Singapore Notes

Fun And Games

2012-02-17T10:36:00.002+08:00

Sigh, is this really that offensive? Enough to detract the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) from cleaning up their own act, and distract the public from the investigation of MHA high ranking officers exchanging sensitive information for bedroom favours? And provide more delays "to come clean with the people what information have they got (sic)", to borrow the words of one Khaw Boon Wan.

That "Thailand is a place of little true joy" is simply a expression of what the Campus Crusade for Christ group hoped, some may say naively, to achieve in their mission trip, i.e. show them true joy, whatever that may be. Their target audience may welcome the visit, or they may not. The choice is that of the Thais - they may not receive the religious messages, but they may find the guitar strumming and sing along musical presentations entertaining. Campus Crusade for Christ is an interdenominational Christian organization that promotes evangelism and discipleship in more than 190 countries around the world. Besides the traditional one-to-one conversations about God to reach out to students, they also use mass meetings, film showings and new media, such as Google advertising. They also founded The Jesus Film Project in 1981 to translate the Hollywood film "Jesus" into 1,006 languages and shown the film in 228 nations. That's another way to spread "true joy" to other people. If you don't like it, don't attend the showing.

Besides the Campus Crusade for Christ, there are many other Christian groups on campus. All of them share something common, young undergraduate minds trying to understand religion. Not all will find it though, some may discover joy elsewhere. Should their quest for personal happiness and spiritual knowledge be quenched by the sledge hammer of the MHA?

Even within the Christian world, it's not all fun and games, joy and laughter. To give you an idea of how complicated religion can be, take a gander at this extract from a stunning guide into the source of scriptures:

"Later in the Book of Isaiah, the Sepuagint's (Greek translation of the Hebrew original text) "And I saw two mounted horsemen, and a rider on an ass, and a rider on a camel" became an embarrassment to Christian apologists but a welcome support to Muslim disputants, because it seemed to be prophesying not only that Jesus would enter into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday riding on a donkey, as the Christian Gospel described him doing in the New testament, but that he would be followed (almost exactly six centuries later) by the prophet Muhammad, who was a camel driver."
("Whose Bible Is It", Jaroslav Pelikan, Penguin Books, 2005, pg 59)

Just a passing thought: If the SCDF Commissioner and CNB Director "got religion", would they have found joy in the private company of the IT executive?

Running Out Of Patience

2012-02-16T10:04:00.000+08:00

There is a remarkable scene in the Margaret Thatcher movie, "The Iron Lady", when Meryl Streep dresses down Anthony Head (as Lord President Geoffrey Howe) for shoddy work. Other members grumbled, "I wouldn’t have spoken to my gamekeeper like that."

The Iron Lady in action

While some may venture that the expulsion of Yaw Shin Leong is rather harsh treatment, few will excuse him for absenting himself from the Tuesday night council meeting and an opportunity to come clean before his party leaders. It's one thing to seal his lips in front of the blood thirsty mainstream media, trying to chalk up brownie points for the pro-alien people, it's another to let down those who placed good faith in him. The anguish is plain in Low Thia Khiang's affirmation that the people's interest comes first before his party's priorities, "We require our MPs to be responsible people. Although it is a difficult decision... we'll have to make it so that the Workers' Party and its MPs can stand tall and hold their heads up to take the PAP government to account."

The surprising development to this twist of events is that the Prime Minister is apparently caught flat footed. Instead of relishing to seize the day and reclaim the renegade ward, he seems hesitant to go into battle. "On whether and when to hold a by-election in Hougang, I will consider the matter carefully." Hardly the demeanor of a take charge general in command. "Under the law, there is no fixed time within which I must call a by-election," he added, as if the people has infinite patience to await an elected representative to voice their needs in parliament.

Perhaps his plate is still full, what with the SMRT unresolved headaches, CPIB probes, and people like Foo Mee Har publicly threatening to "take steps to protect my rights if it becomes necessary to do so." Lawyer Chia Boon Teck expands on latter's pugnative stance, which mirror's the recent reaction of K Shanmugam, "If anybody wants to talk publicly about somebody else, especially a public personality, then you better be careful... If what you are hinting at is based on rumours and gossip, then you are exposing yourself to legal suits." There was no legal action in Yaw's case (the expulsion is in line with party Constitution, and legal recourse is remote) , but look how rumours and gossip can bring one down. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Fuel For Thought

2012-02-15T09:03:00.003+08:00

K Shanmugam's "All are equal before the law" speech at the Rule of Law Symposium yesterday touched on corruption. Although he did not refer to any specific case, everyone in the audience knew the latter was about the two top civil servants hogging the headlines, subject of which Teo Chee Hean is steadfastly maintaining in parliament that there was "no delay" in releasing news of the CPIB coup to the information starved public. But when Teo said, "It was necessary to give CPIB time to gather evidence, seize documents, conduct interviews, etc", you bet there will be lots of speculation on the internet whether the extra time given to the CPIB will constitute "delay." As Bill Clinton will put it, "define delay".

Speculation on whether all is equal before the mainstream media brewed up another storm. A blogger wondered aloud about the MSM treatment of the rumours concerning opposition MP Yaw Shin Leong. He got screwed because of some nutty posting by a "Scroobal". Shanmugam actually instructed Allen and Gledhill lawyers to trace and sue the pants off that character, but as the legal eagles put it, "the internet being what it is, Scroobal has been untraceable so far". All these publicity means there will be lots of speculation on the internet about what the fuss is really all about.

Apparently all the Scroobal postings have been erased. The blogger who received the lawyer's letter of advice also duly removed the comments from his website. What remains as fuel for speculation is the stuff printed by the Straits Times:

"Mr Au said that there had been "relative silence when it came to allegations swirling around K Shanmugam and Foo Mee Har at various points in the recent past.
That there were rumours is widely known, though as in the Yaw Shin Leong case, no one can point to any proof."

Man, that really takes the cake. We are told if we read it in the Straits Times, it has to be true, but K. Shanmugam and Foo Mee Har in a same story? Anyone with an imagination that wild surely deserves an Oscar for creative script writing. I think there's enough speculation even for the most avid of internet addicts. It looks like Yaw was wise to say, "We do not comment on rumours".

What the lawyers say is not okay to say

The Sin In Singapore

2012-02-14T15:13:00.002+08:00

The landline comes free with the internet access package, but we seldom bother to pick up the hefty the phone books from the collection centres. Now they deliver the Yellow Pages section to our door step. See what is listed under "Entertainment-Escort".

Whether it was such an ad that led to the downfall of the principal from Pei Chun Public School is any body's guess. What we do know is that prostitution is legal in Singapore. Officially, places like Geylang are DRAs - Designated Red-light Areas - where presumably, a female in financial straits may sell access to her private portals to pay off the utility bills, town council charges, or the HDB 30-year mortgage. Males, unhappily, do not have the recourse. What they have is 377A.

The tricky part is that the marketing of the goods falls foul of the law e.g. pimping of the services is illegal (as is public solicitation). Wikipedia defines a pimp as an agent for prostitutes who collects part of their earnings, which amount to 60 to 70 percent of the $70 - $200 charge for "basic services" in the current Singapore context. The pimp may receive this money in return for advertising services, physical protection, or for providing (or in some cases monopolizing) a location where she may entertain her clients - such as budget hotels in Geylang, Balestier or Joo Chiat. Now, if the pimp chose to advertise the said services with Yellow Pages, will the latter be consider part and parcel of the modus operandi? Maybe someone should ask Mah Bow Tan, who is now Chairman of Global Yellow Pages Ltd. For all we know, all those shady budget hotels were built during his tenure as Minister for National Development. Erected at a faster pace than public housing for the poor.

It is common knowledge that, in practice, the police unofficially tolerate the operation of, and monitor a limited number of brothels. The only requirement is that prostitutes at such establishments have to undergo periodic health checks and must carry a health card when the boys in blue come a calling. There's no law for the ladies in waiting to carry their passports with them at all times. Section 376B of the Penal Code stipulates that dalliances with anyone under 18 faces potential jail time for up to 7 years. Buyers beware - especially you guys in the education and uniformed service!

Bedroom Secrets

2012-02-13T09:01:00.000+08:00

Discovering that Santa Claus does not exist may have been traumatic for kids, but adults are not spared from disillusionment with the subject of their hero worship either.

Mahatma Gandhi's unusual practice of sleeping nude next to nubile, naked women - in some cases, his young relatives - to test his restraint is documented in biographer Jad Adams' "Gandhi: Naked Ambition" (Quercus, 2010) . "Abnormal and unnatural" was how the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, described Gandhi's advice to newlyweds to stay celibate for the sake of their souls.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King engaged in extramarital affairs, Ralph David Abernathy acknowledged in his 1989 autobiography "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down"(Lawrence Hill Books, 2010). He wrote: "We all understood and believed in the biblical prohibition against sex outside marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation." The FBI did put together a tape of the indiscretions caught on camera and accidentally - some said deliberately - sent it to Martin's wife, Coretta.

John F Kennedy's legendary appetite for female companionship has now been updated with a memoir written by then 19-year-old intern cum mistress Mimi Alford, now 69 ("Once Upon a Secret; My Affair with President John F Kennedy and Its Aftermath", Random House Audio, 2012). Putting aside the graphic details about their liaison, some interesting revelations have surfaced. At the height of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy confided in his lover he was prepared to blink first: " I'd rather my children were red than dead." Even in bed, he was thinking of his country's future.

But when special prosecutor Kenneth Starr went after Clinton's affair with his intern, his infamous report became viral as a pornographic document on the Internet. He may have claimed that "it is unfortunate, but it is essential", that many details revealed highly personal information, many of which were sexually explicit, the end result is that the villain looked more victimised than his purported victim. In 2004, Starr expressed regret for ever having asked the Department of Justice to assign him to personally oversee the Lewinsky investigation, saying "the most fundamental thing that could have been done differently" would have been for somebody else to have investigated the matter.

Investigative reporters should take note, sometimes a better recourse is: "don't ask, don't tell." All that prying about the bedroom habits of high ranking civil servants and "allegations of serious personal misconduct" is now unearthing an online prostitution ring involving a handful of public servants, some say as many as 80, mostly from the education and uniformed services. Well, they do have lots of money to spend, thanks to the generous compensation packages crafted by the Public Service Division.

Money Makes The Academic World Go Round

2012-02-10T01:11:00.006+08:00

Dorothy Rowe is an internationally renowned psychologist whose book, "Why We Lie", has many lessons worthy of contemplation. In both private and public life, says the notes on the cover jacket, we damage our selves with our lies, and damage other people. Lies destroy mutual trust, and fragment our sense of who we are.

In 2008 Rowe was invited to become an honorary professor at London Metropolitan University (LMU), and the staff who invited her made sure she was paid for her work. However, by May 2010 the university was in financial straits, something to do with their awarding the Dalai Lama an honorary degree, and there was no money to pay her. Rowe agreed to work for free. Needless to say, the staff at NUS are of a different persuasion. There, the credo seems to be, no money, no teach.

