Dear Lawrence Wong, thank you for giving Singaporeans the benefits of your accumulated life wisdom at the Forward Singapore event. No doubt if things don’t work out with your boss LHL and you have to look for another job you could become a life coach or spiritual guru, though I somehow doubt you could earn as much.

But I am puzzled by your telling us now that the “Singapore Dream” is no longer solely about material success? Your Government has always lectured Singaporeans from the days of LKY that material success is everything and that our rights and freedoms are worth nothing. LKY made highly misleading and disingenuous comparisons with poor countries like India and said that their poverty was due to democracy, omitting of course to mention that Singapore’s success since its founding has been driven largely by its superlative strategic position. Naive Western pundits like John Kampfner even made the risible suggestion that Singaporeans had entered into a Faustian pact to sacrifice their rights in return for prosperity.

The truth is of course that your Government has failed to make Singaporeans prosperous, except for members of the elite like you. To distract from your failure, you are telling them that the goal instead should be “fulfillment, meaning and purpose in what we do” That’s rich coming from someone earning nearly $2 million a year whose pay will rise even further when and if you become PM. It’s not so easy to find fulfillment when Singaporeans have to work two or even three jobs and their wages aren’t keeping up with rising costs. A simple comparison of household staples shows that they are much more expensive in Singapore than in the UK and Europe and even the US. While you refuse to implement a minimum wage, because it would destroy your low cost low productivity foreign labour model, far too many low to middle income SIngaporeans earn about half of the minimum wage in countries like the UK and the US. The disparity is even more marked if appropriate comparisons are made with global cities rather than countries. I have provided ample evidence of the fact that Singaporeans are shortchanged in many of my blog posts. In fact Singaporeans get such a bad deal from your Government that you persuaded UBS to omit Singapore from its comparison of prices and wages in global cities after a survey in 2011 showed Singaporean purchasing power on a par with that of KL or Moscow.

Also aren’t you being just a little hypocritical in talking about a shared future? Singaporeans already know about your and other Ministers’ salaries. Thanks to my asking the question since 2015, most of them are now aware that your Government refuses to tell us what the PM’s wife, Ho Ching,was paid as CEO of Temasek and what she earns now as head of Temasek Trust. The only certainty is that she earned substantially more than her husband, possibly over $100 million a year, as a Taiwanese news channel suggested. You issued Correction Notices under your repressive POFMA legislation but failed to provide any facts.

Similarly it was only when I outed them that Singaporeans found out that two of your colleagues were renting huge state properties on long leases at rents that are a fraction of those for private sector properties on much smaller land areas. While it may be true in the limited market for state-owned black-and-white bungalows, insisting that the rents were at “fair market value” insults the intelligence of Singaporeans and is more indicative of mismanagement by SLA than anything else. The Ridout Road properties should be yielding millions of dollars a year in rent and if most of the land were redeveloped as HDBs or luxury condos could be worth well over a billion dollars. I hasten to add that Shanmugam and Balakrishnan did as far as I know nothing illegal and that these state properties could theoretically be rented by anyone at a similar rent even though I don’t know how many potential renters would be aware of these properties. I also don’t know if they could pick up the phone to the senior civil servant in MinLaw and ask for a list of those available. Indeed many of these state properties are rented by wealthy expats and foreigners fleeing high taxes or even worse.

In talking about “mismanagment” by SLA I have perhaps been too naive. I have cited as evidence the fact that so much land in Singapore is allowed to stay vacant or rented out for meagre returns is evidence. However there is a more Machiavellian interpretation. By keeping this land together with large tracts in the rest of the island from development you keep prices artificially high and thus maximise the value of the land reserves. You claim that the SLA properties are preserved for conservation purposes as they’re part of our heritage. But if this is the real reason why not preserve the properties but redevelop the major part of the land for public housing or other purposes? Or make them into public parks or holiday chalets.

