- Joined
- Jul 24, 2008
- Messages
- 33,627
- Points
- 0
[h=2]Political rights cannot make us better off[/h]
November 2nd, 2012 |
Author: YourSDP
Even as the SDP continues to focus on cost-of-living issues – proposing ways to reduce healthcare costs, coming up with alternative ideas to lower HDB prices, fighting for minimum wage for our workers, and so on – we would be negligent if we did not, at the same, educate the Singaporean public on the gravity of our freedom of assembly.
There are many people, even those who want to see political change in Singapore, who continue to think that matters like political freedoms and civil liberties are esoteric concepts, far-removed from their everyday lives.
“Human rights cannot make me better off” is the common refrain. They have never been more wrong.
It is precisely because we don’t have political rights that most of us will have little to retire on even though we are the biggest savers in the world; it is because we have been stripped of our civil liberties that we work one of the longest hours compared to our counterparts in other economies and yet see our real incomes decline; it is because we do not enjoy freedom of expression that we find our country more expensive than New York, London and Frankfurt but our purchasing power parity equal to that of Kuala Lumpur.
The truth is that the stripping away of our political rights has also deprived us of the ability to live less stressful lives, retire with a little more security, and build a nation-home that we can call our own.
But how did we come to such a cheerless state? How did things get so bad?
These problems did not just emerge yesterday; they took decades to develop. Which brings us to the the next question: Why did we allow them to fester and grow? Why did we not remedy them when we had the chance? After all, we had elections – several of them – to change course and right the wrongs. And yet, we didn’t.
“Next elections”
The truth is that we couldn’t. We couldn’t have changed anything through elections even though we thought otherwise. We held out the hope that we could vote out the PAP or, at least, vote in the opposition in sufficient numbers to change policy and take the country to a better place.
But change eluded us. And when each election resulted in the status quo, we kept saying, “Next elections.”
The hard reality is that under a system which drove the political process in one and only one direction, there was never any doubt what the outcome of the elections would be. The onslaught of the mass media, the amendments to the Constitution, the paying out of money just before voting ruled out any possibility of political change. And all the while, the outcome was billed as the will of the people.
In addition, there seems to be an ‘issue’ at every election to distract the masses. In 1988, it was the Marxist conspiracy and the foreign interference Singapore’s politics. In 1991, it was the promise of a series of by-elections promised by PM Goh Chok Tong. In 1997, it was HDB upgrading. In 2001, it was the pall of terrorism. In 2006, it was the giving out of the progress package shares. In 2011, it was another pay out, this time called growth-dividend.
With each election, another five years passed. It has been three decades since the late J B Jeyaretnam broke the PAP’s stranglehold on Parliament with his by-election victory at Anson. Nothing meaningful has changed in our politics and policies since then.
If anything, the PAP’s policies have bitten in, making our problems now almost intractable.
Singaporeans, the watchful ones, saw the problems a long time ago, the situation worsening with each passing year, each passing election. They felt helpless to do anything and many chose to emigrate.
This is the truth: We cannot change anything just by relying on elections – elections that the PAP controls. If we could, we would have done it already. Even with the problems so severe, we have barely made a dent in the Parliament’s configuration.
All this is not conjecture. Mr Lee Kuan Yew made it plain: “Please do not assume that you can change governments. Young people don’t understand this.”
Doing the math
Will the 2016 GE be any different? Many hold out the hope that Singaporeans will wise up and vote for the opposition this time around.
Consider this: The PAP has been converting 20,000 new citizens a year and will continue the trend in the foreseeable future. This means 100,000 naturalised Singaporeans by the next elections, more if you go back a decade. Many of these new immigrants undergo programmes conducted by PAP grassroots members, chances are that they will be more pro-PAP than pro-opposition.
That’s not all. There is a continuing decline in the number of locally born and bred Singaporeans. A survey by Mindshare showed that 56 percent of Singaporeans want to emigrate. Data from the World Bank shows that in 2010, 10.1 percent of locals actually left the country, leaving us with a net migration (total number of immigrants less the annual number of emigrants) of 721,738.
Those who have left or expressed a desire to leave indicate frustration with PAP policies relating to cost-of-livng issues. Conversely, new immigrants are receptive of the such policies (otherwise they would not have chosen to settle here). This combination gives the PAP a much needed boost at the polls.
Seen another way, the PAP’s current policies regarding immigration (resulting in increase of new citizens who will vote for them) and living costs (resulting in a decrease of Singaporeans born in the country) is a double whammy for the people but political manna for the ruling clique.