The National University of Singapore is asking permission from the Ministry of Education (MOE) to increase university tuition fees for the new academic year 2012-2013. While the details of their submission are not available to the public, two justifications have come to light.

The politically correct pitch goes like this:
The money would serve to increase financial aid for needy students. Targeting students from the bottom 20% of households in terms of average income per family member, bursary funding for needy students will be increased from $5 million to $9.5 million, starting from academic year 2012-2013.

The word from the horse's mouth is like this:
We quote the NUS Provost, Professor Tan Eng Chye: “I think all of us, when we work in a company, we all yearn to see some salary adjustments every year. So do all the faculty staff.” 70% of NUS’ budget is spent on the salaries of the faculty staff.

And we thought the focus of the tertiary institution was to teach. Why is the academic institution involved in charitable causes, when we have a national budget to address the needs of the poor? NKF's TT Durai tried to get rich that way, and look what happened to him. Perhaps the recent instance of how the Public Service Division made many civil servants happy with a mere stroke of the pen has triggered a wave of self justifying entitlements. That plus how the Ministers can still afford their bungalow, cars and domestic helps inspite of a purported wage cut. Monkey see, monkey do.

Selfish Reasons

2012-02-09T08:42:00.001+08:00

Seriously, I don't know what to say about this.

Following the footsteps of the Woodlands group who objected to the building of an elder-care centre at the void deck of their HDB blocks, residents at Toh Yi estate were protesting last evening against similar intentions for a plot of land at the junction of Toh Yi Road and Toh Yi Drive. Plans for the construction of 130 studio apartments were announced last month, before heckles were raised at Woodlands. Designed to be fitted with senior citizen friendly grab bars and anti-slip tiles, these apartments are open for application only to those aged 55 and older. To many, it brought back haunting images of the notorious death houses at Sago Lane.

Said retiree Loh, 66, "These old people are living there alone. It's almost as if they are sent there to just wait to die."

To appease the objectors, HDB explained that the block will have a playground and exercise corner on the second floor, which will be open to all residents in the estate. The facility will have a place for the young and the old. Cringing before the loud noises raised, MP for Holland-Bukit Timah GRC Sim Ann made the token support argument, "every existing amenity is precious to our residents." She was referring to the $120,000 spent by the town council to build the jogging track and garden at the same plot of land just last year. Another instance of what the right hand of the government not knowing what the left hand is doing. She added, "I fully understand why some residents may be reluctant to see these go - in fact, having invested effort and resources in the site, we in the grassroots feel exactly the same way."

Lest you think the Toh Yi crowd has a genuine supporter in their ranks, here's what Chua Chu Kang GRC MP Zaqy Mohammed really feel: "Some think that the Government will try to appease residents who didn't vote for them. But it will be dangerous if the Government gives in to populists demands." The brigadier general also made some pleasant sounding remarks about Bukit Brown, but the bull dozers are still moving in.

No Country For Old Men

Pay Hike! Pay Hike!

2012-02-07T12:49:00.002+08:00

The Public Services Division implemented a 5 to 15 percent pay hike for civil servants "where their salaries needed adjustment to remain competitive and keep pace with the private sector." The XO sauce,oops, MX grade, officers who are benefiting from this benchmarking exercise are:

MX11 and 12 grades - young officers to middle managers drawing $3,000 to $7,000 - get 10 percent;
MX10 and "just below 9" - deputy director types drawing $6,000 to $10,000 - get 5 percent;
MX9 grades - those drawing above $11,000 - no adjustment needed since they are already getting private sector salaries for doing public sector work

In its typical opaque manner, the PSD said it has "selectively made salary adjustments for some generic schemes of service" in February 2012, without specifying what those schemes are or the number of civil servants who will be receiving the extra pay. Also not disclosed is who will be entitled to the top 15 percent hike. Presumably it will the non-graduate officers in the lower and middle rungs of the management support scheme whose pay starts at $1,600. Nobody knows for sure.

No wonder Gerald Giam was all befuddled when he thought the MX9 scheme was a straight forward salary scale, not tempered by some secretive formula tweaked to suit the political climate of the day. He said information about the MX9 salary scale was something "we are not privy to". Neither are we, the taxpayers, Mr Giam.

Meanwhile in the real world of the private sector, the 2012 Hays Salary Guide is saying that the Singapore workforce can expect an average salary increase of between 3 and 6 percent this year. It looks like they won't be having their chye tow kuay at Peach Garden outlets.

Value Of Friends

2012-02-06T09:05:00.001+08:00

During the launch of book Men-In-White book, one of the authors mentioned taking Dr Toh Chin Chye for a car ride around town, and he asked what was the spiky looking building at Esplanade Drive. This was sad. Was this how the founding chairman of the richest political party in the world lived out his last days?

Dr Toh Chin Chye 1921 – 2012

Thanks to the account of former journalist Pang Cheng Lian, we are glad to learn that he had friends who bothered to hold monthly lunches with him. And put up with a cantankerous old man with a failing memory. The people who cared for his company included former MPs Ho See Beng, Robin Sim, and ex-colleagues in the Cabinet, Ong Pang Boon, Lee Chiaw Meng, Tang See Chim, to name a few.

These are guys with personal knowledge of Toh's contribution to the nation, not third party accounts. The man who could have been Prime Minister on two momentous occasions. Once on 17 July 1961, when Lee Kuan Yew wrote him that the trade unions, the Middle Road Crowd, wanted Lee to resign and Toh to take over as the Prime Minister. Then again in 1964, consequent to race riots in Singapore and Malaysia, when Lee offered to resign, purportedly as an attempt to defuse the strained relations between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Extremists from UMNO (United Malays National Organization) were demanding the Tengku should arrest Lee and prevent him from causing more political mischief and ethnic tension in Malaysia. In that eventuality, Toh or Dr Goh Keng Swee would have been the next logical choice to become Prime Minister of Singapore.

Straits Times wrote that "..it is caricature to say personal bitterness drove him into embarking on a late career as a vocal critic", implying he was unhappy for being booted out of cabinet prematurely at age 59. We believe his outrage stemmed from the shoddy treatment of faithful stalwarts who stood by the party during the nascent trials of nation building, only to be cast aside like used douche bags to make way for technocrats parachuted in. Hear his words from an 2002 interview:
"You don't repay their loyalty by throwing them out suddenly. They have no jobs to go to... We have the responsibility to help them find another job."

It is said his physical deterioration accelerated with the demise of his wife, and then adopted daughter. In the end it is the love of human beings that sustain life, not pecuniary pursuits.

Drivers For Motivation

2012-02-03T09:33:00.002+08:00

Barely one year in office, and Education Minister Heng Swee Keat has picked up the nasty habit of sliming Singaporeans in public, the demeaning trait of Goh ("quitter") Chok Tong and Lee ("daft") Kuan Yew. He is telling everybody that young Singaporeans need more drive.

Well, at least some young guns are motivated enough to refute the Minister,
"I feel it's a sweeping statement to say that Singaporean students lack drive," (2nd year Ngee Ann Polytechnic student, 23);
"I feel that Singaporeans students have drive. .. towards choosing well-paying jobs as has been ingrained into them from a young age," (2nd year NUS student, 20);
"I am driven by my desire for happiness, which comprises a stable income and job I'm happy with," (Film and media studies student, 18).
Surprise, surprise - the one who disagrees most with Heng is a foreign visitor from Australia, "I feel that the students here have enormous drive. They are highly motivated to do well. It surprises me, really. They are more motivated compared with Australian students." Good on ya, mate, thanks for the ringing endorsement!

The European CEO Heng quoted was reportedly shocked by the alleged Singaporean response, "What if I fail? Will I still have a job? Is there a support system and do I get retrenchment benefits?" Doesn't that sound remarkably like the lines used to justify the million dollar ministerial salaries? That money will take care of the uncertainties of the political arena? Maybe that CEO should have talked to real lesser mortal Singaporeans instead of the typical invitees to the Istana tea session. Or some of his own countrymen caught up in the throes of the European sovereign debt crisis.

It beggars to ask, is there such a thing as "noble" motivation or drive? Don't embarrass our local sportsmen and women with that question. Theirs is a carrot dangling in front of the goal post - real gold to strive for at the SEA games ($10,000), Commonwealth Games ($80,000) and Olympics ($1,000,000).

Heng didn't spell out for his listeners what actually drives him and his comrades. The following table with numbers from the Andrea Ong article ("What price a minister? 42 years of controversy") may provide the clue for the source of their motivation and drive.
(* where monthly figures are not available, reported annual pay is divided by 12 months - who can keep up with all those bamboozling bonuses?)

Monthly Salaries	Minister Pay	PM Pay
1970	$4,500	$3,500
1973	$7,000	$9,500
1981	$11,500	$16,500
1989	$28,644	?
1994	$64,000	$96,000
2000*	$80,666	$161,666
2007*	$132,500	$257,500
2011*	$91,666	$183,333

SMRT Numbers Game

2012-02-02T07:56:00.000+08:00

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) announced that SMRT has awarded contracts worth about $600 million comprising:

additional NEL trains - S$234.9 million
additional CCL trains - $134 million
re-signalling of the NSEWL - $195 million
signalling of Tuas West Extension - $40.3 million

The SMRT revenue for the three months to Dec 31 2011 alone is $268.2 million, which means the projected income for a whole year is likely $1.07 billion or more (FY2011 revenue was $969.7 million). Easily pays for the long overdue equipment purchases to address the current operational shortcomings. Assuming the assets are depreciated over 10 years, it will cost them only $60 million a year. According to Lui Tuck Yew's LTA logic, it appears that SMRT only operates the trains, so the bill is not even picked up by them. However, the depreciation charges will come in handy for net profit calculations.

Another intriguing number to note is that the operating expenses posted for same quarter ending Dec 31 is $227.7 million, of which repairs and maintenance expenses amount only to a pathetic $20.9 million. Which suggests that the hardware is hardly given top priority by the management in charge. The SMRT 2010 annual report shows similar figures, $79.2 million for the whole year for repairs and maintenance, or about $20 million per quarter. No wonder the trains are breaking down.

The EBITA margin was 32.5% for FY2011, the corresponding net profit margin being 16.6%. Huge juicy profits made from the long suffering commuters who have no alternative public transportation system to turn to.

The employee statistic tells another interesting story: number of employees went from 6,102 in FY2002 to 6,565 in FY2011, about 7% growth over 9 years. But "Staff and related costs" jumped from $184m in FY2002 to $313.6m in FY2011, a jaw-dropping difference of more than 70%. Obviously some people there are getting awfully rich. Make no mistake though, this is not the Melbourne-based bus company who paid out millions in bonuses to its staff for loyalty after owner Ken Grenda profited from selling the family business.

Radical Solutions Needed

2012-02-01T09:15:00.000+08:00

Two questions on social inequality and mobility that came up during a Singapore Management University (SMU) forum on Tuesday night are worth highlighting.

