TR EMERITUS

Today Ho Ching posted a defence of her husband’s (PM Lee Hsien Loong) salary after an article appeared on a blog called Seedly (which appears to be selling loans, credit cards and insurance under the guise of a personal finance blog without being regulated by MAS) comparing LHL’s salary with those of other world leaders. While pointing out how much more LHL is paid than leaders of other much bigger countries, it (surprise, surprise!) comes down firmly on LHL’s side by saying his salary is a justified premium for growing Singapore’s population and GDP per capita and much lower than those of other corporate leaders, particularly compared to the salary of Piyush Gupta at Temasek-controlled DBS. GDP per capita is a poor measure of citizen welfare particularly when Singapore’s is distorted by having so many guest workers and expats with no dependents and also by tax breaks to encourage MNCs to book revenues here rather than in the US. As I pointed out here, Ireland’s GDP per capita has grown as fast and is just as distorted as a measure of living standards. As for population growth, few Singaporeans will thank LHL for opening the doors to anyone who wants to work here without having to do NS, particularly for third-rate expats from the West who enjoy much higher living standards than Singaporeans encouraging them to think they are in some theme park recreation of the British Raj like an episode of Westworld (which ironically is being filmed in Singapore). In any case LHL’s abilities or lack of them have got little to do with Singapore’s growth, which can be entirely “explained” by the growth in world trade since 1960. Now that globalisation has gone into reverse the PAP have no answers to revive Singapore’s growth other than telling Singaporeans to tighten their belts, upgrade their skills and wait it out. Returning to Ho Ching’s post, I was appalled firstly by the grammatical mistakes and bad English for someone who is head of a $300 billion company, the most powerful woman in Singapore and supposedly the 17th most powerful globally according to Forbes magazine. For instance saying “Having have [sic] these qualities of excellence”. I can only hope that she is more literate in Mandarin! In any case it makes a mockery of the tiresome clamour from the PAP and the Lees, whenever accusations of nepotism and cronyism are raised, that they enjoy their positions and enormous salaries as of right because Singapore is a “meritocracy”, This assertion is then taken at face value and repeated ad nauseum by venal or gullible Western apologists for authoritarianism or leaders looking to gain a strategic edge by shoring up the PAP regime. Secondly why is she adopting a political position and defending her husband’s salary publicly when she is effectively a civil servant. Lawrence Wong may have insulted our intelligence by saying that Temasek is a private company and can do what it likes but everyone knows it is owned by the MOF and ultimately Singaporeans. She should be bound by the civil service code of conduct and stay out of politics. Or else she should resign from Temasek in order to contest the next election if her son does not beat her to it. She is probably only one step away now from emulating that useful idiot Bilahari Kausikan, an Ambassador at Large, who called me a moron for daring to comment on LHL’s collapse at the 2016 National Day Rally. Surely her bosses need to pull her up and rap her over the knuckles for making political statements. But then of course she does not have any boss apart from her husband. By saying “we must not take advantage of them to underpay, or require them to wear hairsuits for a show of sainthood” Ho Ching is damning her husband (and of course) herself by admitting that they are only motivated by money. So much for being servants of the people. She is of course only echoing her father-in-law who stated many times that it was intolerable that he was earning less than top lawyers and did not see why there should be any restrictions on him making as much money as possible while he was in office. “Ministers who deal with billions of dollars cannot be paid low salaries without risking a system malfunction. Low salaries will not attract able men who are or can be successful in their professions or business. Low salaries will draw in the hypocrites who sweet talk their way into power in the name of public services, but once in charge will show their true colour, and ruin the country. This has happened in many countries.” SM Lee Kuan Yew, Speech to the National Trade Union Congress at the Singapore Conference Hall, 19 July 1996 Thirdly and most importantly why is Ho Ching talking about her husband’s salary while she ignores the elephant in the room, which is what she is paid and which she refuses to disclose. If Piyush Gupta is paid $12 million p.a. while the head of SingTel earns over $20 million (including share options), then she must be paid several times that. We cannot just be stonewalled in Parliament by the fiction that Temasek is a private company. I have said many times over the years that it is extremely likely that she is paid more than $100 million a year and has earned more than a billion dollars while she has been at Temasek. Yet her remuneration is treated like a state secret and guarded as closely as the size of our reserves. And when she talks about a “clean” salary without any perks she and her husband need to explain why they are using the Gulfstream owned by Temasek’s subsidiary, ST Aerospace, and whether it is available for her to use for private trips as CEO. Neither does she reveal whether her family money is invested alongside Temasek’s making use of inside information and getting cut in early on special deals. It is clear that Ho Ching occupies much the same role as Kwa Geok Choo did for LKY. While LKY was paid an obscene salary by the standards of other world leaders, the real money was being scooped up by his wife in her role as head of Lee & Lee. My father was able to establish that Lee & Lee were the preferred lawyer for the HDB’s conveyancing though at the expense of losing our family home. It was probably her that LKY was referring to when he said in 1994 that lawyers were able to make $4 million p.a. Like LHL’s mother, Ho Ching is able to make the real money while her husband is paid a meagre pittance of only $2.2 million p.a. I wonder who is really richer: the Najib and Rosmah Show or our very own first couple. I guess we will never know.     Kenneth Jeyaretnam * The author blogs at https://kenjeyaretnam.com/.      Read More →