What incentive is there for the PAP to change policy course? It does not have to appeal to the electorate by coming up with better policies but by cynically – and dangerously – manipulating the immigration-emigration flow.
Given such a scenario, is it smart to put all our eggs of policy change into that one basket of elections?
If the morning after Polling Day 2016 shows that the change-needle has not moved much, what do we do? Tell ourselves that 2021 is just five years away? How many more five-year terms are we going to wait before the PAP’s policies cause our society to implode?
The real hard truth
We need something more and that something is our political rights and our civil liberties. We need a free media. We need an independent elections commission.
And we can only get these if we publicly and visibly demand them. We must assemble – peacefully – in massive numbers to compel the Government that it must, one, amend the Newspaper Printing and Presses Act to allow private citizens to own and start newspapers. Two, re-write the Parliamentary Elections Act to ensure free and fair elections, and introduce an elections watchdog with teeth.
Public assemblies can also directly affect policy-making and it is allows the people to hold those in power accountable if a policy precipitates dire consequences.
In the make-believe world, democrats get voted into power despite the autocracy and they then reform the system top-down.
But that’s not how things work in the real world where democratic change comes about because the people demand it – loudly – and work for it. They amass in large enough numbers to force a government to relinquish control of the media and implement genuinely free and fair elections. Such efforts can, and have, been done peacefully. But never without determination and perseverance.
What do we do?
What do Singaporeans have to do? The first step is to acknowledge that elections alone are woefully inadequate to bring about real and meaningful change. We also need to learn that peaceful protests are a force for good, not destruction.
We have been conditioned to fear protests and, more insidiously, to frown upon expressions of political passion. As long as we retain this mindset, the PAP will have successfully put us in a box and, more disconcertingly, one in which we choose to remain.
We must jettison the foolish talk that human rights is a Western concept, inimical to Singaporeans. The idea that we must focus on bread-and-butter issues to the exclusion of defending our rights is one that the PAP has planted in our minds to disastrous effect. It is such thinking that has allowed the Government unchecked control of the election system, the media and, as a consequence, public opinion.
Once we overcome this mental obstacle and stop repeating the utter lie that political freedoms and civil liberties have no value in changing cost-of-living issues, we have overcome the hardest part of the battle. Our political rights have everything to do with our economic well-being. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
.
Singapore Democrats
Rate this (27 Votes)
<meta content="4.7037037037" itemprop="ratingValue"><meta content="27" itemprop="ratingCount">
Even as the SDP continues to focus on cost-of-living issues – proposing ways to reduce healthcare costs, coming up with alternative ideas to lower HDB prices, fighting for minimum wage for our workers, and so on – we would be negligent if we did not, at the same, educate the Singaporean public on the gravity of our freedom of assembly.
There are many people, even those who want to see political change in Singapore, who continue to think that matters like political freedoms and civil liberties are esoteric concepts, far-removed from their everyday lives.
“Human rights cannot make me better off” is the common refrain. They have never been more wrong.
It is precisely because we don’t have political rights that most of us will have little to retire on even though we are the biggest savers in the world; it is because we have been stripped of our civil liberties that we work one of the longest hours compared to our counterparts in other economies and yet see our real incomes decline; it is because we do not enjoy freedom of expression that we find our country more expensive than New York, London and Frankfurt but our purchasing power parity equal to that of Kuala Lumpur.
The truth is that the stripping away of our political rights has also deprived us of the ability to live less stressful lives, retire with a little more security, and build a nation-home that we can call our own.
But how did we come to such a cheerless state? How did things get so bad?
These problems did not just emerge yesterday; they took decades to develop. Which brings us to the the next question: Why did we allow them to fester and grow? Why did we not remedy them when we had the chance? After all, we had elections – several of them – to change course and right the wrongs. And yet, we didn’t.
“Next elections”
The truth is that we couldn’t. We couldn’t have changed anything through elections even though we thought otherwise. We held out the hope that we could vote out the PAP or, at least, vote in the opposition in sufficient numbers to change policy and take the country to a better place.
But change eluded us. And when each election resulted in the status quo, we kept saying, “Next elections.”
The hard reality is that under a system which drove the political process in one and only one direction, there was never any doubt what the outcome of the elections would be. The onslaught of the mass media, the amendments to the Constitution, the paying out of money just before voting ruled out any possibility of political change. And all the while, the outcome was billed as the will of the people.