Third-year student Ms Mathew said the Primary 1 registration system creates an uneven playing field for children as places are given first to those who live near the schools and whose parents are their alumni. She asked if the Education Ministry had plans to tackle this issue.

SMU alumnus Ong said he observed at a neighbourhood school that several students were too poor to buy red-and-white outfits to celebrate National Day, and asked if the Government had a clear policy on addressing the issue of social inequality.

Education Minister Heng Swee Keat, as expected, did not provide pertinent answers, but laid on the blame with a broad brush on Singaporean parents. He said: "Honestly, if parents' mindset is that there is only one good school in this place, whatever system of allocation, whether by proximity, by pure balloting, by whether you volunteer and all, that will not have any good outcome." Heng had his party issued blinkers on, ignoring the elitist elements in the school system.

He may not admit it in public, but not all schools are created equal. Even teachers are assigned according to their personal assessment by superiors - the less favoured being doomed to the neighborhood establishments where gangs proliferate and girls hawk their services for extra pocket money. A principal once told us not all the students at her school are wearing the new uniform just introduced because many could not afford the expense, and at least 800 were in arrears with the school fees. Needless to say, there were no posh cars in sight waiting to pick up their wards. A neighborhood school is not a place where you see maids carrying the kid's school bag.

Maybe we should just do away with the brand names, and just number them as Primary School 32, Secondary School 45 or Junior College 88. And buy lots of those American yellow buses to transport the students to schools all over the island, regardless of race, language or postal district codes.

Money Down The Drain

2012-01-31T09:11:00.002+08:00

When Lee Kuan Yew was asked in July 2010 if he thought the response from the various agencies to the recent spate of floods in Singapore was sufficient, he was quoted as saying,"whatever we do when we get extraordinary rains like we had recently, no amount of engineering can prevent flooding." Oops, looks like another "I stand corrected" statement is in order.

The Public Utilities Board (PUB) just announced that it will be spending about $750 million over the next 5 years to carry out 20 drainage improvement projects to achieve a higher level of flood protection. Presumably most of the money will be allocated for implementing the recommendations of the Expert Panel for Drainage Design and Flood Protection Measures, like introducing a polymer lining to smoothen the Stamford canal walls and speed up the water discharge. Longer-term solutions mooted include the construction of a diversion canal and detention ponds, items which Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Vivian Balakrishnan was so hesitant to commit on - "These are very expensive projects. We have to approach this methodically and carefully." (MyPaper, 3 Jan 2012)

Actually, that's the worrying part. This is the guy who was given $104 million to spend for YOG and ended up with a bloated $387 million expense. Of which $79.8 million was parked as "Other Costs", an accounting entry that was not even picked up for query by the Auditor General. Yet the then 50-year-old, who was heading the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS), insisted that his team "did not overspend or waste or squander the $387 million budget" allocated to the project - note the sneaky sleight of hand here, actual $387m amount expended (per report card presented in parliament) equals exactly the revised $387m budget proposed (supposedly figure approved by PM Lee).

Which means the $750 million can easily balloon to $2.2++ billion. With pro-rated "Other Costs" to match. Instead of more CCTVs to monitor flood-prone areas, what we need is a closer watch of these profligates at the helm. Note only $2 million is needed to remove the sewer and NEWater pipelines from Stamford Canal and line it with polymer, leaving lots of room to fiddle with $748 million.

The New Army

2012-01-30T11:38:00.002+08:00

"The Men Who Stare at Goats," is a weird story about a secret, psychic military unit established in 1979 by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, walk through solid walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them.

The goats of the title, according to author Jon Ronson, have been hidden at a Goat Lab at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and de-bleated for security reasons. The experts there contend that a goat's heart can be stopped by the intense gaze of a certain kind of supersoldier.
This jaw-dropper of a hard-to-believe book (also made into a movie starring George Clooney) is a non-fiction story. Based on material from declassified government documents, Ronson addresses the more sinister aspect of out-of-the-box military thinking.

Equally weird is a study by the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) that claim recruits who go through their Building Resilience in Individuals for Growth and Emotional Well-being programme (BRIDGE - even the acronym does not tally up) out-jumped, out-ran, out-shot and out-performed those who did not. Add out-hype to those superlatives. Mindef spokesman Desmond Tan boasts that the programme focuses on imparting the knowledge and skills recruits need to control their thoughts and actions to overcome the adversities they face in physical or outfield training.

Stretched over the 10-week Basic Military Training (BMT), BRIDGE is supposed to teach recruits to:
Stop negative thought processes (and replace these with positive self-talk like HDB prices will come down);
Reflect and share thoughts with peers and commanders (keep the distance though, look what happened between teachers and students in schools);
Set individual targets for physical training (why 10 push-ups when one will do?)

Oh yeah, and recruits get to watch movies and are given handbooks, in addition to the laptops and iPads issued.

Makes one wonder when our young men in uniform will get to practise their marksmanship on the firing range, or learn to reverse a land rover without running over someone standing behind.

More White Lies

2012-01-28T10:02:00.000+08:00

Can the Minister for Home Affairs, namely Teo Chee Hean, be probed by the CPIB for lying to the electorate?

In the latest MHA statement, Teo's ministry said it had planned to announce that Lim and Ng were investigated and suspended from duty on 25 Jan, one day after Lianhe Wanbao informed the public on 24 Jan. The MHA also said it was informed by CPIB on 20 Jan that there was "sufficient basis" to consider civil service disciplinary action for misconduct, resulting in the immediate appointment of their replacements.

Why is the MHA, Teo's ministry, still insisting that there was NO DELAY in releasing news of the CPIB probe of the allegations of misconduct against the two top men in his ministry?

The MHA, in an earlier press release, already stated for the record that both men were arrested on 14 Dec 2011 (Ng) and 4 Jan 2012 (Lim). Is the MHA saying that prior to these dates, investigative work had not yet commenced on both these black sheep? That, prior to these two dates, the Minister, namely Teo Chee Hean, was not clued in on the developments before his two top lieutenants were dragged into the police station to be handcuffed and finger printed for the arrest?

Hiding behind the "not in the position to comment as investigations are in progress" excuse, Teo said, "If I have more information , I'll be happy to provide it to my fellow Members of Parliament". That's his way of saying that lesser mortals will have to settle for scraps of flaky information from his MHA, to plaster over the truths being leaked from other sources.

Well, it looks like the MPs will have to ask the hard questions:
When was impropriety about the IT purchases first discovered;
When was suspicion first cast on the uniformed officers;
When was the female IT executive first identified and invited to assist in the investigations;
When were the collaborative pieces of evidence first assembled to pin point the targets;
When did the CPIB conclude it had "sufficient basis" to inform MHA;
When did they receive official permission to arrest Ng and Lim.

CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria interviewed PM Lee Hsien Loong at Davaos on Thursday 26 Jan, "People say the system is too closed you need more political openness." Lee's response is telling, "If only it were so simple." We can understand why. The can of worms that is being opened confirms the ugly truth - white is the new colour for the rot within.

On Hidden Agendas

2012-01-27T14:05:00.002+08:00

The broadside burst from his shotgun came out of nowhere. It was not clear who his bullets were targeting, the members of the audience at the "Young Guns" forum organised by the NUS political association, the journalists of MSM at large, or the bloggers of the new media.

Vikram Nair of the People's Action Party was obviously not within his element of boot-licking grassroots leaders and apple-polishers when he professed, "At every forum I've attended before this one, I have been misquoted." Whining like a wounded puppy, he lamented, "That is because people have an agenda to discredit us (presumably referring to his keechiu crowd)... I don't think (the misquoting) is accidental, I am quite sure they are deliberate."

Well, people, it looks like Nair is one card carrying member who fully subscribes to the "us" versus "them" mentality. Which means the political divide is here to stay, it seems to suit their agenda. On this, this Nair seems to have a head start.

Way back on 11th August 2009, the 93.8FM website quoted one of the editors of the lame P65 blog site, Mr Tang Ho Wan, as saying that none of the 8 new writers brought in to beef up the blog was affiliated to the Young PAP. He was also quoted by the Today newspaper as having said the same. Young PAP Chairman, Mr Teo Ser Luck, as quoted in the Straits Times, had explained, “We have our own Young PAP website for the politically inclined… The P65 blog is to allow other young people to share their views, which are non-partisan, neutral and can be constructive criticism of policies.”

All too soon, it surfaced that one of the writers on the blog was indeed a Young PAP member travelling incognito. And Vikram Nair revealed it himself in a blog post titled, “I’m coming out”.

It looks like we have an expert practitioner on hidden agendas talking.

The Tin Pei Ling Defence

2012-01-26T08:51:00.002+08:00

The two top uniformed officials, entrusted to protect life and property, have been finger printed and formally arrested, passports impounded. So why are they offered an escape clause? Specifically,
"The bureau (CPIB) said that in the case of public servants, and especially where there may be no criminal wrongdoings but serious misconduct, the matter may also be referred to the ministry or agency concerned for appropriate disciplinary action to be taken".

The Kate Spade MP from Marine Parade clearly violated the "Cooling Off Day" election law, but was let off with a teeny weeny smack on her dainty little hand. Even the shame of the official police warning was borne by a mysterious "administrator", whose identity was never declared in the election filings.

This "personal failing" of the civil service elites is rumoured to involve clandestine interactions with a certain female IT executive; does mean that the Clintonesque excuse ("define sex") will also be resorted to? And assuming a Monica Lewinsky type dress could be produced, the testimony of the DNA lab could also be stained - recall the senior employee of over 30 years experience at the Health Sciences Authority's DNA Profiling Laboratory who screwed up because he had "misread' the label of the EDTA reagent.

In the Lennick and Kiel book, "Moral Intelligence" (Wharton School Publishing, 2005), the authors wrote:

"Knowing who you want to be - an honest, responsible, and compassionate leader - is one thing. Knowing how to become your best self is another. Actually, doing what you know you should do is still another matter. That is the essence of alignment, a shorthand term that means "your goals and your behaviors are consistent with your moral compass."

Targeted at corporate governance, the authors could have easily written for politicians and elitist civil servants. Commented one reviewer, Paul Fribourg of Wharton Business School, "We live in an increasingly competitive and global world,. Increasingly, 'the end justifies the means'. This often results in the loss of our moral compass. Lennick and Kiel show us that the truly great business leaders never sacrifice moral integrity for financial goals and that maintaining the highest ethical standards is not only the 'right' thing to do, it also produces the best companies and the best results."

It makes one wonder if the Singapore elites read stuff besides their CPF statement which, according to Minister Lim Swee Say, makes him feel fabulously rich.

A Bad Dose Of Crap

2012-01-25T09:55:00.010+08:00

Tanjung Pagar GRC MP Lee Kuan Yew once said that all you need is a dose of bad government, and our wives and daughters will end up working as maids for a living. So what happened that resulted in high flying civil servants being nabbed by the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB)?

