I have to say I quite enjoyed the pounding Singapore's Health Minister gave WP last week. I'm just surprised more outlets haven't commented on his unusually direct speech.
Not only did he lambaste the identity politics, cynically used in Singapore's last General Election, but also singled out the remaining opposition party in the parliament – so eager to abuse sensitive topics of diversity for political gain – for lack of diversity in its ideas for Singapore:
"I feel that if the WP is positioning itself as the ‘0.5’ in a ‘1.5 party system’, I think it needs to present a principled, consistent, and coherent approach to the main challenges facing Singapore.
In a maturing democracy, voters deserve and want more than positions that agree with the PAP’s policies in general but suggest ‘let’s do a little more’, or offer something that appears to be more generous, more compassionate, and yet requires fewer hard choices. This falls short of being a real alternative. A real alternative promises gains with accompanying trade-offs, so that voters can make informed decisions and not be lulled into comforting illusions."
In other words, Ong Ye Kung just told WP to earn its pay by showing some originality. Good luck with that!
Pritam Singh defended himself and his party against the comparisons OYK made to developed countries in the West, using the usual excuse that "Singapore is not as mature" as they are, because of the dominance of one party since independence and the alleged "asymmetry of information", suggesting that the government isn't sharing enough data for them to make better policy proposals.
As someone who is regularly digging through publicly available numbers, I call that rubbish.
As we well know, the political strategy which appears to have worked for the Workers' Party is to take a small step away from the PAP on every issue. Look at the government's ideas and then shave them from one side, add a little from another and pretend to be more generous. Simple.
The party's approach is guided by avoidance of mistakes, also because whenever it tries to infuse its policy talk with ideas or predictions, it embarrassingly falls flat on its face.
Remember the 2019 white paper on HDB, where they repeatedly claimed Singapore would have a price decline problem, eroding retirement savings, and that too many flats were built in relation to population growth?
"Growing the BTO supply with flats at 99-year leases while population growth is slow and the society is aging tends to lead to a tipping point when HDB resale prices start to decline, eroding retirement adequacy and bequest values while generating capital losses for some."
"Resident population growth has been approximately 30,000 a year since 2010 and 2011. Assuming an average household size of 3.3, this would mean that around 9,000 or so new dwelling units are required annually. Completions within the same time period have far exceeded the resident population growth. Private vacancies have only started to inch down, but there are still around 12,000 private units completing up to 2022.
Will the HDB have a vacancy rate problem, compounded by a still steady stream of 16,000 to 17,000 BTO units in the last few years, which will continue to increase supply up to 2022?"
As I explained just last month, Singapore's population growth could stop completely and the country might still need as many as 570,000 new apartments, because what drives demand is not immigration but changing household structure and size.
How do you expect a party whose very leadership can't comprehend freely available national figures to come up with meaningful policy proposals?
We had another example of their very basic incompetence just last week, when Jamus Lim presented WP's proposal for reforming COE, by offering... 10% discounts to qualifying families.
How exactly 10% off $120,000 is meant to benefit anybody in need, when they still are a long way from being able to afford it? When you factor in the cost of the car the cut is closer to 5% of the total value.
Has anybody thought this through?
No, in a typical WP fashion they took an existing policy and tried to promise something that wouldn't sound outlandish, even if in practice it wouldn't benefit anybody else other than the very same people buying cars today, for whom $10k one way or another doesn't make a big difference.
Pritam is lamenting lack of access to information, when the public data made his own MP privately admit that public housing in Singapore remains affordable, while he himself made false claims about GST turbocharging inflation in Singapore last year, even as it had consistently gone down throughout both 2023 and 2024 (which I also pointed out here).
It would be good to start taking advantage of what you already have before you want to ask for more. And what is it exactly that WP doesn't know about Singapore anyway? Has it ever asked and was refused the details?
Ong Ye Kung really didn't pull punches and cornered WP setting it an impossible task: take a stand on something; define your politics; prepare consistent, original proposals.
But Pritam Singh is not Tom Cruise and life isn't the umpteenth instalment of Mission Impossible movies, where he miraculously proves that the mission was, indeed, possible after all.
They won't do it not because they don't want to, nor because they believe so much in their current proposals, but because they are completely unable to.
WP is a party which has defined itself as the overseer of the PAP, nothing else.
Respond to whatever the government is doing and criticise it whenever you can to justify your existence in the parliament, serving as a vent for the ignorant portions of the public. That's all.
Writing meaningful policy? It is incompatible with their political strategy. They don't want to rock the boat – they just want to occasionally bark complaints at the rowers. And that's what the 35% keep voting for.
