In a Facebook post today Ho Ching told Singaporeans not to harbour the illusion that the Elected Presidency is any kind of independent check and balance.

The primary role is that of a head of state, representing Singapore as a nation and state, and the symbol of unity for our people.

The secondary role for which the election is to be held is to hold a second key to help safeguard our reserves and the integrity of our key institutions.

It is not to be an independent voice, a check on govt, or an ombudsman to all the woes and ills of society.

So what exactly is the point of the Elected President? Particularly as the carefully drawn criteria make it all but impossible for a non-PAP endorsed candidate to win. Where one might succeed the Presidential Elections Committee stands ready to do the PAP’s bidding and reject the candidate using undisclosed criteria. “Not of sufficient moral character” was used to keep JBJ out of the race despite his false conviction having been overturned by the UK Privy Council and the disqualifying period having been completed. Similar criteria have been used to keep the PM’s own brother out of the race, or at least the strong hint that he will be rejected should he dare to apply.

The point is that of course a PAP President is not going to act as any kind of check and balance. They will just treat as a nice little earner prior to retirement, an opportunity to collect another nine million dollars for doing nothing. Some Singaporeans may have got excited thinking that Tharman is some kind of liberal who should have been PM but for LHL’s Chinese supremacist views. Tharman happily accepted being some kind of house slave to LHL in return for a swelling bank balance and the opportunity to rub shoulders with the global financial elite like Christine Lagarde and Timothy Geithner. Besides as I explained in my last but one blog Tharman was a leading and willing participant in the dark arts of fake accounts and false Budget accounting used to trick Singaporeans into believing that their Government has no money and will collapse if ordinary Singaporeans don’t tighten their belts, cut back and pay more taxes.

True to form, Ho Ching goes in for a rant against voters in general, and Singaporeans in particular, for being greedy short termist individuals with no impulse control who would deplete the reserves if they were allowed to by the Government:

But then when we design an election system to safeguard the reserves, this is typical at odds with the desires of the electorate.

Why?

Bcos most electorate would want the govt to spend more and not less, to subsidise this or that, or to make this or that free, not to prevent a spendthrift govt from raising tbe reserves.

This 3rd generation syndrome of not having gone through hardship to earn the money is very real for families and for nations.

The gimme-gimme syndrome takes hold as the 3rd generation eyes the national kitty as a freebie, instead of thinking of the reserves as their heritage and legacy which they must in their turn add to and strengthen for their own future generations.

This is straight PAP playbook dating back fifty years. I well remember the reaction to my dad’s victory at Anson from LKY and Goh Chok Tong was that Singaporeans had a low threshold of pain.

I wouldn’t ordinarily give Ho Ching’s ramblings much oxygen. Whatever position she has is through her husband and marriage into the dynasty. However it’s a fair representation of the entitled views of the PAP elite and display a remarkable lack of self-awareness. Her husband,Minilee, thinks of Singapore as his heritage and legacy including the kitty, which he controls by having his wife as CEO of Temasek while he is Chair of GIC. She and her husband are undoubtedly plotting to put a third generation of Lees on the Dragon Throne after having despatched his brother into exile.

Her attitude is shared by all the PAP elite, Ministers, spouses and their offspring who regard state resources as a gigantic milk cow whose teats they think they alone are entitled to suck on. They create a huge bloated state sector, ensure they and their friends and family have a monopoly on all the top jobs and pay themselves outrageous salaries. They keep the most outrageous a state secret. As a public service, instead of ranting against Singaporeans as lazy welfare dependents, it would be good if Ho Ching would tell us how much she and her husband arranged for her to be paid over the last 20 years. What was the size of the estate they inherited from LHL’s parents and where is the money invested? Are there any conflicts of interest you have not condescended to tell Singaporeans about?