Top dogs collared by Corrupt Practices Bureau

Both are government scholarship recipients, those get-out-of my-elite-uncaring-face types normally fast tracked by the Public Service Commission to lofty heights of high office appointments. With superscale grade salaries to match. Peter Lim was Chief of the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF), Ng Boon Gay was Director of Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB), together they had 40 years of service in their respective uniformed organisations. Barely a month transpired (Ng was investigated in end-Dec 2011, Lim in early-Jan 2012), and both have been replaced (by scholars of the same mold). The euphemism used for their downfall, "serious personal misconduct" is hardly appropriate for these guys obviously caught by their short hairs. Closer to home perhaps, is what the Chinese daily Lianhe Wanbao, who scooped the arrests, attributed to: "money and women."

Significantly, both transgressors are key members of the Home Team, the decorated folks that gave you the Mas Selamat debacle. The guy in charge of the Home Team is the Home Affairs Minister, currently DPM Teo Chee Hean, who also happens to be the Minister-in-charge of the Civil Service, the organisation who selects the scholars, and makes sure they are helicoptered to the top appointments in the land.

Don't expect DPM Teo, a soldier-scholar of the same breed, groomed by the same system, to be tainted by this latest hiccup. What did PM Lee say recently? "We can't expect ministers never to make mistakes or never to have mistakes happen on their watch in their ministries."

Chinese New Year Revelations

2012-01-24T11:33:00.002+08:00

Chinese New Year reunion dinners are a great time for exchange of gossip. Fortified with 14-year-old whiskey, supposedly more mellow than Blue Label Johnny Walker, inhibitions vaporise and all tongues are let loose. Guess what? The picture of ex-SMRT CEO Saw Phaik Hwa seated on a sedan chair carried aloft by eight bare-bodied men in at her company’s dinner and dance was not photoshopped!

Er, guys, you should be heading for the exit doors...

The more important revelation is that the window in the failed MRT car need not have been shattered, because there was a back up battery system that should have keep the lights and air-con working for at least 45 minutes! The relative who confirmed this gem also said, from the inception, the UK provided copies of their operating manuals and documentation of years of experience in train operation to help our SMRT planners get started. So the only excuse for the in-tunnel black-out would have to be the classic DBS line - we have the backup system in place, but chose not to switch it on.

More riveting is the structural constraint in the congestion problem. Way back when Ong Teng Cheong (the president who was denied a gun-carriage funeral) battled Goh Keng Swee for a all-train over all-bus, or bus-plus-train mass transportation options, the population numbers justified 6-car trains. The foreign talent policy, the 6-million population target, are making nonsense out of this configuration. Look at the train stations, under-ground and above-ground, they are physically handicapped to support longer trains, unlike Hong Kong, Japan or the UK. In Sydney, there are double decker cars to handle heavier passenger loads, which current MRT tunnels are not designed to accommodate. Aren't those guys supposedly (over) paid for long range far-sightedness in planning for the future?

The morning after, one hoped that the nightmares conjectured were just alcohol fuelled. But no, even after cups of head clearing kopi-o, the headaches are as real as ever. Just take a look at the nearest MRT station.

Reprise of Bak Chor Mee

2012-01-21T10:34:00.000+08:00

For someone appointed as Minister of State of Education, Lawrence Wong sure wasn't paying attention in class during the three days of ministerial salary debate. Instead of taking cognizance of lessons learnt in the bruising battle of words, he is droning on like Wong Kan Seng (no relation) over the Gomez-CCTV episode of 2006.

Yes, the Workers' Party did propose in 2006 that ministerial salaries be benchmarked 100 times the salary of the bottom 20 percent. But they also know that even if WP pointed out that white is indeed white, the PAP will pass a law to decree white is black. Hence during GE 2011, WP proposed an alternative benchmark pitted against the political office of developed countries. Now Wong (Lawrence, not Kan Seng) is quibbling over the Superscale MX9 peg.

WP chose MX9 because it is the entry-level of the Superscale grade. Who's to know how this level is pegged to the private sector salaries? There are so many opaque formulas in play in the system - electrical tariff, HDB pricing, COE quota, health care subsidy, etc - that it's probably easier to find out the secret recipe of the XO Sauce that the keechiu general is yapping about. Case in point, PM Lee revealed that only one minister is currently at the higher MR3 grade, but stopped short at naming the minister. What's there to hide? Is he afraid the public will be outraged at that minister's financial bonanza, or supreme sacrifice?

Wong should heed the words of a real teaching professional, NUS law professor Walter Woon, who said that the debate over minister's pay has become a proxy for dissatisfaction with the divide between the top earners and the vast majority of Singaporeans:
"No amount of argument with facts and figures will change that."

Wong should heed the lesson that in attempting to win the battle, he will lose the war. He may continue to rant like a rabid dog, but he's still taking a hair-cut with his take home pay. And we have the WP, and the electorate of Singapore, to thank for that. Let's hope he won't take it out on the kids by skimping on the angpows.

Air Force One Envy

2012-01-20T04:49:00.001+08:00

For Tanjung Pagar GRC MP Indranee Rajah, perks of office mean UK taxpayer funded type cheap meals, wine and spirits in the House of Commons. Her boss has his sights on a private jet.

The plane popularly known as Air Force One, is technically the call sign of any US Air Force aircraft carrying the President of the United States. In practice, it refers to one of two highly customised Boeing 747-200B series aircraft, which carry the tail codes 28000 and 29000. The idea of designating specific military aircraft to transport the President was first mooted in 1943, when the United States Army Air Force became concerned with relying on commercial airlines to transport the President. The "Air Force One" call sign was created after a 1953 incident involving a flight carrying President Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the same airspace as a commercial airline flight using the same call sign.

There are a number of differences between the customized 747's and a standard 747. These include state of the art navigation, secure and unsecure communications and computer systems, custom configuration and furnishings, self-contained baggage loader, front and aft air-stairs, and the capability for in-flight refueling to provide unlimited range.

The plane has an presidential executive suite, including a stateroom and an office, enabling the president to perform duties while in the air in the event of an attack on the United States. The president, his staff, and family, also have dining and conference facilities available to them. Separate accommodation is also provided for guests, senior staff, security personnel, and the news media.

Less detail is available about the Singapore Airlines plane SQ321 which was commandeered and outfitted into a private hospital ship, complete with two neurosurgeons, two intensive care nurses, oxygen equipment and a drip, to fly Lee Kuan Yew's wife back to Singapore after she suffered a stroke in London in October 2003. Consequent to public concern that tax payers would have to foot the bill, Lee's office released a short statement saying "Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew is paying for all the extra expenses of Mrs Lee's medical treatment in London and for her flight home on Singapore Airlines." The statement did not say how much the bill would be, and how much was paid to date, what discount rate was applied. What we do know is that the news team of tabloid ‘TODAY’ was trashed for the report they made of his speech about the event, which was based on material from an official press release. Apparently the offending point had to do with the phone call made by Singapore High Commissioner Michael Teo to No. 10 Downing Street, hoping for some intervention to move Mrs Lee up the NHS queue for a brain scan.

Who needs an Air Force One when one has the whole SIA fleet at his beck and call?

Dancing Monkeys In Play

2012-01-19T09:52:00.002+08:00

Pay peanuts, and you get monkeys. But who would have guessed that if you pay millions, you end up with dancing monkeys? Tired of the monkeying around about "convergence and agreement" of the principles in play over the ministerial salary debate, Chen Show Mao told the house:

"If indeed there is convergence today and if indeed, as has been mentioned, today is much like a dance, I would like to thank the Government for leading the dance and taking the first step towards acknowledging that political salaries in this country need fixing.

"While we agree with he three principles distilled by the committee, does DPM agree that under the committee's application of the principles, they have produced a formula that is really quite distinct from what the WP has proposed?

"For example, if maximum bonuses were received under the committee's proposal, ministerial salary would be in fact be reduced by 8 percent. And under the WP's proposal, it will be reduced by 37 percent."

Josephine Teo, missing the forest for the trees altogether, could not grasp the monkey tricks with the allowances. For Pritam Singh, it was like talking to a wall, "It's not the numbers that's the issue.... Peg it to the average Singaporean at a level where Singaporeans can aspire to."

What the primates in white and white missed altogether (scientific factoid: one of the most predictable traits of rhesus monkeys: their tendency to steal food at every opportunity) was a lifeline that would save them from the quagmire of greed they were sinking deeper into. Instead of pegging pay to the top earners, pegging it to rank and file servants, Pritam Singh explained, would be more acceptable to the public and, "critically, take the emotion out of the debate and set the tone in future decades for a more sober assessment of political salaries."

The last word came from Tanjung Pagar GRC MP Lee Kuan Yew, who preferred the boardroom of TOTAL in Paris discussing profits from oil to Parliament House deliberating the nation's future, "unless we have a steady stream of high quality men and women to serve as PM and ministers, Singapore as a little red dot will become a black spot." Precisely why we need people who come in for the service, not the money.

Flogging A Dead Horse

2012-01-18T09:25:00.002+08:00

Lee Hsien Loong can be so dense. Of all the unhappiness Singaporeans are so worked up over, none is worse than the demand for private sector pay without the private sector accountability. Even Steve Jobs was fired by the board when disappointing sales caused Apple shares to slide.

License to fail, and still get rich

Instead of sacking his epic fails, Lee would "move them to less demanding portfolios". Which explains why Vivian Balakrishnan is now "jaga longkang" (Malay for "custodian of drains"), but still drawing $1.1 millions after the "pay cut". The electorate is not so forgiving - witness the punishment dished out at the polls for Wong Kan Seng, Mah Bow Tan and Raymond Lim. More would have had their heads at the guillotine if not for the protective shield of the GRC.

Lee said Workers' Party MP Chen Show Mao entered politics at age 50, after a successful career as a lawyer, "Now he is ready to do public service". Lee himself became prime minister at 52, at a substantially higher salary than entry level MP allowance. No wonder Teo Chee Hean's quote made the headlines yesterday, "Passion alone not enough to run country". For some people.

Heng Swee Keat was held up as a sterling example of a private sector find who "took a substantial cut" in salary to enter politics. Heng was a Permanent Secretary (superscaled civil servant) before made managing director of Monetary Authority of Singapore (government appointee). That's as "private sector" as they can get. And Heng was made Minister so fast, you will never guess he was sneaked in on the Tampines GRC ticket in 2011. Even Lee himself had to serve time as minister of state before handed all the perks of ministerhood, personal security officers, Gurkha guard post, official car, etc, etc. The Workers' Party is asking that the total pay of political leaders should be published annually. Better still, let's see how big a sacrificial pay cut was taken by Heng. Before and after Lee defers his bonus for 40 years.

If John F Kennedy had campaigned under the PAP ticket, he would have said:
"My fellow Singaporeans: ask not what your ministers can do for you -ask what you can afford to pay your ministers."

Teo's Duplicity Exposed

2012-01-17T09:59:00.004+08:00

We just want to be as rich as these guys, is that asking too much?