When PM Lee spoke about his plan for our children at the National Day Rally last Sunday night to assure parents, I find it a little troubling as to why he is not addressing some of the pressing challenges that are already plaguing our children over these past years. Just a few months ago, we have the Monica Boey‘s incident at NUS which eventually escalated into a full blown embarrassment for our universities. Many Singaporeans were shocked by the double-standard exercised by our SPF where leniencies were shown to sexual perpetrators while female victims were left in a state of limbo. As more female students find the courage to step forward and expose many more violations over the years, showing that this was not an isolated incident but one where non-action by the authorities and our academics over a long period of time had allowed such violations to fester into “norms” at our universities until it also dented the good reputation of Singapore. Here we go again: Over the past month, new issues of indiscretions were again surfacing out of our universities. We also have the unresolved case between Jeanne Ten and NUS which has stretch for years, and her current dilemmas in filing for an appeal in the High Court is starting to draw attention to our universities again. While she may not have a clear cut case of violation, surely any good standing academic institutions like NUS will find plagiarism a serious issue that is worthy of their timely intervention. For the case to stretch for so long, being escalated into the High Court and where large amount of tax-payer monies were allegedly being utilized is definitely a very troubling development. Are the academics and administrators at NUS unable to practice conflict-management? If they were unable to practice what they are lecturing to our young, then what exactly is our young learning in our academic institutions these days? Are our children being taught to become pushovers or be accepting into being bullied or be treated unfairly? Then we have the fallout in ROAR, a CNA’s documentary which forms part of our National Day Celebration where a beneficiary charity was deprived of media coverage when siblings Subhas and Preeti were charged for being racist. The hard stand of CNA and our SPF draws strong criticism from some Singaporeans while others felt that they should have taken a more calibrated approach in mitigating this unfortunate issue. SPF finally relented and finally gave them a conditional discharge but the damages were already done and the opportunity missed. Reality of Race & Racism Race and racism are realities that every Singaporean faces almost daily in school, social outing, at work or even within some family setting. It was a controversial issue in our last Elected Presidential election, just as it was when it comes to the open debate about a minority becoming the Prime Minister of Singapore. To put things into perspective, race is a feature of our Singaporeans identity since our government has been reluctant in scrapping it out of our identity card despite the constant call for it to be removed. In signing of the CECA agreement with India, where Indian nationals were able to gain unfretted employment in Singapore, a large numbers of working Singaporeans and parents were vocal in objecting to such an unfair employment practice. Surely these concerned Singaporeans cannot be labeled as being racists as the issue here is about the lost of good paying jobs to foreigners. To make matter worse, when news of fraudulent qualifications or the lack of real life expertise surfaces, or when Singaporeans face discrimination in a foreign-majority working environment right in their homeland, more concerned Singaporeans rightly raised the issue publicly and demands that our Manpower Minister takes corrective action to mitigate this discrepancy and level the playing field. Being pragmatic about correcting a social discrepancy in such cases cannot be construed as being racist. Importance of Being Singaporean First Until we find the courage to drop the race identity and start addressing ourselves as Singaporeans, race will always be an issue since everyone needs an identity within a group setting. While the removal of race will not decimate the race issue, it will greatly reduce the social tension since everyone now has a common indentify that is more significantly meaningful. Until our Singaporean identity is allowed to takes roots in us, race will always be a contentious issue and will cloud or complicate other social tensions. If adults struggle with these issues, then we should expect that our children will likely to struggle even more. Forced Social Activism When we start adding the cases of Daniel De Costa, Li Shengwu, Soh Rui Yong, Han Hui Hui, Seelan Palay, Jolovan Wham and on and on, I begin to wonder if our government is in a mad rush to create social-activists out of our children, just like they had turned Roy Ngerng needlessly into a “Joshua Wong” of Hong Kong. If left unmitigated, such forced social activism will propagate needlessly, and one day in the not too distant future, the violent protest that we are witnessing in Hong Kong may just explode right under our nose. I am not writing to support wayward behavior, in individuals like