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The emerging ‘invisible’ underclass in S’pore
Maxwell Coopers
March 12, 2013
The news just did not surprise anyone, simply because it could not! The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in a report last month labeled the ‘economic oasis’ everybody knows as Singapore as the nation with the greatest income inequality.
The report did not mention the city-state’s income inequality was the worst in the world, but a sensation is steadily gaining that eroding income levels have accelerated a slow and painful process of societal alienation, thus in the process increasingly fostering class divides.
Not since one-time political dissident and erstwhile gun-blazing firebrand of the Workers’ Party, J.B. Jeyaretnam (JBJ) first complained of “pockets of poverty behind gleaming office towers” to a Western newspaper in 1982 has a more salient focus been once again turned on the city-state.
Those remarks from Jeyaretnam, needless to say, earned him some of harsh and most withering of barbs from the then and late education minister, Tan Eng Soon.
Yet after some 30 years, an ‘invisible’ Singapore underclass is hardly indistinguishable. The sight of the old and infirm waiting out at tables, clearing rubbish in the streets or scavenging into trash bins to eke out whatever living that is sanely and remotely possible is not just commonplace.
It has now lead to strident calls to temper the very harsh, forbidding facets of Singaporean-style meritocracy with a compassionate edge replete with a welfare system even as that maybe ideological bugaboo.
That call is almost certain to grow louder as the nation continues to age brought on firstly by a birth rate that remains stubbornly low and the lack of any favourable measures to reverse the decline in falling birth rates.
According to the BBC report which cited the United Nations, the income gap in Singapore is the second biggest among Asia’s developed nations, which again given the lack of a minimum wage regime, is excruciatingly unsurprising.
The report did not say which Asian nation had the biggest income gap but there leaves nothing to doubt what a Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) said several years that Singapore’s ruling Peoples’ Action Party (PAP) is “quick to tax its people but slow in granting privileges”.
Though that has been changing somewhat by the slew of a pro-family, pro-business and pro-Singaporean budgetary measures unveiled by the nation’s deputy prime Minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam and aimed of all things to reversing the plunging fortunes of his kinsmen; the measures at its best are too little, too late and at its worst, pin prick steps taken to address a badly and severely wounded national psyche and a populace aghast at the continually widening income gap between the haves and have nots’.
Class war
Just how much a chasm there was and is; came ‘illumined’ in the sprightly gaffe from the PAP’s candidate for the recently-concluded Punggol by-election in January 2013 Dr Koh Poh Koon; when he told a rally of supporters that both he and his wife own two cars and each of them of would drive separately to work each day.
Given the stratospheric prices cars in Singapore fetch – something like US$30,000 to US$40,000 for even a souped-up vehicle – the statement from Koh was enough to hit a raw nerve to reinforce ground sentiments that the PAP was an elitist party with little or no sympathy for the sufferings of the ordinary poor and their plight.
Worse of all, it lent credence to what has all along been perceived: that the PAP is out of touch.
It's policies have only brought grief and that the pockets of poverty the late JBJ complained aloud is existential, it is actually growing and not an empty, vacuous gripe meant to score political points.
As a matter of fact according to the BBC report wealth in the country was created so very quickly over the last few years.
That while a tribute to the nation’s management wizardry also proved in becoming a double-edged sword as it easily allowed people to slide in their economic takings.
Though monthly incomes rose by 40% over the last 10 years, the reverse was the case for those languishing at the lower rung of the socio-economic ladder whose average monthly incomes fell by 2.7% across the board.
Former deputy prime minister Goh Chok Tong who was in parliament in 1982 during the outburst from the Tay Eng Soon warned last December “our community may be divided by differences in income levels within it” highlighted the BBC.
That may certainly be happening now.
Many older Singaporeans still remember with fondness the times in the 1960s and 1970s when primary schoolchildren would be given free milk on the back of the PAP government’s generosity, which it then argued was about the assistance it had to give to the poor and the struggling.
The PAP then was just a shadow of its present riches. The irony, today is that despite close to US$800billion in its national reserves, even those mercies seem to have been taken away.
Is a class war looming? Only time and the depth of social engineering programmes will tell.