DPM Teo Chee Hean used the word conundrum to mean "a puzzling question or problem". But it also means "a riddle in which a fanciful question is answered by a pun". He may try to avoid a direct answer to an outstanding issue by repeating the fallacious line, "Political pay levels and structures based on domestic political considerations in one country may not correlate with the conditions in another," but we have not forgotten his comrades' official spiel about globalisation that forced Singaporeans to accept "competitive pay" - their justification for foreign imports that stole white collar jobs.

Calling for high standards of accountability, MP for Ang Mo Kio GRC Inderjit Singh said: "If a minister consistently performs poorly and less than satisfactorily, the Prime Minister should be quick to replace him, as is done in the private sector." We have a PM who actually apologised for his past performance and promised to do better, was he ever in danger of being replaced?

Chua Chu Kang GRC MP Alvin Yeo was dumb enough to cite Barack Obama has a net worth of US$7.3 million, "thanks to his book sales." Many a minister in the cabinet has not penned a single volume, save the octogenarian who keeps regurgitating his fairy tales in heavy tomes fit mostly for door stop material, yet you can safely bet each of their net worth is easily more than twice that of the US President. Just take a look at their residential addresses.

Sengkang West MP Lam Pin Min reminded us that when political leaders sow the sees today, "we will reap the harvest for ourselves, for our children and our future." He must be referring to the under capacity trains, the insufficient drainage, the shortage of affordable housing, and insatiable greed of the ministers in office. Yeah, right, reap and weep.

Surprisingly the quote of the day came not from the opposition parties, but from Moulmein-Kallang GRC MP Denise Phua, who nailed it by calling the proposed benchmark for pegging ministerial salaries "arbitrary" and "smacks of elitism." It could have been a moment of epiphany, or it could simply be a calculated ploy to take the sting out of the opposition's, and the people of Singapore's, rightful accusation. Leopards don't usually change their spots overnight.

Knowing When To Shut Up

2012-01-16T22:56:00.000+08:00

The most important aspect to being a good salesman is knowing when to 'shut up' and let the people buy.

The best salesmen get up, make their pitch fast, shut up and get off the stage quickly so they can start collecting their money from the convinced customers. A bad one stretches every little bit of his story out, throwing in things that he obviously thinks will bolster his point, but in reality end up scoring an own goal.

At what was reported as the first ministerial community visit since the General Election, "keechiu" general Chan Chun Sing said in response to a query about ministers and monetary motivation, "Money shouldn't be the one (factor) to attract them". Instead of stopping there, and clamming up like he should have, he rattles on to insert foot in mouth:
"On the other hand, money should also not be the bugbear to deter them."

If that doesn't bug you enough, he's determined to ruin your digestion with the tasteless example of $10 XO Sauce chye tow kuay at Peach Garden (if you have to ask where, you can't afford it) which he claims will make you happy because the quality of a $1.50 version at a hawker center is such "you might not want to eat". That statement should make him popular among hawkers at eating outlets island wide at the next election. Does this guy even know that everyone is still puking at the XO (eXtra Ordinary) months of allowances creamed off by the ministers to date?

Chan will definitely not make the grade as a successful salesperson. But he's a shoo-in as a stand up comedian, what with lines like:
"I don't think anyone of them comes here for the money."
"They come here to provide a better life for the next generation."
"One of the reasons I stepped forward was because I knew I was joining a team that was not here for the money."

Oh, shut up already.

Damn Bloody Stupid

2012-01-15T21:57:00.004+08:00

The two Bugis street DBS ATMs compromised in the recent card skimming scandal were equipped with "jitter" technology - which uses a stop start or jitter motion inside the card drive specifically designed to distort magnetic stripe details and prevent copying by a foreign card reader inserted into the ATM - but it was not turned on. This has to be damn bloody silly.

Wait, it gets worse. DBS has 4.3 million customers, the highest customer volume at its ATMs among all the banks here. While it employs a wide range of ATM security measures, the bank admits not all the measures are deployed at all its 1,100 ATMs all of the time. Why? The lame excuse offered is damn bloody stupid.

It looks like the DBS concept of security is to leave their doors unlocked, use chihuahuas as guard dogs, employ security guards who don't have to show up at their posts, and install expensive intruder detection systems that need not be monitored.

When DBS acquired POSB in November 1998, many account holders closed out their books and migrated to other banks. Banks like OCBC and UOB who have all security measures activated at all their ATMs. Maybe an additional level of security is to for remaining customers to junk all those DBS-POSB credit and debit cards altogether. After DBS did say said that it was highly unlikely crime could have been prevented even if additional security features have been turned on, hardly a vote of confidence in their own anti-fraud protection systems.

Needless to say, all these revelations make mockery of India import Piyush Gupta's hollow boast about improvements at DBS under his watch. Unless he progress he referred to was about his personal financial well being.

Transparent Pay System, My Foot

2012-01-13T09:35:00.003+08:00

"Singapore practises a transparent system where salaries are fully accounted for through a clean wage set at a competitive level with no hidden perks and privileges," so reads para 15 of the report of the Committee to Review Ministerial Salaries (CRMS). If you have not read the report in detail, you would have missed out on some of the "hidden perks and privileges".

Many an apologetic has waxed lyrical about the great financial sacrifice made by those who signed up for political office, the most nauseating version being Grace Fu's not so subtle threat about "tilting the balance." But unknown to most of us, and the whole wide world watching the money game in play, the PM seems to have an ace up his sleeve that runs counter current to all the talk about the pain of pay cuts. This get-out-of-jail free card (as if ministerhood was indentured servitude) would make sure the appointee can have his cake and eat it too. Specifically, the PM is empowered to offer a higher salary outside the official Ministerial range, and damn be whatever numbers Gerard Ee's committee members come up with.

The name that comes to mind immediately is Ng Eng Hen, who once famously said, “You’re getting a bargain for the ministers you get… I worked half as much and earn(ed) five times more when I was in the private sector.” (Channelnewsasia, 9 September 2003).

Interestingly, an unpublished paper presented to the American Accounting Association in August by Richard Cazier and John Mcinnis discovered that the premium pay expected of external hires is negatively correlated with their actual performance. This may be because superstars have an inflated opinion of their own capabilities. They assume all the credit for the success of their previous firm, when in fact the contribution of others were involved. ("The Trouble With Superheroes", Schumpeter, The Economist, October 1st 2011)

Now unless Gerard Ee is emboldened to lie in black and white, we have his word, Scout's honour, that the hitherto lesser known make-up pay system, which was introduced in Parliament in 1989, has not been used thus far. But if Ng, or similar super salaried decides to bitch like Grace Fu, he could easily get his 5 times ministerial salary in a jiffy, complete with creative contrivances of miscellaneous allowances and all.

The CRMS has chosen to retain this joker card, albeit the recommended provision is good for one term only, compared to the prescribed two terms. The big $64,000 question is why this loop hole is not plugged?

Damn Bloody Slow Bank

2012-01-12T07:54:00.004+08:00

When OCBC's ATM banking services were down on 13 Sept 2011, CEO Chris David Conner promptly messaged an apology to all its customers before the day was over. But it took DBS Group Holdings chief executive Piyush Gupta nearly a week before he apologised to customers for the inconvenience caused by their recent ATM scam.

At last count, a total of some 400 POSB and DBS customers holding ATM and debit cards have had about S$500,000 fraudulently withdrawn from their accounts over Wednesday 4th and Thursday 5th Jan 2012. Gupta made his apology only on Wednesday 11 Jan at an exclusive DBS private bank luncheon at posh Shangri-La Hotel. For those not on DBS's private banking list, one presumes he won't give a hoot about them lesser mortals.

Gupta claims the unauthorised ATM withdrawals were done through a card skimming scheme by a syndicate that can happen to any bank. Well, if it does happen to another bank, the apology probably won't take that long to come through. And it probably will be addressed to all customers, not just the champagne circuit crowd.

The real embarrassment was that Gupta had boasted about IT technology progress during his tenure at DBS in a 4th Jan Straits Times spread, the very day the scam was hitting the ATMs. The operation took place despite all DBS ATMs were fitted with anti-skimming devices 6 years ago. And the ATMs are supposedly checked regularly by security staff whenever they replenish the money in the machines. In the article, Gupta claimed that the large scale IT failure in 2010 motivated him to accelerate the "scaling up the bank's resiliency programmes" from two years to one year. Didn't quite work out as he planned, did it? Perhaps he is just another foreign import who places priority on profits over maintenance and security of systems.

What else can DBS say? "We continue to keep up with the latest in technology to see how we can continually enhance our security," managing director and head of group strategic marketing and communications Ms Ngui told the press. They'll probably get their act together one day, it's just that they are still Damn Bloody Slow.

Hear It From The Experts

2012-01-11T09:26:00.000+08:00

It has to be karma that Vivian Balakrishnan, notorious for his gutter politics during the May 2011 elections, has ended up dealing with drainage gutters. In all probability, he won't be any more successful than Yaacob Ibrahim, the cad who lied about acts of gods and blocked drains, they are both made of the same political mold.

This chap is putting off the construction of a much needed diversion canal to relieve the overflowing Stamford Canal, because it would cost between $300 and $400 million ("in the long run, these need to be done," he is quoted saying). But he did not hesitate to waste $387 million on the YOG debacle - food poisoning and fake certificates of appreciation for local volunteers, free hospitalisation and R&R for the foreign one - and even boasted to a reporter he'll do it again anytime ( "I felt it was money well spent").

We don't know if serious money was spent on the 12-member panel making recommendations on flood mitigation in Singapore. We do know that one of the suggestions, porous pavements, was a no-brainer. When the junction of Scotts Road and Orchard Road was submerged, everyone knew that the absorbent grass knoll would prevented the flash flood if it wasn't paved over for the impermeable concrete monolith of Ion Orchard. What was commonsense among netizens aged 6 to 66 is now officially confirmed, "Urbanisation has undoubtedly led to an increase in storm water run off in Singapore."

Asked about Balakrishnan's procastination on the diversion canal requirement, Prof Balmforth of MWH UK said, "It would be unusual to produce a range of measures on a city that didn't involve some upgrade of some conveyance capacity somewhere." The minister may dismiss internet input as chatter, but will he listen to the experts? Maybe he's just afraid to contradict the declaration of the octogenarian "expert", "No amount of engineering can prevent flooding."

Another Day, Another Dollar

2012-01-10T10:02:00.003+08:00

The problem with overpaying ministers is that they tend to take too long to come up with solutions. After all, each extra day means an additional $3,000 in the wallet - courtesy of the taxpayers, even after the token salary cuts. The loaded sarcasm in the January edition of The Economist article is universal, "Politicians take a pay cut - poor things".

Asked why MRT train windows do not have emergency ventilation panels, Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew's response demonstrates the laggard attitude about the life threatening event of a blacked out carriage jam packed with suffocating human beings.

Confirming the existence of a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) system that was supposed to keep the lighting and ventilation going on for at least 45 minutes, Lui said,
"Whether the emergency power supply... is doing what's it's supposed to do, whether it's sufficient, I would want to take a much more careful look."

