TR EMERITUS

Click to enlarge When Singapore started out as a developing self-ruled nation, our economic policies were largely focused on Wealth-Producing sectors that were producing high paying jobs, especially during the period from 1965 to 1985. Economic planning was always well communicated while our government adopted a very prudent approach in spending. By collectively creating wealth that grew our economy, our national savings in the form of the CPF grew, and with prudency, Singapore managed to build up a sizeable reserve by the time the First Generation of the PAP stepped down in 1985. This partly explained why a poor country like Singapore can become a financial hub for South East Asia region as without money, how could we have attracted more money? Our earlier economic trajectory was so strong that it continued to fuel our economic growth right up to mid-1990s and that is why many Singaporeans were not critically aware of the shift in our economic planning. Between 1995 to 2005 was when the unthinkable happened - we stopped being prudent and started to shift from a wealth producing nation to a wealth-consuming nation by attracting wealthy foreigners and entities, and where high-paying wealth producing sector jobs were traded for lower-paying wealth-consuming service sector jobs. Hence we started to hear politicians naively hankering about the need to be “cheaper, better & faster” but for what and for who exactly? To make the Singapore Workforce cheaper, our government started to aggressively import cheap foreign workforce to replace our local workforce, and by introducing tax levies, billions were collected and became the obsession of politically motivated parliamentarians. With massive increase in foreign workforce, more rents were collected, catering food for them were much more lucrative than opening more hawker centres to cater to locals, and when you start adding healthcare, insurance, telecommunications, remittance etc, those politicians naively believed that foreign workforce can be manipulated to grow the economy and population that also give them more votes. Yes, our economy grew superficially and the government started paying themselves lavishly as if they had done a great job, and that is why some Singaporeans refer to the GST as “Government Salary Tax”. To make matters worse, government started to outsource a large part of their services and many Singaporeans were replaced with “cheaper, better & faster” foreign workforce. To make sense of the drastic shift that has taken place, welders in our shipyards in the 70s and early 80s were earning several thousand dollars a month while their supervisors and managers were earning more than S$5,000, and general workers in the 1970s could easily earn a daily wage of S$40 at a time when our Civil Service were only paying several hundred dollars a month for clerks & office workers. When you start comparing these with the salary of skilled workers these days, or a cleaner, a security guard or a taxi-driver, our real wages had remain stagnant or gone down while our living costs have actually gone up very significantly. Go check and work out the difference in wages and the quality of our Singaporean Workforce during the period when Singapore was focused on wealth producing jobs and our economy today, where everyone and everything is premised on being “cheaper, better, faster” except for the privileged politicians, senior unionists and those in their services. Look at the new Equinor’s FPSO vessel for the Johan Castberg project that was being built at Sembawang Shipyard but due to serious weld-quality errors identified by the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) of Norway in 2020, who attributed these faults to Sembawang’s lack of welding expertise and poor quality control, and ordered for extensive repair work that resulted in excessive delay until the Norwegian owner has no choice but to send in a team from Norway last month just to prepare the “unfinished” hull to be towed back to Norway to be repaired for these welding defects. Isn’t this shameful and reflect poorly on our Singaporean Workforce & our GLCs? Rich-Poor Divide Can Only Get Worse: That single policy shift, or the failure of our government to plan strategically to sustain new wealth producing jobs, is the single most important factor that has exacerbated the income disparity that is plaguing our “rich & poor” divide, and is also responsible for the demise of the original Singaporean Workforce, one that was once dynamic and highly admired by MNCs and foreign investors. In the process of outsourcing these services, the responsibility and accountability are now pushed to contractors and contracted service providers. Such regressive practices unfortunately resulted in more jobs being outsourced because the Hard Truth or harsh reality is this - whenever something goes wrong at a ministry or government agency, we can see how quick they were to blame their contractors and promised to inflict punitive punishment on them but without a single iota of responsibility or accountability on their part. In short, such regressive practices were favoured by the government simply because it allows them to get away scoot-free but at what expense? Let’s Talk About Prudency: Consider the massive investment cost for more iconic developments like The Jewel, massive investment in SIA to cater to the growth in tourism, more investment in Seletar Aerospace Park to promote ownership of private jets to cater to the “whims & fancies” of new rich