By: Phillip Ang
Khaw used to be top on the talking nonsense list but younger aspirants like Minister Ong Ye Kung seems to have mastered the art in double quick time.
Perhaps being sarcastic, Ong says “Singapore needs an economy driven by new ideas”. Something wrong with Lau Goh’s open-leg policy? Or PM Lee growing our GDP by opening casinos or inviting billionaires to take up citizenship?
In a recent talking nonsense session to an audience of mostly students from SUTD, Ong uses an analogy of the “world as an airport” and says our economy has to be more than a “control tower”: it has to become a “runway” where ideas are conceived, business plans are developed, and products and services eventually launched.
Question: How to have such a runway when PAP leaders are preoccupied with propaganda, self service and control?
Did someone write Ong’s thesis? Does Ong not have ZERO experience in the real private sector, not GLCs? (Since 1993, Ong has served in different ministries, as PPS to PM Lee, CEO of WDA, NTUC Asst. Sec-Gen, etc and finally entered Parliament via the GRC back door system)
Ong: “… be more gung ho and prepared to take risks and fail..”. What about PAP leaders? Aren’t the careers of PAP scholars iron rice bowls, smooth as silk since day one?
It’s easy for policymakers and part-time MPs earning more than $50,000 every month to exhort risk taking from behind a desk. During the GFC when risk takers were … taking risk, PAP ministers were looking at their CPF statements every month and rewarding themselves with 19-month bonuses.
PAP leaders are the most risk-adverse species, preferring others to take risk while they reap the rewards. Can Ong name any PAP member who took real risk besides Michael Palmer and David Ong?
A good example would be the HDB which takes ZERO risk with its BTO flat allocation system, unlike private developers.
Ong should not expect others to walk his talk when he and his party members only talk.
Thanks for the joke Ye Kung.
Risk takers exist in every society and who doesn’t want to make money when the opportunity arises? PAP should just stop monopolising public resources and tweaking legislations to favour GLCs, stop crowding out SMEs and genuine businesses and there will be risk takers aplenty.
In another report, Ong cited unverifiable job statistics: 30,000 IT professionals are needed next year. So which companies are hiring 30,000 Singaporean IT professionals? You bet Ong can’t even name the companies hiring half the number of IT professionals.
If PAP had any planning and had known there would be future demand for IT professionals, why were polytechnics and universities not conducting more IT courses years ago? Nobody wants good jobs with good pay or were 30,000 IT jobs miraculously created this year?
Equally optimistic is Ong’s cabinet colleague Gan Kim Yong who has a surprise for Singaporeans: 30,000 additional healthcare workers will be needed in five year. Gan describes these as “ample good jobs for Singaporeans”. Don’t know who he’s trying to hoodwink.
For at least a decade, PAP has been depressing wages of healthcare workers by importing foreigners. Healthcare wages are not determined by market forces but government immigration policy which now allows PAP to label citizens ‘choosy’.
Like PM Lee who realised “easy ways” to economic growth were “maxed out”, Ong seems to have realised “easy ways” to job growth have also been “maxed out”. Ong warns of tougher times ahead for retrenched workers who had it so much easier when the government was preparing to open 2 casinos in 2008.
Ong claims the government is “helping laid-off workers find new jobs and retraining workers to have the necessary skill”. But aren’t these mostly lower-paying jobs, not the good jobs promised by PAP?
Truth be said, the government has never assisted meaningful numbers of retrenched PMETs. There are no statistics to confirm X number of retrenched PMETs were re employed through government assistance. PAP has been merely talking nonsense all the time and using the MSM to gloss over unemployment numbers.
Ong’s final advice to employees: be multi-skilled, possess mental skills and be willing to unlearn, learn and relearn. If it were really so simple, retrenched workers would be re employed almost immediately. But of course Ong was referring to menial jobs/blue collar jobs which qualify one to beg for state handouts.
So what about PAP? When are ministers going to unlearn their economic shortcuts and learn to generate real GDP growth through increased productivity?
It’s about time Singaporeans pause to think: in the absence of supporting statistics, PAP is just talking nonsense. The days of treating citizens as fools are over. Or are they not?
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Republished from the blog ‘likedatosocanmeh‘.