This coming from a guy much photographed on site, posturing for the opportunistic photo op, trying his darnedest best to understand what the fish was going on, and still wants more time to read the used-by date on the backup batteries. While at it, how about flipping through the maintenance log, and do a quick check when they were last recharged? These are actions with immediate repercussions, as there are similarly equipped trains running everyday, each of which is another disaster waiting to happen.

We can understand it will take a bit longer to query why they bought Kawasaki trains assembled in China, the country that gives you spectacular smash ups like the recent collision in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang. Even Bangkok, with lowly paid parliamentarians, didn't stinge on public safety when they sourced their trains from the more reputable Siemens Transportation Systems (Siemens C651 were bought mainly to complement the existing Kawasaki C151 trains due to the opening of the Woodlands extension). Investigating sourcing decisions sometimes require the assistance of other agencies like CPIB. How long did they take to nab the flashy guy who scammed the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) out of $11.8 million?

Here's a heads up for the really difficult work about vibrations dislodging the third rail: take a hard look at the spacing of the rail mountings.

Spring Cleaning Required

2012-01-09T10:44:00.007+08:00

That has to be a goddamn lie.

Either that or he is saying there are are lots of lying journalists out there.

TODAY Online,
Friday, 16 Dec 2011
"On public calls for her and other senior management to resign, Ms Saw said that while she would consider resigning if necessary, she would reserve her opinion on the matter for the time being."

AsiaOne Online,
Monday, 19 Dec 2011
"SMRT CEO Saw Phaik Hwa said yesterday that she will be staying on in the company, as leaving now was not the right thing to do.
She said in a statement issued yesterday: "'As CEO of SMRT, I am naturally responsible. Being responsible does not mean walking away from these faults. It means doing all I can to get the problem fixed"."

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, this Koh Yong Guan is connected to 17 board members in 3 different organizations across 3 different industries.

Koh has been Singapore's High Commissioner to Canada since January 2008. Koh has been Chairman of SMRT Corporation Ltd since July 23, 2009. He serves as the Chairman of Governing Board of the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore and the Central Provident Fund Board.
Koh had served as Chairman at Singapore Turf Club and Deputy Chairman at Singapore Totalisator Board. He has been a Director at SMRT Corporation Ltd. since April 2, 2007. He serves as a Director of SMRT Group, SMRT Trains Ltd., SMRT Road Holdings Ltd., SMRT Buses Ltd., and SMRT Light Rail Pte Ltd.
Koh’s career in the Singapore Civil Service included appointments at the Permanent Secretary level in the Ministries of Defence, Finance, Health and National Development as well as the Commissioner of Inland Revenue, and Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Do I look like I give a damn?

Now, how could a barefaced liar like that end up with all those fancy appointments? One icon of cronyism may be gone, but it looks like the Spring Festival clean up rite has yet to begin in earnest.

By Grace, The Truth Is Out

2012-01-07T09:58:00.000+08:00

For someone appointed as Senior Minister of State for the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, Grace Fu is a master of misinformation, a retard in communications, and pretty artless on Facebook. Don't blame us, we never voted for her. She slided into parliament in 2006 on the coat-tails of some senior politician in the Jurong GRC.

"I had some ground to believe that my family would not suffer a drastic change in the standard of living even though I experienced a drop in my income. ... If the balance is tilted further in the future, it will make it harder for any one considering political office," she wrote. What's there to misunderstand about her focus on pecuniary priorities? When she made the threat about "harder for any one considering political office", she surely wasn't referring to other political aspirants within her family group.

And if there's any doubt about what was "tilted further in the future", she makes it plain as day in her following posting: ".. it may not be wise to call for the trade-offs to be tilted further to an extent that it dissuades good people from coming forward in future." You probably heard the same refrain from the nocturnal denizens of Geylang, "No money, no honey."

The long overdue correction in the obscene ministerial salaries is hardly a trade-off between personal and national pursuits. It is a matter of public service altruism versus self centred greed. If money is all that matters, Lim Kim San would not have taken up the challenge of building houses for the masses as a volunteer, and foregoing a salary for three whole years.

Unfortunately for us, Grace Fu is not the only misguided soul. She's simply one of many MIW following the example of her political paymaster. PM Lee Hsien Loong told BBC journalist Jonathan Head in 2009: "...these are jobs where you make decisions which are worth billions of dollars. And you cannot do that if you’re pretending and you just say, well, we’re all in it for the love of king and country."

Papa Lee makes it nauseatingly clear in "Hard Truths" (page 123): "We're in this part of the world where "money politics" is the culture, we're not in Europe, nor Australasia or some region where different political cultures prevail."

Millionaire Ministers of Singapore

2012-01-06T09:12:00.000+08:00

Surely the bar can be set a wee bit higher

Only a few days ago, Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said Singapore will face "an environment of slow growth" for at least two years. UOB expects overall GDP growth to slow to 2.5 per cent this year. Now note that gloomy forecast of 2.5 falls nicely between 2% to 3%, the benchmark in the National Bonus Matrix that triggers a 50% bonus payout. It may be raining, but the ministers still have plenty to smile about.

Like the Breadtalk CEO member in his Committee to Review Ministerial Salaries, Gerard Ee is one who knows which side of his bread is buttered. That's why, die, die, the ministers must end up with a $1,000,000 paycheck.

The base figure of $55,000 a month would have been closer to public expectations, as Opposition Leader Mr Low Thia Khiang rightly pointed out in 2000. That's enough for a bungalow, two cars in the garage, servants and annual holidays skiing at the Swiss Alps or cooking lessons in France. But no, they have to fudge with the findings to come up with an additional 8 months of pay.

The 13th month AWS and Annual Variable Component are done deals. But nobody has a clue how the PM goes about handing out the 3 months individual performance bonus. Maybe all they need to do is tahan him, and vice versa. Vivian Balakrishnan flunked miserably at YOG budgeting, but still gets to keep his pension, thanks to an exception made in the no-more-pensions recommendation (appointed before May 21, 2003). As for the 3 months National Bonus Matrix invention referred to earlier, it's obvious that numbers can always be massaged to suit the intent. Now if they can produce 7% real GDP growth rate in the current economic climate, no one will quibble about their helping themselves to the economic pie.

And what is the "kinesthetic check" that Gerard Ee was yapping about? That must be a high-faluting version of the Lim Wee Kiak proposition:
"If the annual salary of the Minister of Information, Communication and Arts is only $500,000, it may pose some problems when he discuss policies with media CEOs who earn millions of dollars because they need not listen to the minister's ideas and proposals. Hence, a reasonable payout will help to maintain a bit of dignity."

So what's the real world like? Former president of the Association of Small and Medium Enterprises Lawrence Seow said "$1.1 million is rare":
"On a $10 million turnover, it quite good already if the CEO draws $250,000. On a $50 million turnover, maybe $500,000," referring to the revenue generators and not the cost centers hankering for easy money.

Still Greedy As Ever

2012-01-05T08:47:00.002+08:00

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who had promised a salary review to ease public anger about the rapaciousness of his team's unquenchable greed, accepted a token 36 percent reduction in basic pay to $2.2 million (US$1.69 million).

Compare his (still) hefty slice of the public pie to:
US President Barack Obama - US$400,000 (pop. 311 million)
France's President Nicolas Sarkozy - US$300,277 (pop. 65 million)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel - US$246,750 (pop. 81 million)
India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh - US$36,200 (pop. 1.2 billion)

On top of the basic pay, Lee and his cabinet members will be helping themselves to a "National Bonus" of up to three months' pay if targets are met on economic growth, employment and improvement in Singaporeans' incomes. Those performance targets were never published before, and more akin to shifting goal posts that were moved to suit their bonus expectations of the occasion. The new published targets pile on the financial rewards if, for instance real median income growth rate exceeds 0.5%. But if real income growth is negative, the ministers are not made any poorer.

In 2008, when the world was bracing for the financial meltdown, ministers were actually paid S$1,924,300 (S$2,055,100 with pension), the highest ever in the period of 2001 - 2011. Now, that's gotta be obscene in any language, English, Chinese, Malay or Indian.

Under the benchmarks unveiled, the salary of an entry-level cabinet minister is set at 60 percent of the median income of the 1,000 highest-earning Singaporean citizens (the names of which will probably never be published, like the previous 48 anonymous professionals) which works out at S$1.1 million (still more than what President Obama makes). Which means people like Lui Tuck Yew will not be embarrassed when clinking cocktail glasses with businessmen (who work hard for their money). And if any of the businessmen in their index pool gets wiped out in the market, they will find another set of well to do high earners to boost the median income of the 1,000 highest-earning Singaporean citizens. This is the crux of the system corruption - the public servants are still demanding private sector pay without the same levels of accountability and responsibility. Shops are flooded, trains are stopped in the tracks, and they just keep on collecting the cash. They have a rigged formula, and would not relinquish it. The same shenanigans are going on with the formulae for electrical tariff hikes, HDB pricing, healthcare subsidies, etc.

So how serious is the ministerial salary review? Gerard Ee's comment on the exercise is telling: "I immediately think of some of my friends that (might be) potentially considered (for the ministerial junket). Would they say outright, 'Don't kid me, $1.1 million, don't come and kachau me.' "

Deep in their heart of hearts, public service was never in the equation. These folks just want their pals and cronies to join in the feeding frenzy. Just like the Mafioso.

Stupid As Stupid Gets

2012-01-04T12:10:00.001+08:00

What's wrong with this picture? The third rail which supplies power to the trains, has to be a heavy piece of metal. The claw, a metal grip which transfers the weight to the mounting brackets, has to be another seriously massive piece of a component. 21 claws were dislodged, obviously the result of being subject to tremendous forces at play. And the solution is to hold this critical structural component in place with cable ties and a flimsy metal bracket? Whoever thought of this must have been dropped on his head as a child, or just born plain stupid.

Well, it looks like stupidity is prevalent in the system. A laboratory manager at the Health Sciences Authority's DNA Profiling Laboratory used 1.0 millimolar (mM) of the reagent ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) instead of the prescribed 0.1 mM - a senior employee of over 30 years experience - because he had "misread' the label. Thanks to the error in the government run laboratory, 412 cases of DNA testing have to be reviewed. The Government may give it's assurance, but it remains to be seen how many of the 87 tests the AGC are demanding to be redone ended up with wrong convictions.

The good news is that if CEO Saw has not been sacked, the laboratory manager will probably get to keep his job, given his seniority and all. So what if the salary review results in a 30 percent pay cut, the ministers will still be millionaires several times over.

Watered Down Explanations

2012-01-03T09:29:00.000+08:00

What a difference a week makes. The day after the Friday 23rd Dec floods, PUB insisted that "Based on our monitoring, Stamford Canal did not overflow." A new word was plucked from the English lexicon to explain the repeat of last year's disaster: PUB said "ponding" resulted in Liat Towers and Lucky Plaza being hit again.

One week later, we read that the "ponding" was traced to a drain that overflowed. The drain water could not be discharged into Stamford Canal as designed as it was "already full and could not take any more rainwater". So did the watery contents of Stamford Canal swirl into the drain or vice versa? Does the chicken come first or the the egg?