citizens, like in the movie “Crazy Rich Asians”, are these investments strategic for a country like Singapore? Point is, who traded away our competency and earlier success in economic planning that were driving our wealth-producing sectors responsible for producing high paying jobs for these sleazy and low paying jobs, and why? Can anyone in Singapore truly believe that we can compete with Bangkok on unrestraint entertainment or Dubai in accommodating the “rich & famous”, or Macau or Las Vega when it comes to gambling? Even those in the financial sector jokes about the stupidity of our policy-makers, who on one hand, wanted to promote Singapore as a financial centre while on the other hand, had premium cigars in exotic boxes repacked into plastic zipper-bags. Pandemic-Driven Reality-Check: The pandemic actually gave Singaporeans a jolt of reality - a rich & developed economy like Singapore cannot compete on cheap foreign labour and critically needed more sophisticated socio-economic strategies to stay ahead as regional economies like Indonesia, Vietnam and India start waking up from their slumbers after watching the spectacular rise of China. How can we ever be "cheaper, better, faster" than these developing countries when our rental, home prices and costs of living are so high? Can Singapore afford more economic planning missteps or believe that we can still be relevant in 2030 or beyond with all these realities exposed by the pandemic, and when our neighbouring economies start attracting FDIs and talents away from us since they can all easily outmaneuver us in being much more cheaper, better and faster? With severe hardship, massive loss of “quality” employments, large segment of Singaporeans being under-employed while entrepreneurs, enterprise-owners, freelancers, taxi-drivers, gig-workers and small business owners are still struggling to cope with the hardships caused by the pandemic, with many of them in serious debts, it is unthinkable for the government to be talking about increasing the GST from 7% to 9%. With ultra low interest rate for bank deposit and the impact of global stagflation starting to bite into our economic growth, our costs of living have been going up excessively and this include the recent increase in utility bills, fuel prices, COE, school fees, property tax for public housing and cost of fresh imports, and the proposed increase in GST may just break the backs of many Singaporeans and families. Singapore already has taxes for everything, except for any wealth tax or inheritance tax, and the total collection for last financial year already amount to S$49.6-billion, accounting for a massive 73.6% of our operating revenue or 10.6% of our GDP. GST at 7% already amount to some S$10.3-billion so when increased to 9%, coupled with the multiplier effect, the increase can easily translate to some S$3-billions in additional revenue inflating our GDP growth with its compounding effects, and hurt our enterprises & Singaporeans. But why is the government pushing ahead for the GST increase just for a mere S$3-billion? It could be just another of the “increase the tax to justify growth” mindset of a government that is intoxicated with “taxing-the masses” to inflate and grow the economy, or a politically driven plot - announce a GST increase, then get the preferred candidate for the next prime minister to step into reverse or delay it in parliament to win some political votes. With the 4G PAP, l am no longer sure if this even remotely plausible. Whatever the government has in mind, our present economic planning, or the lack of a more strategic one, is clearly destroying the livelihoods and future of many Singaporeans and can only get worse. Are we going to wait until Singapore becomes notoriously famous for exporting graduates as domestic workers or be the world-first in having graduates working as cleaners, taxi-drivers, hawkers etc? Is this what we have been voting for at every past General Elections? As parliamentarians start to prepare for the upcoming Budget, many hard questions have to be asked of our economic planning, and what is the government doing to restore wealth-producing sectors that can produce high paying jobs, one that is befitting of a First World Country like Singapore. So wake up and wise up if we still believe that Singaporeans still deserve better.   Joseph Nathan      Read More →

One of the most prominent quotes about one of the ladies in my life came from Singapore’s dumpiest hooker, who described my ex-girlfriend, who was had been to Raffles Girls School (RGS) as having “Studied so much that she had become stupid.” I think of this line because in a way, this sums up the biggest problem in Singapore these days. We have top heavy management filled with people who have studied so much that they have become stupid. If one were to look at the performance of the big firms run by born and bred CEOs, as was done in “BE LIKE A PARALYMIAN AND DON’TBUBBLE WRAP YOURSELF” (26 August 2021), you will notice an uncomfortable trend. Our big local firms, run by born and bred Singaporeans have been underperforming in just about every measure of the word and that is despite the fact that they’ve got near monopoly power in their domestic market on essential services. The internet is a buzz with lots of noise about how the influx of dark-skinned Asians has ruined the lot of our local born Singaporeans. The common complaint is this – how can someone from the University of Rubber Pundek Prata on the tip of Tamil Nadu get a position superior