Amos Yee or Michael Faye but rather in cases where the individuals are simply trying to raise what they see as social injustice, social issue or what looks like institutional indiscretions to them. If they were crude or unpolished in escalating these concerns objectively, a more calibrated approach by our authorities may be more desirable. I remember how some senior individuals in MHA used to engage some wayward youths in the nineties and gave them the benefit of the doubts whenever they antagonized or tested their authority. In taking a more mentoring approach and listening to these youths, many of such entanglements were avoided. It also helps when the authority reciprocated with timely response to the issues raised. These days, the reverse is true. By taking the silent approach, disinformation and non-action will just make such entanglements more frustrating and controversial when the full force of our SPF and AGC suddenly serve arrest warrants or notices upon them. Is there no more middle ground when it comes to educating and mentoring our children? Risks of Forced Activism Roy was just a nursing staff at TTSH but has now became a powerful force that is drawing external attention to our city-state whenever he raises social issues and what he saws as injustice. Just like Joshua Wong, forced activism has turned individuals like them, and will in time, will also turn the others into being powerful antagonists of our establishments. The failure of our 4G politicians to engage them meaningfully when all options were possible may just become their Achilles’ heel of our establishments and institutions. Like a bad nightmare, they are not going away any time soon. Take the case of Jeanne. If she failed to file her appeal due to cost constraint by this Thursday, then the whole of our Judiciary system and that of NUS and even SMU will be dented in some way through no fault of hers. The failure of the leaderships in those establishments to engage her and to find a resolution to the whole affair will be seen as a structural failure of our public sector. With substantial tax-payers’ monies being spend on legal proceeding by NUS against her, even PMO, MOE and MOF will be drawn into this issue needlessly. The cost of damages against our public institutions will not only become irreparable but such unresolved conflicts undermine PM Lee’s promise of a society that truly cares for our children. Since PM Lee had took pain to explain what mitigating is all about in his rally speech, I hope our 4G politicians will at least show him some respect, understand its meaning and demonstrate their mitigation skill in conflict management and help reduce the incidence of forced social activism among our children. Our Children Needs Inspiring Role Models Our children need inspiring role models like Tommy Koh, Catherine Lim, Kishore Mahbubani or Ho Kwon Ping, individuals who have the courage to speak up objectively when it matters in their time. Kwon Ping, who now chairs SMU, was an outspoken social activist and wrote against the establishment and was detained under the Internal Security Act. Yet, with proper engagement, all these individuals are now our social-economic assets, not liabilities. Otherwise, our politicians in yesteryears will surely crack under the prowess of their collective activism. Our youth needs these inspiring mentors to help them find better ways to articulate and raise social issues more objectively and constructively. But for this to happen, we need to engage them, not punish, harass or threaten them into submission. While some youths are starting to draw discords against Kwon Ping for appointing Lily Kong as President of SMU, I personally think that he is unaware of the unresolved conflict between Jeanne Ten and Lily Kong which SMU unknowingly inherited when they appointed her as president of SMU. Now that the case is brought into the open again, it will be interesting to see how Kwon Ping can intervene and bring this conflict into an amicable closure. I hope all these inspiring individuals will step up and help these youths and other children in their pursuit of social justice or in escalating issues that they saw as social injustices. In the process, I hope some of the more promising 4G politicians like Tharman Shanmugaratnam or Ong Ye Kung will also step up and help those implicated to find tenable closures so that our establishment will stop manufacturing social activists out of our children. The collective consciousness of our awakened children matters and it is time that patriotic Singaporeans help to de-escalate all these entanglements because Singaporeans truly deserve better.   Joseph Nathan      Read More →

I agree that we need to deal with climate change. I am not sure if we need to spend $100 billion to achieve this goal. What I know is that we have another goal that is more urgent and more immediate. We need to bring down our cost of living. We can bring it down by more than 7%, if we abolish our GST immediately. We are facing economic challenges due to the global recession and the trade wars. By giving additional spending power to the people, we can stimulate the local economy, so that the people who lose their jobs can find alternative work to make a living. This is the most pressing need. It takes $10 billion a year. But, we do not need to increase the reserves by $10 billion a year from the land sale. It can be diverted to reduce the cost of living. We will need to build dykes to stop the flooding of our low lying areas. It does not cost much in the short term. It will take a long time for the sea level to rise a few centimeters. We can do it gradually. Maybe, the whole project will not take $100 billion. Maybe it will take $5 or $10 million over the next 20 years. We can afford it. Let us focus on the more urgent and more immediate problem, while still pay attention to the longer term challenge. Tan Kin Lian      Read More →