PUB also blames the pumping capacity of the affected buildings, without providing guidance on where the pumps should be discharging their liquid loads. Surely not into the Stamford Canal which was already at full capacity?

Meanwhile three wisemen have been appointed to look into the dumb guys in charge at PUB, a judge, a prisons director, and a professor from the School of Aerospace at Nanyang Technological University. Tan Siong Thye, Chief District Judge of the Subordinate Courts will probably lay down the law for incompetence, after which the prisons director presumably may have to haul the culprits into a nice comfy cell. The Aerospace expert will probably provide intellectual input on how 100 mm of rainwater (2010) and 152.8 mm (2011) could target the unlucky Lucky Plaza and Liat Towers with unerring GPS guided accuracy rivalling the success rate of state-of-the-art cruise missiles.

New Year, New Promises

2012-01-02T11:01:00.004+08:00

The list of promises was issued not by by the Government, but by it's official mouth piece. It remains to be seen how many will be broken, contorted or simply swept under the carpet - thanks to the short term memory capacity of the 60.1 percent.

More flats coming up - affordability not addressed
Better chances for second-timers - another tweak of the malleable HDB rules
Fate of DBSS projects - suspended but no final decision

Re-employment of older workers - at discounted wages and benefits, so called "reasonable adjustments"
Parent-care for civil servants - private sectors not encouraged to breed, presumably because they tend to support alternative political parties
Tighter Employment Pass requirements - to level playing field for Singaporeans competing with foreigners, but processing time for latter as citizens may be expedited (as in the "within days" case of Fooled Me Hah!)

More university places - intake to be pushed beyond 30 percent only from 2015, nice figure to keep in mind for 2016 GE

Report on ministerial salary review - supposed backdated to May 2011, a litmus test of the white-and-white sincerity - just don't set your hopes up too highly

Lower taxes - as in chargeable income, but watch out for the squeeze from from GST, COE, ERP, utility tariffs, town council charges, tertiary education fees, etc, etc
More protection for investors - obviously these guys have yet to watch "Margin Call"

More train stations - more good years for (still) CEO Saw, since reliability and accountability are not expressly stipulated
Safer rides for school children - just another excuse to hike school bus charges

Subsidised health care for more people - it's true, medical products are cheaper across the causeway - which makes you wonder how subsidy is defined
More savings for health care - which is official euphemism for jacking up your Medisave balance requirement from $27,000 to $32,000 - more reason for those above 55 to take out as much of their CPF as possible so that can't move your numbers around without your permission

Lemon law to protect consumers - if life gives you lemons, be prepared to make lemonade. Anybody got a painless refund from SMRT yet?
No more surprises from telcos - ISPs must measure and publish typical download speeds, but not mandated to deliver what they promised in their sales pitch
Better flood protection - this has to be comic relief, the expensive flood barriers failed miserably on Black Friday 23rd December.

Silent Night In Bethlehem

2011-12-25T14:59:00.004+08:00

The Arabs in the Bethlehem Manger Square were appreciative of the traditional carol belted out in their native language. The super fit Palestinian soldiers providing security for the VIPs (including Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas) dropping by for the Xmas eve gathering smiled ear to ear at the recognition of the familiar tune. Peace on earth and goodwill for all mankind.

Li-lathon! Thick-ru-ha!
Khalidon, wa-atheem,
Ith taja-lat lil-wara,
Nematu-rabbil karim,
Fee wajil massih-ih,
Muf-taddil atheem.

P.S. It rained, but there were no flash floods (or "ponding") like at Orchard Road on Friday.

Marry Christmas

2011-12-24T20:53:00.000+08:00

The spelling mistake was pretty obvious, since most of the other text on the hotel display were in Hebrew. Aha, jolly good opportunity to chat up the chiobu Jewish receptionist, pointing out to her the management's mistake. No, she insisted, the word is spelled with an "a", not a "e". Google it, we suggested, not wanting to ruin the spirit of goodwill in the air.

Later in the day, after covering the day's activities, we noted that the spelling mistake was corrected.
If only it have been so easy to convince the SMRT apologists of their foibles.

There's a good book out there with a title that asks why intelligent people make the most stupid mistakes. One of the examples quoted was about how animal activists burned down a mink farm to protest the use of animal fur for fashion apparel. The collateral damage of the minks' lives was somehow missed by the animal lovers.

Seng Hand Thong may have thought he was protecting the mirage of superiority that his political party uses to justify their "mandate to rule". In doing so, he ended up exposing the rot within. It would have been so much simpler if he had humbly apologised, repented, and promised to sin no more. The snowballing negative PR is far worse than the SMRT taxi message, broadcasted notably in English, not Malay or Indian.

But we won't let them ruin our Christmas, will we?

Racists Within The Ranks

2011-12-23T11:37:00.000+08:00

It looks like Seng Han Thong (MP, Ang Mo Kio GRC) is under fire again (figuratively! figuratively!). And he deserves to be flamed (figuratively! figuratively!) for upsetting the poor lady Halimah Jacob by insinuating that her minority ethnic group is linguistically challenged - "they're Malay, they are Indian, they can't converse in English ... well enough". Han must be either deaf or sleeping in parliament whenever Lim Swee Say murders the English language in public.

Maybe SMRT, in all their high and mighty-ness, also perceives Singaporeans as incapable of reading into the racist smear. SMRT had said in defence: "At no point did Mr Goh highlight any particular race in his remarks." Have the Malay and Indian races of Singapore been eradicted as ethnic components of our society to be replaced by the favoured Foreigners? Will the Chinese racial group be next to go?

Minister of State (Community Development, Youth and Sports) Halimah Jacob was spot on when she fingered the malaise in the elite upper ruling class: "I am reminded of how employers in the past sometimes try to pin the blame on the lowest level workers as a way of deflecting responsibility from the management whenever a major problem occurs." Instead of derailing the SMRT top executives, a bunch of clowns that has yet to come up with a solution for the third rail power supply problem, the lower echelons are prepared to as sacrificial lambs - just like in the Mas Selamat case. If there is an iota of integrity in their veins, their CEO Saw should be fired (literally! literally!) instead.

A World Of Difference

2011-12-22T09:53:00.001+08:00

Jerusalem has a Light Rail system, the first of several rapid transit lines planned for the city. The clean smooth 6.5 km ride from Mount Herzel through the heart of downtown to Pisgat Ze'ev in Northern Jerusalem was built by the CityPass consortium. It was inaugurated in August 2011, but full operations began only on 1 December 2011.

The $1.4 billion project was budgeted for dramatically lower costs and an earlier debut, but delays were caused by the discovery of archaeological sites and glitches in the signalling system. During the debugging period between August and December, Jews and Arabs were provided free transportation as a token of goodwill, and in part to make up for the inconvenience, traffic jams and economic hardship created by the construction. This is Israel, not Singapore.

Think of the headaches of the Maplewood residents, and businesses affected at sites like the Beauty World area. Was any affected party compensated for inconvenience or economic disruption? The unresolved problem with the third rail, which provides power to the SMRT trains, is still not addressed. Commuters have been made to pay full fare for a system not thoroughly debugged. Gerard Ee 's PTC even approved the recent fare hike.

Yaacob Ibrahim could provide no (credible) answers for the Orchard Road floods, neither can one expect much from the likes of Lui Tuck Yew. These expensive overheads are just muddling through on-the-job-training at the cost of taxpayers. And if that's not enough, they add to their team keechiu generals and Kate Spade junkies who have contributed zilch since collecting their enhanced paychecks after the May elections.

Two Souls

2011-12-21T12:20:00.002+08:00

The Arab manning the hotel souvenir shop in Egypt invited us to come in out of the cold, no purchase necessary. After learning we were from Singapore, he said his name was the equivalent of Peter, as in St Peter. Not exactly something one would shout from the top of the roof in a 99.9 percent Muslim country.

Peter said business throughout Egypt was in the doldrums, following the departure of Mubarak. Would he consider Mubarak a good guy? Yes, said Peter, he was a strongman, but he was getting old (in the head). The new set of leaders are wimps by comparison, and have yet to earn the confidence of the people. Uh uh, we know the feeling, but discretion kept our opinions to ourselves.

Raul the bellhop at Dubai was from Mumbai. He heard from friends Sentosa World Resort (sic) was hiring. Where are the Dubai nationals, we asked him. From the waiters in the coffee shop to the guy in charge of the internet kiosk, everyone was from the Philippines. Only the drivers for the shuttle buses to the city shopping center were not speaking in Tagalog. And practically all the sales staff at the shops were filipinas. One of them said she recognised our "Singapore accent" - maybe she was a former domestic who relocated for the higher pay in Dubai. One up for our distinctive "national identity".

Raul said the drivers were likely from Pakistan or similar. There was the odd bearded guy with a burkha draped missus (or two) in tow. Maybe our hotel was not in the same class as the ones Thaksin hangs out at. Maybe there are more local born and bred there. Maybe.

Out Of Town Perspective

2011-12-20T17:57:00.001+08:00

The world looks different from Mt Sinai, Egypt, some 2,000+ metres above sea level. Definitely more peaceful and tranquil, far away from the maddening crowds of Singapore. And the rumble of the problems with the public transportation system.

The wifi router in the tour bus provided net access on the move, and an update of the SMRT woes at home. So CEO Saw is still in self denial mode, refusing to vacate her tenacious claim on the shaky throne, with the atrocious claim that only she can make things right. Will anybody be brave enough to tell her she's the one responsible for the mess in the first place? Lee Hsien Loong made the mistake of not asking Wong Kan Seng to step down after the Mas Selamat debacle, and it cost him dearly at the polls in May. By turning a blind eye, this shirking of his own accountability to the people will surely come back to haunt him in the near future. Lame duck Lui Tuck Yew doesn't have the cojones to take on the patron saint, madame Ho. No wonder the technically challenged Saw, who probably thinks a collector shoe is the latest footwear from Gucci, is acting all cocky and smug.

We had a sampling of the Dubai trains during the transit stopover, a glimpse of what a smoothly run transportation system should be like. Come to think of it, even Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur never had to put up with the SMRT snafus in the past week. Surely it's not too difficult to source a more capable transportation executive than the Duty-Free-Sales girl? With that character in charge, even the camels that we rode on to ascend Mt Sinai were more dependable.

SMRT SNAFU - Situation Normal All Fouled Up

2011-12-16T08:45:00.003+08:00

Those who read their news at channelnewsasia.com were probably wondering why everybody was fussing about PM Lee's election speech in May 2006. CNA online had reported it as "counter the opposition" instead of using the more unpalatable verbatim quote of "what's the right way to fix them". Couple of days ago, CNA tried to make a molehill out of a mountain again.

"The disruption began at 6am, and lasted just 40 minutes.
But trains were delayed for more than five hours as a result of the disruption. While engineers managed to partially-restore the services along the affected stretch, peak hour trains could not be deployed to meet the morning peak frequency.
Train services resumed normal operations around 11.45am."