Maxwell Coopers is a Singapore-based freelance writer.
http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2013/03/12/the-emerging-%E2%80%98invisible%E2%80%99-underclass-in-spore/
Maxwell Coopers
March 12, 2013
The news just did not surprise anyone, simply because it could not! The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in a report last month labeled the ‘economic oasis’ everybody knows as Singapore as the nation with the greatest income inequality.
The report did not mention the city-state’s income inequality was the worst in the world, but a sensation is steadily gaining that eroding income levels have accelerated a slow and painful process of societal alienation, thus in the process increasingly fostering class divides.
Not since one-time political dissident and erstwhile gun-blazing firebrand of the Workers’ Party, J.B. Jeyaretnam (JBJ) first complained of “pockets of poverty behind gleaming office towers” to a Western newspaper in 1982 has a more salient focus been once again turned on the city-state.
Those remarks from Jeyaretnam, needless to say, earned him some of harsh and most withering of barbs from the then and late education minister, Tan Eng Soon.
Yet after some 30 years, an ‘invisible’ Singapore underclass is hardly indistinguishable. The sight of the old and infirm waiting out at tables, clearing rubbish in the streets or scavenging into trash bins to eke out whatever living that is sanely and remotely possible is not just commonplace.
It has now lead to strident calls to temper the very harsh, forbidding facets of Singaporean-style meritocracy with a compassionate edge replete with a welfare system even as that maybe ideological bugaboo.
That call is almost certain to grow louder as the nation continues to age brought on firstly by a birth rate that remains stubbornly low and the lack of any favourable measures to reverse the decline in falling birth rates.
According to the BBC report which cited the United Nations, the income gap in Singapore is the second biggest among Asia’s developed nations, which again given the lack of a minimum wage regime, is excruciatingly unsurprising.
The report did not say which Asian nation had the biggest income gap but there leaves nothing to doubt what a Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) said several years that Singapore’s ruling Peoples’ Action Party (PAP) is “quick to tax its people but slow in granting privileges”.
Though that has been changing somewhat by the slew of a pro-family, pro-business and pro-Singaporean budgetary measures unveiled by the nation’s deputy prime Minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam and aimed of all things to reversing the plunging fortunes of his kinsmen; the measures at its best are too little, too late and at its worst, pin prick steps taken to address a badly and severely wounded national psyche and a populace aghast at the continually widening income gap between the haves and have nots’.
Class war
Just how much a chasm there was and is; came ‘illumined’ in the sprightly gaffe from the PAP’s candidate for the recently-concluded Punggol by-election in January 2013 Dr Koh Poh Koon; when he told a rally of supporters that both he and his wife own two cars and each of them of would drive separately to work each day.
Given the stratospheric prices cars in Singapore fetch – something like US$30,000 to US$40,000 for even a souped-up vehicle – the statement from Koh was enough to hit a raw nerve to reinforce ground sentiments that the PAP was an elitist party with little or no sympathy for the sufferings of the ordinary poor and their plight.
Worse of all, it lent credence to what has all along been perceived: that the PAP is out of touch.
It's policies have only brought grief and that the pockets of poverty the late JBJ complained aloud is existential, it is actually growing and not an empty, vacuous gripe meant to score political points.
As a matter of fact according to the BBC report wealth in the country was created so very quickly over the last few years.
That while a tribute to the nation’s management wizardry also proved in becoming a double-edged sword as it easily allowed people to slide in their economic takings.
Though monthly incomes rose by 40% over the last 10 years, the reverse was the case for those languishing at the lower rung of the socio-economic ladder whose average monthly incomes fell by 2.7% across the board.
Former deputy prime minister Goh Chok Tong who was in parliament in 1982 during the outburst from the Tay Eng Soon warned last December “our community may be divided by differences in income levels within it” highlighted the BBC.
That may certainly be happening now.
Many older Singaporeans still remember with fondness the times in the 1960s and 1970s when primary schoolchildren would be given free milk on the back of the PAP government’s generosity, which it then argued was about the assistance it had to give to the poor and the struggling.
The PAP then was just a shadow of its present riches. The irony, today is that despite close to US$800billion in its national reserves, even those mercies seem to have been taken away.
Is a class war looming? Only time and the depth of social engineering programmes will tell.
Maxwell Coopers is a Singapore-based freelance writer.
http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2013/03/12/the-emerging-%E2%80%98invisible%E2%80%99-underclass-in-spore/