Most egregious of all is the Ridoutgate scandal, in which two senior Ministers, thinking no one would find out and if they did would be too scared of them to raise it, helped themselves to two enormous and palatial state properties on undisclosed rents, rents that are almost certainly massively out of alignment with the rents for similar private properties on much smaller land areas. This mispricing likely created an arbitrage opportunity between the rent they were paying and the rent they could get on their own GCBs, proving yet again that, as JBJ said, the PAP are skilful at managing their own personal fortunes even if they can’t help Singaporeans struggling with the austerity for which there should be no need. Meanwhile Singaporeans are lectured by the likes of Indranee Rajah and Desmond Lee on the need for them to pay the maximum prices for the land on which BTO flats are constructed lest they drain our precious reserves.

Ho Ching of course talks about the need to safeguard the reserves and not only hand them over to the next generation but add to them. But the Government refuses to tell us what the reserves are and the reasons why we need to keep adding to them when the native born population is declining rapidly. Why should Singaporeans be forced to go without to hand over trillions of dollars in financial reserves (over $10 trillion if you include the land owned by the state which was stolen from the people) to new immigrants whose parents didn’t go without to accumulate them.

Ho Ching also gaslights Singaporeans about the Swiss:

The Swiss for instance is one such society, highly conscious that there is no free lunch.

They rejected the idea of fewer working hours with higher minimum wages for instance. And by a very large majority.

There is no national minimum wage in Switzerland and it varies by canton. In Zurich the minimum wage is CHF23.90 per hour (or CHF4,000 per month). This is about $36 per hour or $6,000 per month. This contrasts with about $7-10 in Singapore under the PAP’s fake Progressive Wage Model and considerably less for many Singaporeans not covered by it. Of course the Swiss work considerably shorter hours than Singaporeans as well (38 as opposed to 45 or more).

Singaporeans shouldn’t need Ho Ching to remind them that the Elected Presidency is just a comfortable semi-retirement for old PAP Ministers, a chance for them to collect a useful additional $10 million or so to pay for a few more round the world cruises or luxury holidays when they finally decide to call it quits. It doesn’t even have anything to do with safeguarding the reserves or holding a second key. Ex-Finance Ministers like Tharman are unlikely to call for rocks to be turned over and a light to be shone into dark corners when they were complicit in designing a fake Budget and system of accounting to hide revenues and resources from Singaporeans. They intentionally presided over a system which aimed to present a dismal picture of the Government’s finances and convince ordinary people, many of them desperately poor, of the need for belt tightening and making do on one meal a day in the midst of plenty. In fact I have done more to safeguard the reserves and see that they are utilised for the benefit of Singaporeans than any President apart from maybe Ong Teng Cheong. In 2012 I demanded Parliamentary and Presidential approval for conditional loans to the IMF which the Constitution clearly requires. Our judiciary removed my right to sue the Government saying their their main role was to “greenlight” the executive, even if what they were doing was illegal. The President slept through all of that and did not even comment.

Singaporeans need to lose their romantic illusions about the President, including Tharman, and instead be prepared to vote this government out Otherwise the only people who will continue to enjoy free lunches at your expense are LHL, his family and the PAP.

Published by kjeyaretnam

I'm a Singaporean economist who became an opposition activist. I blog to provide an alternative to the porkies that the Pinkies tell. It just so happens that my alternative is the truth. That's why I've never been sued in any civil or criminal court no matter how hard hitting my criticism. I'm quoted and interviewed and asked to speak across the world but largely censored in Singapore in an effort to silence my political opinions. The left hate me because they think I split their vote and because I eschew their outmoded economic models. Models that don't work. The Right and the Conservatives hate me because I'm a liberal. I'm not sure what the middle think of me. I don't think there are more than a handful of people in the middle, here in Singapore. I'm a Singaporean born and bred, dual heritage, my parents Singaporean established here before the State of Singapore was created. I'm not Eurasian. I read economics at Cambridge and could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school but I believe in interventions. I was formerly a successful hedge fund manager. After economics and politics my greatest interests are history, film and Makan. I run but I run so I can eat like a Singaporean. View all posts by kjeyaretnam