to the graduate from the National University of Singapore (NUS), which we are told is a world-class university? As much as the government decries the people complaining about graduates from the University of Rubber Pundek Prata, the government is actually grateful that the complainers are focused on the University of Rubber Pundek Prata because it districts the population from the awful truth that the real problem with Singapore is the fact that the government has stuffed the top positions on every organisation with power over the lives of ordinary citizens with people who have studied so much that they’ve become dumb to the reality of what’s happening on the ground. Our guys have great degrees and the top ones don’t even come from NUS. They come from places like Harvard and Cambridge. If you looked at their qualifications, you’d say that these people are exceedingly smart. You would be right to assume that they’re smart – they’re so smart that they realised that all they had to do in life was to ignore all the basic laws of economics and collect money. The key to success once you’re in a lucrative position is to stay there and avoid getting into trouble – which means not doing anything. Your screw ups will be miraculously turned into a success narrative. Just look at the SMRT Corporation and how it’s CEO, Mr. Desmond Kuek became a hero for creating value for his shareholders by selling the company to his largest shareholder, Temasek Holdings. Or look at another former General, Ng Yat Chung, who ran Singapore Press Holdings in such a manner that he became a hero by hiving off the media part of the company that needs government support and the property part was sold at a few times less than its peak to another property company. Our “local” genius seems to come from creating stories about how fine everything is without checking on the ground. Today (25 January 2022) had one of its best. Apparently, an academic in our world class national university has worked out that the people on the lowest rung of the ladder were in fact the least affected by price increases. The story can be found at: [LINK] As with the case of Singapore, the good professor ensured that he had the statistics to back his claim. It’s quite clear that the good professor is rather sheltered. Sure, the price of certain items that the middle and higher classes buy might have risen a bit more than the prices of the things the poor focus on. However, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that someone earning S$5,000 a month is going to feel the pinch significantly less than someone earning S1,400 (the amount that is considered a minimal wage of sorts in Singapore). What exactly are we trying to prove here? We have a world class university because it can come with statistics that magic away the reality that people face on the ground? There’s no way of saying it other than to say that we are wasting brains and talent of our local achievers on creating a fantasy world. There are plenty of issues faced by normal people, who are paying Rolls Royce prices for a “top-notch” government to solve. The government and our local elites need to spend a bit less time creating stories that have no relation to the reality that the rest of us face and start having an honest dialogue with the people.   Tang Li *Although I’ve been based mainly in Singapore for nearly two decades, I’ve had the privilege of being able meet people who have crossed borders and cultures. I’ve befriended ministers and ambassadors and worked on projects involving a former head of state. Yet, at the same time, I’ve had the privilege of befriending migrant labourers and former convicts. All of them have a story to tell. All of them add to the fabric of life. I hope to express the stories that inspire us to create life as it should be.      Read More →

My uncommon sense tells me that, after the covid pandemic is declared over, the Singapore government will move towards increasing immigration to boost the population to 6.7 million and eventually to 10 million. They will work towards this goal out of economic necessity. Singapore has become uncompetitive and irrelevant in many sectors of the economy due to high cost of doing business and inefficiency. It will still remain attractive as an oasis for the wealthy to make their home here for the following reasons: a) To pay lower taxes, compared to their home countries b) To raise a family c) As a base to operate in the region. We have already developed our MRT systems, hospitals, schools and airports to cater to a larger population. They cannot remain under-utilised and become white elephants. This will pose a challenge to the local competition in facing competition for jobs from foreigners, especially in the higher levels of the workforce. Maybe the ministers think that they will be able to cope with the challenges better in the future. I believe that the challenges are huge and insurmountable, unless there are major changes to several policies on national service, employment practices, improvement in productivity, encouraging childbirth, etc. I do not welcome this strategy. I think that it is exposed to high risks and disadvantages. But my uncommon sense says that this is a likely scenario. I will not be around to see the success or failure that will occur over the next three decades. In case Singapore gets too crowded and life becomes unbearable, I have prepared a retreat in Johor. It will probably be useful for my children or grandchildren.   Tan Kin Lian      Read More →