In addition, there seems to be an ‘issue’ at every election to distract the masses. In 1988, it was the Marxist conspiracy and the foreign interference Singapore’s politics. In 1991, it was the promise of a series of by-elections promised by PM Goh Chok Tong. In 1997, it was HDB upgrading. In 2001, it was the pall of terrorism. In 2006, it was the giving out of the progress package shares. In 2011, it was another pay out, this time called growth-dividend.
With each election, another five years passed. It has been three decades since the late J B Jeyaretnam broke the PAP’s stranglehold on Parliament with his by-election victory at Anson. Nothing meaningful has changed in our politics and policies since then.
If anything, the PAP’s policies have bitten in, making our problems now almost intractable.
Singaporeans, the watchful ones, saw the problems a long time ago, the situation worsening with each passing year, each passing election. They felt helpless to do anything and many chose to emigrate.
This is the truth: We cannot change anything just by relying on elections – elections that the PAP controls. If we could, we would have done it already. Even with the problems so severe, we have barely made a dent in the Parliament’s configuration.
All this is not conjecture. Mr Lee Kuan Yew made it plain: “Please do not assume that you can change governments. Young people don’t understand this.”
Doing the math
Will the 2016 GE be any different? Many hold out the hope that Singaporeans will wise up and vote for the opposition this time around.
Consider this: The PAP has been converting 20,000 new citizens a year and will continue the trend in the foreseeable future. This means 100,000 naturalised Singaporeans by the next elections, more if you go back a decade. Many of these new immigrants undergo programmes conducted by PAP grassroots members, chances are that they will be more pro-PAP than pro-opposition.
That’s not all. There is a continuing decline in the number of locally born and bred Singaporeans. A survey by Mindshare showed that 56 percent of Singaporeans want to emigrate. Data from the World Bank shows that in 2010, 10.1 percent of locals actually left the country, leaving us with a net migration (total number of immigrants less the annual number of emigrants) of 721,738.
Those who have left or expressed a desire to leave indicate frustration with PAP policies relating to cost-of-livng issues. Conversely, new immigrants are receptive of the such policies (otherwise they would not have chosen to settle here). This combination gives the PAP a much needed boost at the polls.
Seen another way, the PAP’s current policies regarding immigration (resulting in increase of new citizens who will vote for them) and living costs (resulting in a decrease of Singaporeans born in the country) is a double whammy for the people but political manna for the ruling clique.
What incentive is there for the PAP to change policy course? It does not have to appeal to the electorate by coming up with better policies but by cynically – and dangerously – manipulating the immigration-emigration flow.
Given such a scenario, is it smart to put all our eggs of policy change into that one basket of elections?
If the morning after Polling Day 2016 shows that the change-needle has not moved much, what do we do? Tell ourselves that 2021 is just five years away? How many more five-year terms are we going to wait before the PAP’s policies cause our society to implode?
The real hard truth
We need something more and that something is our political rights and our civil liberties. We need a free media. We need an independent elections commission.
And we can only get these if we publicly and visibly demand them. We must assemble – peacefully – in massive numbers to compel the Government that it must, one, amend the Newspaper Printing and Presses Act to allow private citizens to own and start newspapers. Two, re-write the Parliamentary Elections Act to ensure free and fair elections, and introduce an elections watchdog with teeth.
Public assemblies can also directly affect policy-making and it is allows the people to hold those in power accountable if a policy precipitates dire consequences.
In the make-believe world, democrats get voted into power despite the autocracy and they then reform the system top-down.
But that’s not how things work in the real world where democratic change comes about because the people demand it – loudly – and work for it. They amass in large enough numbers to force a government to relinquish control of the media and implement genuinely free and fair elections. Such efforts can, and have, been done peacefully. But never without determination and perseverance.
What do we do?
We have been conditioned to fear protests and, more insidiously, to frown upon expressions of political passion. As long as we retain this mindset, the PAP will have successfully put us in a box and, more disconcertingly, one in which we choose to remain.
We must jettison the foolish talk that human rights is a Western concept, inimical to Singaporeans. The idea that we must focus on bread-and-butter issues to the exclusion of defending our rights is one that the PAP has planted in our minds to disastrous effect. It is such thinking that has allowed the Government unchecked control of the election system, the media and, as a consequence, public opinion.
Once we overcome this mental obstacle and stop repeating the utter lie that political freedoms and civil liberties have no value in changing cost-of-living issues, we have overcome the hardest part of the battle. Our political rights have everything to do with our economic well-being. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
.
Singapore Democrats
Rate this (27 Votes)
<meta content="4.7037037037" itemprop="ratingValue"><meta content="27" itemprop="ratingCount">
