This week should have been a significant and promising one. A new Finance Minister has just delivered his first Budget speech. We are beginning to emerge from the pandemic. How is Singapore going to deal with the new world? The debate in Parliament has just begun and should have been exciting. The Leader of the Opposition was expected to be articulating the views of a segment of the population on, among other things, why the government should first exhaust other sources of revenue before slapping any GST hike. And Workers’ Party’s Pritam Singh did just that – and he has been doing that for years.
The problem is that the People’s Action Party lives in its own universe. It will only hear what it wants to hear.
Instead of a proper discussion, we hear members talking almost like all over the places. We lost an important opportunity to move the country forward – not just in the policies and programmes presented to the people but also to showcase what our Parliamentarians can do in providing the leadership for meaningful discourse.
Thus we have the spectacle of a very strange phenomenon.
There was Manpower Minister Tan See Leng more or less not convinced that any kind of increase on taxes on the well-to-do would not lead to a flight of talent from Singapore. And there was Singh replying: “I disagree with the minister’s characterisation. I also cannot understand why he is baffled because it would be that in the course of this debate that the WP would propose alternative revenue sources.”
A New York Times report on the Russian invasion of Ukraine spoke about the yearning of certain civilisations for their very own universes where no one else really matter, regardless of whether there are other people living in the same world or the next.
How did the Singapore Parliament end up like this, where people seem to be living in different universes?
Another example of two different universes – this time between those of Tan See Leng and Progress Singapore Party NCMP Leong Mun Wai.
Leong had criticised what he saw as MOM’s reluctance to differentiate PMET employment data by categories of “original citizens”, “new citizens” and PRs, and the decision to “lump all the figures” under one grouping of “locals”.
“We do not have a clear picture of how policies have affected each category of people,” he said, adding that the PSP had previously disputed figures Tan had provided in July last year on job creation for PMETs.
So why could there not be clearer data for better and more informed debate? Who decides what is relevant or not relevant?? Is this society so fragile that disclosing such figures would result in the lack of social cohesion?
All this obfuscation – whether to avoid having a proper debate or to simply mislead the public or obscure the real issues – is unhelpful.
Let’s hope the rest of the Budget is more productive and more up to par.
Tan Bah Bah is a former senior leader writer with The Straits Times. He was also managing editor of a local magazine publishing company.