Found this in my archives....written by a student some 10 years ago...
If democracy is about fair representation and balance of powers,how can this be achieved
if both the executive and parliament are overwhelmingly dominated by the same party ?
With the party whip, PAP members must vote according to their party stand even if their
conscience is against it. This makes the passing of laws very expedient for the ruling party.
Laws that may hold political motive.
I 'am not saying that PAP is corrupt.( I can;t)..Hell, if i get paid that much,i don't need to be corrupt.
But there is no gaurantee that there won't be corruption tomorrow. There are no checks and balances
to prevent it.
And even the representation is skewed. Even if PAP won 75% of the votes,that has somewhat converted to 82 out of 84 contested seats in Parliament. That's 97.6 % of the contested seat. I don 't remember them getting a 97 % majority vote. And the opposition parties got 25% of the votes. 25% of 84 seats would be 21. But instead, they got 2. That's about 10 times less. Somehow, by the rearrangement of electoral boundaries and ballooning of GRCs, 25% of the people's will is only represented by about 2.4% of contested seats in parliament.
If democracy is about representation and checks and balance, then clearly the situation here raises
some questions.
If democracy is about fair representation and balance of powers,how can this be achieved
if both the executive and parliament are overwhelmingly dominated by the same party ?
With the party whip, PAP members must vote according to their party stand even if their
conscience is against it. This makes the passing of laws very expedient for the ruling party.
Laws that may hold political motive.
I 'am not saying that PAP is corrupt.( I can;t)..Hell, if i get paid that much,i don't need to be corrupt.
But there is no gaurantee that there won't be corruption tomorrow. There are no checks and balances
to prevent it.
And even the representation is skewed. Even if PAP won 75% of the votes,that has somewhat converted to 82 out of 84 contested seats in Parliament. That's 97.6 % of the contested seat. I don 't remember them getting a 97 % majority vote. And the opposition parties got 25% of the votes. 25% of 84 seats would be 21. But instead, they got 2. That's about 10 times less. Somehow, by the rearrangement of electoral boundaries and ballooning of GRCs, 25% of the people's will is only represented by about 2.4% of contested seats in parliament.
If democracy is about representation and checks and balance, then clearly the situation here raises
some questions.
