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An important learning point from this session is that there is a need to keep the message simple. WP came up with a fairly comprehensive proposal. They split it up among the different MP's who then took turns to present different aspects of it. Unless you were following all the speeches and saw the big underlying picture, this gave the wrong impression that the different WP MPs were proposing different things.
A very necessary thing which needs to be done is to simplfy the message. They should assume that 80% of the audience have not heard what their other colleagues have said. They should therefore chose the most powerful and compelling arguement (e.g. benchmark to a broad median as opposed to top 1000) and have everyone repeat it so that the point sticks.
I have said in another thread that it would be accused of touching the surface if too simple.
Generally, WP's primary damage was GG who could have articulated better - eloquence does matter a lot of points, look at VN's rubbish but no one saw that it was rubbish. No MP for a long time had stuttered and hemmed in Parliament since Cheo Chai Chen of SDP, and it is made worse and wasted as GG actually had valid points while CCC most of the time did not. (One former NSP chief of course regarded CCC as a treasure but that is another story for another day.)
The bigger "damage" was the WP proposed a high figure as well and on the net mostly people don't like any sign of WP deemed "walking closely" to PAP. I disregard that for several reasons.
1) WP seemingly enjoys using the UK model be it whatever unpopular result it produces among its supporters - this smacks of LTK's pattern. When WP refused to call WKS to resign over Mas Selamat, it was also based on a UK precedence, or rather non-precedence where no country has ever asked a minister to resign over an escaped prisoner. In the end, despite receiving flak, only WP won a GRC in the 2011 election.
2) WP had already proposed a cut - people should compare WP's proposals to PAP's old salary, not compare WP's proposals to PAP's new proposals. We forget WP stuck to its guns for decades, rather than PAP that cut its salaries only recently.
3) Reverse engineering to achieve a methodology to produce lower pay should be avoided. That is not honest.
4) The amount is the same does not forego the fact that methodology is different is very important. You court a girl to marry you by giving flowers or threatening suicide, both methods are different even if the end result is the same that the girl marries you. WP's old proposal - or rather LTK's proposal - to pay minister 100 times the bottom 20% salary comes up to $140,000 - is even higher than all the proposals so far, but at the same time seems even more righteous. So what's the point in going on the numbers/figures but not methodolgy (which was a repeatedly emphasised point made by Pritam).
5) It's just pandering to the likes of the pro-opposition and even all-except-WP types like Joseph Ong and the village insect, which is pointless.
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