Michael Barr - PAP looking down the proverbial barrel

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

The PAP is looking down the proverbial barrel. The government has so much stacked in its favour that if it does well it will only be “as expected,” but if it does badly it will be a disaster. Not that the PAP will lose government, but any slippage from the already-bad 2011 result will probably destroy prime minister Lee Hsien Loong’s stature and authority inside cabinet. Even a failure to significantly improve the PAP’s showing will be enough for Lee to be judged harshly by his colleagues. The imperatives in Singapore’s political culture might make a spill motion against Lee extremely unlikely, but if the result is disappointing he risks becoming a lame-duck leader.

Lee followed the announcement of the election date with hyperbolic statements about the election ushering in the next generation of leaders and the next prime minister. This wasn’t just a contrived effort to appear statesmanlike: it was also an attempt to disguise his desperation in the face of the high stakes for which he is playing. There are other indicators of his desperation as well. Calling an election eighteen months early is a clear sign of nervousness, and his new pattern of asking to be judged more by his father’s record (since 1965) than by his own (since 2004) is an implicit admission that his eleven years as prime minister have been less than wonderful.

Yet it is too soon to be writing him off. Lee Hsien Loong emerged from the 2006 election with his authority seriously wounded by, among other things, the weakness of the party’s vote in his own constituency. This put his long-term hold on the prime ministership at risk, but he reversed the trend in his own constituency in 2011 (partly by tweaking the boundaries) and successfully turned his personal fortunes around, even as neighbouring Aljunied slipped away from the government.

This time, the PAP faces many challenges, but it still holds most of the cards. The institutional advantages it enjoys in any election have been supplemented by the fact that the election takes place immediately after the spectacular but jingoistic celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Singapore’s independence, which in turn followed the dam-bursting wave of emotion after Lee Kuan Yew’s death in March. This confluence of forces is tailor-made for Lee’s chosen tactic of framing “his” government’s record over the fifty years since independence rather than the decade and a bit since he became prime minister.

THE IDEAS DEFICIT

For Singapore as a whole, the future looks more certain, if not more comforting. The most worrying feature of this election is how bereft the government is of new ideas – or at least that is how it seems at the time of writing.

Government ministers used the period before the formal campaign began to make preliminary statements. One of these was buried in an interview given on 27 August by manpower minister Lim Swee Say, who said, “The way we grew our economy over the last ten years or so, I think we all recognise that is no longer sustainable.” He was referring to the most explosive of all the policy failures that led to the surge in support for the opposition in 2011: the government’s effort to boost production levels through the simple expedient of drastically increasing immigration to boost the number of working bodies – a policy initiated personally by the prime minister ten years ago. This primitive strategy was itself a throwback to the economic model of the 1960s and 1970s, when Singapore was launching itself as a manufacturing and export centre. It worked in the 1970s, but there should have been no place for it in twenty-first-century Singapore.

When I read Lim Swee Say’s statement I assumed he had been given the task of foreshadowing a major revision in the direction of government, and I was puzzled to find it buried in a news report. After all, it is widely acknowledged that Singapore, as a country and as an economy faces new and unprecedented challenges that require novel responses. This has been the standard orthodoxy in the upper levels of the civil service for more than a decade, so surely, I thought, this must be the opening gambit in pushing in a new direction.

A few days later I watched Lee Hsien Loong launch his party’s election manifesto and then downloaded and read the manifesto itself. Only at that point did it become clear that Lim’s admission was not part of any plan. I was struck by the timid, backward-looking nature of both Lee’s speech and the PAP manifesto. No new ideas; no hint of reflection; no revision; nothing very much that looks forward at all. This is not just bad news for the PAP; it is bad news for Singapore, since new ideas are desperately needed. Lee still has time to announce new ideas, but time is running out and I am beginning to wonder whether there is a single new idea in cabinet – or whether there has been for some time.

This would never have happened under Lee Kuan Yew. His mind churned....http://insidestory.org.au/singapore-...st-fifty-years


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