Of salaries, value and hypocrisy

The issue of political remuneration is one of the latest hot potatoes to drop into the hands of the ruling People’s Action Party, and for all the efforts of the PAP to cool this potato, it appears that the potato has an internal combustion engine that keeps on spewing heat to keep the potato hot. [...]

Elected non-PAP MPs are also part of government

A letter by Ooi Hui Mei, director of corporate and marketing communications, from the People’s Association about why elected members of parliament who are not from the ruling People’s Action Party are not allowed to become advisors to the PA’s grassroots organisations has generated an online firestorm. The full letter, available from the Straits Times [...]

The true winner of the presidential election

Tony Tan has won the presidential election to become Singapore’s seventh president. However, what is more significant is not that he won, but how he well he fared. Winning by a margin of 0.34 percent, or 7,629 votes out of 2,153,014 votes cast is an extremely poor result for someone who has held several important ministerial [...]

Teaching an old dog new tricks

Teaching an old dog new tricks, as the saying goes, is almost impossible. The People’s Action Party aptly showed its inability to learn new tricks, judging from the uproar over Housing Development Board’s decision to lease open spaces in Aljunied GRC to the People’s Association instead of the newly minted Aljunied-Hougang Town Council. While the [...]

Why Tan Cheng Bock should be president

Singapore’s upcoming presidential election is keenly contested, with four candidates vying for the position of the head of state of the Republic of Singapore. The presidential elections, hot on the heels of this year’s parliamentary elections, has generated much interest in the role of the president. The role of Singapore’s president is largely ceremonial, although [...]

Build-to-order scheme needs revamping

The appointment of former health minister Khaw Boon Wan to the national development ministry has raised hopes of positive changes to public housing policies in Singapore. The Build-to-Order scheme of the Housing Development Board, commonly known as the BTO, is in serious need of a revamp because this policy has contributed significantly to rising prices [...]

Too little, too late

Singapore’s general elections this year is remarkable, for it’s the first time in decades that most Singaporeans can exercise their basic right of being in a democracy: the right to vote. In past elections, many of the seats up for election have been uncontested, resulting in walkovers by the incumbent People’s Action Party, who has never [...]

Do the right thing and say sorry

Just when this blog published a piece on how hard it was to get the prime minister to say sorry, the People’s Action Party team in Aljunied Group Representative Contituency wrote a Facebook note which ought to have been an apology but instead turned out to be a denial. The note titled “Response to Online [...]

It’s hard to say sorry

It took the People’s Action Party seven days after Nomination Day before it finally acknowledged that it has done poorly in some areas in the years since the PAP won the last general elections. PAP’s secretary-general and Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong apologised for his party’s missteps during a lunchtime rally on May 4, [...]

Counter fear with facts, counter darkness with light

With all the fear mongering about falling property prices in Aljunied that the People’s Action Party has been engaging in recently, someone needs to set the record straight, and two very credible netizens, Bernard Leong and Gilbert Koh, who is better known as Mr Wang, have both written very insightful articles about why Aljunied residents need not [...]