I read through your maiden speech and struggle to comprehend how even your media monopoly, paid for with Singaporeans’ money, can call this a major reset. For a government that likes to portray itself as a purveyor of hard truths, taking its cue from the founder of the dynasty that has controlled Singapore since 1959, and no doubt continues to exert control over you until the time is right to replace you, your maiden speech as PM was less than honest. It was no doubt written by a highly paid team of media consultants and substituted cliches and vague and easily broken promises for substance.

Your government has always tried to brainwash Singaporeans into believing that our natural patriotism and love of Singapore should be synonymous with loyalty towards the PAP. After all you have consistently characterised any opposition, and in particular my father and now me, which refuses to accept the divine right of the PAP and our leading family dynasty to rule Singapore forever as seeking to destroy our system of government or undermining Singapore’s institutions.

But, even in what you hoped would be a speech that would inspire Singaporeans to go out and vote for you in the rapidly approaching elections, you and your party are so bereft of ideas that you had to go out and plagiarise Ronald Reagan and Warren Buffett. You say that “I believe Singapore’s best days lie ahead of us.” Ronald Reagan, in one of his most famous speeches, said “America’s best days are yet to come” at the Republican National Convention in 1992. (see video)

I am sure you didn’t mean it that way but I think Singaporeans will perceive this as a cynical and cruel joke. You are well aware that, with our Total Fertility Rate now below 1, in the absence of immigration Singapore’s population would fall to half or less of its current level by 2100. Yet your government is sanguine about this, presumably because you believe that it will be easy for your government to attract new immigrants from poorer countries to make up for the growing shortfall in the local labour force. In fact you have been doing it for years already. When you talk about Singapore’s best days lying ahead, exactly who are you referring to ? I am an advocate for the economic and other benefits of immigration and believe we must remain open to global talent but this must be coupled with help and protections for Singaporeans, particularly for those on middle and lower incomes. Immigration must benefit everyone in society. Yet far from investing in Singaporeans with the massive reserves that GDP growth fuelled by population growth and coupled with a cruel austerity squeeze on real incomes have created, you insult Singaporeans by telling them continually that the reserves must be safeguarded for future generations. Who precisely are these future generations you are always quick to invoke? Your contempt for Singaporeans and your colonial attitude towards us is typified by your arrogant refusal to even tell us what the reserves are or how they are growing. You won’t even tell us how much the PM’s wife was paid to manage those reserves.

If this was a real reset and you were sincere about wanting to improve Singaporeans’ lives and hopefully encourage us to have more children, then you would be announcing more generous support for middle to low income families Reform Party has since 2015 called for the reform of the Working Mothers Child Relief, which in its original form reflected eugenicist beliefs and was a disgraceful subsidy to the rich, and its extension or replacement by a cash payment of at least $300 per child per month. I had hoped to see a similar scheme mooted in your speech. Instead you chose to tinker at the edges by expanding Parental Leave to 30 weeks. While this is good in itself, it’s hardly a gamechanger. Firstly how does that help when one or both parents may not be working? Secondly, in the absence of legislation to prevent discrimination, it does nothing to remove women’s fears that they may lose their job if they start a family or have their promotion prospects adversely affected. Your government may very late in the day finally be planning to introduce Workplace Fairness Legislation but this won’t protect the self-employed nor those working in companies with less than 25 employees. With weak employment protection Singaporeans know that they can easily be replaced by a cheaper foreign worker who is unlikely to become pregnant (or for men need to take time off for reservist liability).

Your unemployment insurance scheme, hailed by your media and the usual talking heads as a major game changer, is also far too little, particularly when compared with unemployment benefit in other wealthy countries. $6,000 or $1,000 per month is only 20% of the gross (including Employer CPF) median monthly income from work for a full-time employed worker. 50 to 60% would be more appropriate and it should last for longer, but with reducing percentages. Also your motivation for introducing the scheme is not altogether altruistic since as you know those in full time education do not count as unemployed, thus helping to reduce the unemployment rate and making it look as though your government is doing better than it is. In any case I calculate the total cost of this scheme is only about $400 million a year at most or miniscule in the context of an inferred $3 trillion of reserves.