As a result of artificially limited supply, HDB prices continue to rise with even four room apartments in some areas now fetching more than a million dollars in the resale market. You claim that the PAP are magnanimously subsidising HDB purchases by having HDB sell at a loss compared to the “market value” of the land to keep housing affordable.This is just another of the PAP’s paradoxes which basically means changing the meaning of the words to bamboozle Singaporeans. On the one hand how can the rents of Ridout Road be “fair market value” when HDB must pay full “market value” lest the reserves be drained and future generations disadvantaged? I’m put in mind of the quote from Alice in Wonderland when Humpty Dumpty says, “When I use a word, it means just what I want it to mean, neither more nor less”.

Yet far from benefiting Singaporeans the whole “subsidy” scam seems to be aimed at channeling money from the Budget into the reserves. HDB purchases land from the Government. As land prices rise so do land sales revenues. thus benefiting the reserves. You provide grants to HDB in the Budget to cover its losses on land purchases. You also provide CPF housing grants to individuals. These amount to about $5-6 billion a year. This is not free money but has to come out of the taxes Singaporeans pay and means less money to spend in other areas like health or education or helping Singaporeans with living costs. Singaporeans end up paying more and more for smaller and smaller slivers of land (as HDB sizes shrink and more importantly plot ratios rise). While in the short term they may feel wealthier, they are only leasing the land for 99 years and eventually their investment will become worthless. This contrasts with most advanced countries where private ownership of land is the norm instead of leasing land from the state.

You keep harping on about private charity and asking for Singaporeans who have “done well” to donate to help the less well-off. Singaporeans should naturally be curious about why you are silent on the subject of the reserves. Despite your use of state machinery and your vast taxpayer paid resources to try paint me as a liar and purveyor of disinformation, I stand by my assertion that much of the NIRC has been put into long term funds and endowments, in a kind of “left pocket, right pocket” model. By my calculations, using the limited data I can access and given the fact that I’m on my own and don’t have any benefit from state resources and vast numbers of highly paid civil servants whose major duty is to keep you in office, you have put approximately $54 billion into long term funds and endowments since 2019 while total spending from these funds has been around half (The figures show $19 billion up to 2022. I have assumed $7 billion in 2023 though this could be more or less). Rather than making assertions while failing to provide any facts, like you did with LHL’s wife’s salary, why don’t you help SIngaporeans by setting out in a table the NIRC since 2010, the amounts put into long term funds and endowments and the total spending from these long term funds and endowments? You should also provide the Statement of Assets and Liabilities for these years so that we can see the growth of these funds. This will also include returns from investing the money. To take just one example, out of the $9 billion set aside by Tharman in 2014 for the Pioneer Generation Fund, over $6 billion remained unspent.

You are unwilling to provide any clarity on the reserves and since you have failed to issue a POFMA, I can take it that my calculation that the reserves including monies held in long term funds and endowments is as much as $3 trillion. This does not include the Government Securities Fund of nearly $1 trillion on which I am sure GIC is able to make a profit. Including the value of the land the Government owns total reserves could be as much as $10 trillion. Yet you fail to explain why we need to keep growing the reserves so rapidly, particularly as with our falling birth rate more and more of the population will be first generation immigrants who have not made the economic sacrifices and lived through decades of unnecessary austerity. Rather than keep lecturing us on the need to go without to hand over our reserves untouched to future generations not born here, start telling us what the reserves are. Tell us why we can’t spend, say, 3% a year on improving the lives of Singaporeans while still continuing to grow the reserves instead of treating us as children by coming up with nonsense like saving for a rainy day. If the reserves are $3 trillion then we should be able to invest at least another $90 billion in Singaporeans and thereby actually improve our future prospects. Instead you hide behind the constitutional framework as an excuse to keep us in ignorance but your Government has always been able to amend the Constitution at will since you hold around 90% of the seats.

Rather than issuing your coercive powers to issue Correction Notices, while failing to provide any useful information, why don’t you agree to a public debate with me? Then Singaporeans can decide for themselves who is telling the truth.

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