Padan muka?HAS THE REAL STANDARD OF LIVING AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE OF THE AVERAGE SELANGORIAN AND PENANGITE IMPROVED over the past decade?
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IT IS THE AUTHORITARIAN AND UNDEMOCRATIC SYSTEM THAT HAS PERMITTED YOU TO MAKE DECISIONS AS YOU LIKE, to achieve the economic growth at any price, or rather at a heavy price paid by your average Singaporean, and against the interests of the majority of Singaporeans, NOT DUE TO THE CALIBER OF OUR LEADERS.
Put it another way, with such authoritarian rule, you can put any leader from any First World country, or even some Third World ones to do the job and they would do as good (or as badly) a job as ours.
Or put it in an even better way. If you put ANY of the PAP leaders to run any other democratic First World country where they have to operate with their hands tied and cannot pursue growth at any price to the citizens as they like, you are likely to see how badly ours will perform.
So please do not make a sweeping swipe on the (inferior) quality of the candidates in other First World democracy because they do not pay their leaders out-of-this-world salaries without taking a good look at the caliber of those that our multi-million-dollar salaries have bought.
When you have a true democracy and freedom from fear and persecution, you will not find shortage of passionate people who would stand up and step up to serve.
The tough competitive process in a true democracy (indeed, in any competition anywhere) will throw up the best (most capable) amongst their peers. The same democratic competitive process will also weed out the weaker ones.
Now try to pit each candidate in those other First World democracies against each of ours and see how they would out-talk and out-think and out-rationalize ours.
You yourself must have had plenty of opportunities to assess many of them personally at first hand having met and exchanged thoughts with many of them in the past. Ask yourself honestly, do you think the caliber of each of those individually in other First World democracies is inferior to those hand-picked ones of ours?
Actually, I find the caliber of many of the candidates you put up for the last GE PATHETIC.
Unlike candidates in other First World democracies, many of ours were ushered in through the back-door through the warped GRC system, aided by political gerrymandering which in effect banished major opposition leaders who posed a real threat to the hegemony of the PAP. This was how many MPs got into parliament too. Through walk-overs.
And virtually all who got in didn’t get through on their own merits, but under the umbrella of the GRC’s. Not one of them has the mettle. They were picked, selected, by your own incestuous narrow and misplaced criteria believing (erroneously, in my opinion) that leaders can be selected. You will never throw up an Obama or a Churchill, or a
Lee Kuan Yew from this lot.
And please don’t suggest that the bunch who make up our economic team are of a higher caliber than that of the US economic team. If that were so, why send our scholars to their universities to learn from them. Why can’t we get them to come to our universities to learn from us?
What Singapore has been able to achieve and boast about is a world-class infrastructure enabled by budget surpluses, which in turn were generated from yes, relentless economic growth.
However, this uncontrolled economic growth comes at a very high price for the average Singaporean. The difference is that the leaders in other First World democracies do not have the luxury of such budget surpluses, not because the caliber of the individual candidate is inferior to ours, but because they cannot operate freely as they
like.
They have to spread their budget thin on pensions and universal health care and other social security safety nets and they can’t pursue any growth at any price they like such as flooding their countries with cheap immigrants or pricing out the natives of the country.
Even as you’re singing praises of your team, have you asked yourself what they have achieved for the average Singaporean?
HAS THE REAL STANDARD OF LIVING AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE OF THE AVERAGE SINGAPOREAN IMPROVED over the past decade?
Not to mention that the rest of the Asian Tigers without their leaders being paid millions have all done well too. So how do you relate their relatively modest pay to their performance?
The major part of the benefits of our economic growth did not trickle down to your average Singaporean. Only the elites reaped most of the benefits while everyone was made to MAKE THE SACRIFICE with suppressed pay and longer working hours to create that pie for the rest.
Not to mention paying the price in over-crowding and housing prices becoming more unaffordable. This team has made modern day middle-class become out of reach for most Singaporeans. Indeed, what life is there for most Singaporeans?
In this pay debate, it’s all about you, you and your own lives, never about lives or the standard of living of the average Singaporean.
A citizen named Nanny. Source: Temasek Review
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