Your government has not been shy to trumpet its SkillsFuture credit as enabling older Singaporeans to “upskill” and change careers. However it has failed to provide any information as to the effectiveness of the courses funded by SkillsFuture in finding older Singaporeans new jobs or better paid jobs. I suspect that the cost of the courses is inflated because of the subsidies offered and that a large percentage are at best of dubious value in achieving their objectives. As I said above I believe much of the rationale is a cynical attempt to massage the unemployment rate so it appears better than it is. You also tease details of a new scheme which you say will provide those over 40 who take time off work to study full time UP TO $3,000 per month for 24 months.Without more details it’s impossible to know how much people will be able to claim but I suspect it will be much lower than $3,000 in the majority of cases. Yet in the next paragraph you say this adds up to $72,000 per person. Shouldn’t you award yourself a POFMA for this shameless marketing trick?

Passing on to housing, you boast of delivering on your promise to build more BTO flats and promise to lower the current waiting period in excess of four years. It’s scandalous that your Government has allowed such a backlog to build up in the first place when you control the supply of housing and of the land to build it on. `I presume that as a monopolist your government wants to keep the price of housing high by restricting supply. You claim that Singapore’s public housing (after grants) is more affordable than that in other big cities but I suspect that you are deliberately trying to bamboozle Singaporeans by not comparing like-with-like. For instance many governments offer help to first time buyers, including the UK. The UK grant has to be repaid if the house is sold just as in Singapore but is usually for a bigger percentage of the sale price. In any case housing in other countries is usually not leasehold but freehold so that it can be passed on to future generations. With the native born population now seemingly set to decline inexorably it’s difficult to understand why Singaporeans are not permitted to extend their leaseholds or buy the freeholds of their properties.

In any case your system of housing grants is really a way of transferring resources out of the Budget, where they could be spent on investing in Singaporeans, and into the reserves, whose size, allocation and growth you refuse to disclose. It’s apparent that the system of housing grants, and subsidies to HDB, is designed to keep prices higher than they would be in the absence of such grants. But you maintain, and threaten those that dispute your dogma with prosecution under your POFMA law, that the Chief Valuer sets prices for land sold to HDB, and that this is done with reference to resale prices and other benchmarks. Even someone with a rudimentary knowledge of housing understands that when you control both the supply of land and the housing supplier and have a huge influence of demand by controlling the size of the citizen population and restricting the ways in which they can use their very high compulsory savings, you have almost complete control over the price of housing. Why not discount the price at which the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) sells land to HDB rather than giving grants to HDB to buy the land and grants to Singaporeans to buy BTO flats?

In yet another misleading statement, you say that “Singapore students from lower-income households did better than the average student in OECD countries.” in an OECD assessment of Creative Thinking skills. However you fail to mention that the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) recently said that the dispersion between the top students and the median was wider in Singapore than the OECD average. You have belatedly scrapped the Gifted Education Programme and say you are replacing it with a programme designed to identify and stretch high ability pupils in all primary schools. However this is undoubtedly not enough. More needs to be done otherwise students from lower income and minority race backgrounds risk falling further behind. For too long your government has been influenced by the eugenicist beliefs of our first PM and channelled resources towards students from already elite backgrounds, particularly those from the majority race, as shown by historic awards of Government scholarships, a significant number of which were awarded to those who already had sufficient resources, including frequently the children of Ministers and PAP MPs. I would like to see the current distribution of Government scholarship holders to be convinced that that is not still happening.

Finally, you rightly celebrate the achievements of our athletes at the Olympics and big up the role of your Government in supporting them. However if we rank countries by medals won on a probability adjusted basis., on the basis that all countries have an equal propensity per capita for winning medals, then our performance was distinctly average. We won only one bronze medal which was only slightly more than the number of medals we were expected to win (0.855). We came 65th on the list. By contrast New Zealand, with a similar population, managed to win 20 medals as against an expectation of 0.71.While taking nothing away from the performances of our brave and dedicated athletes, this suggests that you should be spending a lot more on supporting them rather than complacently sitting back and basking in a falsely created glory and talking up the Government’s investments in sports.

I too believe Singapore’s best days lie ahead, but ,unlike you, I believe this is only possible if Singaporeans refuse any longer to be palmed off with lies and evasions, start demanding answers to the questions you refuse to answer and have the courage to replace you with a new government. I look forward to a richer and freer future, but without Singapore being synonymous with 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