans first.
Now does that surprise you, Sim Ann? It probably does given the propensity of PAP MPs to groupthink.
But Sim Ann, given the many false accusations you have levelled at Gerald and the Workers Party in addition to your own culpability - as an erstwhile top civil servant - in many of the misguided policies of the PAP, maybe the title of your article "Of Wrongful Pride and Prejudice" was really referring to you.
The Alternative View
http://therealsingapore.com/content/rebuttal-letter-mp-sim-ann