Note picturesque MRT station with no crowds, no rush

Why were the commuters on the Circle Line all red in the face? The disruption, in the world according to CNA, lasted only a mere 40 minutes. The level of train service between 6.40am and 11.45am was just as before, i.e. late as usual.

Commuters who still feel their work day was disrupted should read the advisory put out by SMRT carefully:
"Passengers who were unable to complete their journeys due to the disruption can file a claim for refund at the Passenger Service Centre in any of the 68 SMRT stations."

Before you rush out to claim your refund, pay heed to how "unable to complete their journeys" can be interpreted:
You could have boarded one of the shuttle bus services;
You could have waited for the train, however long it takes to show up;
You could have switched to a cab and paid the new enhanced charges;
You could have started walking since one is not allowed to be in the network for longer than 2 hours.

You could have done any of the above, or even charter a chopper if really desperate, and still be "able to complete your journey".

And if you feel skepticism is out of order during this yuletide season of goodwill, see the way SMRT quickly responded to last night's total chaos on the North-South Line. Let's hope they aren't as prompt in making a police report about the train cabin windows that were smashed to let in fresh air for the suffocating passengers.

The Exam System Is Broke

2011-12-15T09:19:00.000+08:00

Allison Pearson, commenting on the Daily Telegraph's expose of GCE history chief examiner Paul Evans' shocking action of revealing contents of future papers to teachers, was no more surprised by her own daughter's attitude. "Relax, Mum, it was a paper from 4 years ago... Plus, if the paper's hard, the examiners will adjust the grade boundaries so I'll probably get an A* anyway."

One schoolgirl who sat for this year's A Level biology paper at a Dover Road premier school said something similar. The questions were difficult, but she was confident that the T-score will be tweaked if everybody else stumbles. Last year one chemistry paper question was out of syllabus, but since a particular JC had supplied its students with the material for the answer, everybody had a free boost in their grades.

Pearson reflected that, during her days, one "swotted up as hard as you were inclined", and the exam results will pretty much reflect one's strengths and weaknesses in the subjects studied. Those were the days when 10As were unheard of, Bs and Cs were respectable grades. There was no such thing as "being good at exams". Or as Evans explained the game in play, "We're cheating, we're telling you the cycle." His illogic for focusing on key topics instead of covering the entire syllabus, "Yes, if we are proper educationists, our gut instinct is to teach the lot... (but) if you are under pressure to get results and you are hammering exam technique, you may go at a slower rate."

Our teachers will recognise the technique: if you teach the whole syllabus, you will have less time for drill practices. All the holistic spiel about skipping the O Level in the IP system so kids will have more time for enrichment activities is plain baloney. The extra time is more likely spent in extra tuition classes. They even have tutors for students sitting for the IB. One lecturer claims that even undergrads are attending tuition classes.

Quick to distance themselves from the British exam system under fire, principals like Chan maintain that other than briefings on changes in syllabuses, teachers here have limited contact with Cambridge examiners. Specifically, "...questions that will be used for exams in the future are not discussed." Tell that to the kids, and especially their parents, who sign up with ex-teachers who make a bundle selling tuition services on the premise of their uncanny skills at spotting questions.

A Matter Of Perspective

2011-12-14T09:11:00.002+08:00

"COES mainly for the rich? That's life," wrote the director of Mag-E to the Forum page, to justify one car on the road and another in the garage. Not any car of course, he was referring to a Ferrari for "forging deals" and "paying the salaries of his average-income employees." That's sickening.

Once upon a time, cabinet ministers made a point of driving (and being seen in) cheaper Japanese makes. Slowly, they have moved on to more expensive and swankier European marques. Goh Keng Swee would be rolling in his grave. His favorite story was about his son asking to be dropped off a distance from his Alma Mater - the kid didn't want to be embarrassed by his dad's humble set of wheels.

Delivered as a Babara Weinstock lecture in January 1979 at the University of California in Berkely, Goh Keng Swee's perspective about good business ethics and sustained economic growth comes across in this excerpt:

"When businessmen earn money the hard way, i.e. the honest way, they do not engage in meaningless extravagance. Profits are not spent in conspicuous consumption but are ploughed back into the business.
Where, however, business profits are the results of favours granted through bribery, the effects are different. The businessman himself may or may not re-invest profits earned. This depends on whether he can secure more favours to start new monopolies. In that event, he would be imprudent not to stash a good portion of his profits in an unnumbered Swiss Bank Account.
Patrons behave differently. Since they have acquired vast fortunes by virtue of the positions they hold and not because of work put in, the temptation to spend freely becomes irresistible. Almost invariably, there is competition among patrons to impress one another and the general populace. This is why we so often witness gross extravagance among the wealthy in third world countries."
(page 193, "In Lieu of Ideology, An intellectual biography of Goh Keng Swee", Ooi Kee Beng)

It makes you wonder if present day Singapore is still lingering at Third World status.

Power To The Consumer

2011-12-13T10:13:00.000+08:00

One thing's for sure, ComfortDelgro directors won't be on Santa's list this year. The biggest cheer this season is that Singaporeans have awakened from their "daft" mode, and the boycott is on, with a vengeance.

Still in denial mode, the rapacious taxi company is assuring itself that demand will return to normal once commuters "get used to the new fares". There's no new normal for these villains, even as the cabbies have to bear with the consequences of their greed:
"When I drove past, they flagged for a cab from another company."
"I've earned about 50 percent less today than I normally do."
"It's a very slow day for me and I hope business picks up soon."

A friend suggested checking with the retirees in the neighborhood who drive, if a ride to the airport is needed during this holiday season - let the senior citizens pocket the cab fare instead. Totally wicked!

The Public Transport Council reported that none of the other cab companies have yet to notify it about revising their fare structure. None except SMRT, the other government linked operator, that is. Come next Tuesday, SMRT will be following the ComfortDelgro template to a T. Now if that's not a clear case of price collusion, the Competition Commission of Singapore needs to take a second look at the law books.

We don't have a Ralph Nader to champion our cause, so the John Lennon lyrics will have to do:
Singing power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people, right on

Where In The World Is Liechtenstein

2011-12-12T09:48:00.001+08:00

The additional 10 percent stamp duty for foreign buyers and property speculators seemed to have ruffled a few feathers. The Real Estate Developers' Association (Redas) cried foul, whined about "the lack of consultation" on the government measures. In the past they may have had cosy links with the bureaucrats in charge, at the cost of home owners, but the new normal demands everything to be under the scrutiny of anti-competition watchdogs.

Overseas consultants have joined in the protestations, with some delighting to highlight how Hongkong's non-intervention policy makes investment more attractive - whose non-intervention government also recently announced it may reverse property cooling curbs if so required. And in Britain, non-residents pay no seller's or capital gains tax for playing in the property market. If Singapore is giving all these foreign countries the wrong end of the stick, why is Liechtenstein so favoured?

Liechtenstein National Museum

Liechtenstein is a tiny country with a land area of 160 sq km (compared to Singapore's small 704 sq km) wedged between Switzerland (west) and Austria (east). It has a population of about 35,000, of whom one third are foreigners, a similar ratio as in Singapore. It turns out it is also a member of the Singapore-European Free Trade Association FTA (EFTA), which comprises Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. But the EFTA is just one of a long list of trade agreements signed to reduce or eliminate obstacles to trade and enable cross border movement of goods and services between the signatory countries, e.g.

ASEAN (AFTA)
ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand FTA (AANZFTA)
China (CSFTA)
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GSFTA)
Japan (JSEPA)
Korea (KSFTA)
Trans-Pacific SEP (TPFTA)
United States (USSFTA)

Someone else must have also wondered about the preferential treatment for the EFTA countries, and the United States(USSFTA), which are as foreign as China and Australia. The press now tells us these exceptional countries have certain exempt clauses in their free trade deals with Singapore. Clauses which do not exist in the other FTAs. Strange, huh?

The only other bit we know about the Liechtenstein connection is that George Yeo signed the FTA in 2002 when he was in the MTI. According to his blog, Liechtenstein's foreign minister then was Ernst Walch, with whom he had a nice lunch and a nice visit to the modern art museum in Vaduz. Walch's daughter studied law at NUS.

More Slut Than Stud

2011-12-11T22:41:00.001+08:00

SlutWalk SG has come and gone, with minimalist impact, thanks to our sisters who made sure exposed epidermis on display did not detract from the main message.

When a female bares her midriff, you're spoiled for choice when it comes to adjectives: tart, slapper, slag and slut ... all of them nasty and all of them suggesting that women should really stick to sex for their procreative role only. And try not to enjoy it too much. Due to a quirky bias in history (there's no such word as "herstory"), coming up with a pejorative for someone male who likes to flash his nude torso in public is really challenging.

In our unfair world, men are esteemed for their conquests, women are cherished for fighting them off. So is there even a male equivalent for the word "slut"? What exactly do you call a guy who delights in brandishing his naked bod as a badge of pride?

UrbanDictionary defines "manwhore" as:
"A male who's unleashed himself from the bonds of society; thinking for himself and following his own mental dictates and biological drives."

That sounds more stud than slut. Dominique Strauss-Kahn may prefer "womaniser" or "libertine", and even that smacks of a boast rather than a scarlet letter. None of these labels seem to convey a sense of moral depravity, instead they are tinged with admiration and (male) jealousy. No wonder DSK was widely expected to seek the Socialist nomination for President of France in 2012, until he was derailed by the Sofitel tryst in New York.

Even so, it's hard to imagine DSK standing in front of the Abercrombie & Fitch store in Orchard Road. If it's abs they want to show off, Arnold Schwarzenegger would been more appropriate. But these in the line-up look more like boy toys. Fairies also come to mind, but Enid Blyton will be upset by the imagery.

In 2009, the American Family Association disapproved of the influence of the A & F "sex-as-recreation" lifestyle fashion apparel, and asked the brand to remove its "sexualized shirts" from display. The government will probably wait for outraged citizens to protest first before they figure out if the store's message is consistent with the recent roll out of moral education in schools.

Does this picture make you see red?

Black And White Proof

2011-12-09T13:10:00.000+08:00

If anyone wants proof that paying civil servants high salaries is no guarantee of warding off corruption, he need look no further than the morality tale of of ex-PAP MP Choo Wee Khiang. The astonishing revelation is that he allegedly took a bribe of US$200 for approving the use of two training venues in China by the Singapore Table Tennis Association (STTA). Is there no limit to stooping down for greed?

Choo was head of the Singapore Table Tennis Association (STTA) for nearly 20 years, an appointment which probably came about by way of his political affiliation. Credited with Singapore's silver medal success at the 2008 Olympics, he also held other appointments like general manager of the Marina Bay Golf Club. The official endorsements enabled him to con a secondary school principal into engaging STTA for training services which were never delivered.

The question on everyone's lips is how such a shady character was admitted into parliament. Well, he was the MP for Marine Parade and Jalan Besar GRCs from 1988 to 1999, another shining proof of the failings of the GRC system.

Choo made headlines for other dubious reasons while holding political office. In an odious speech made in Mandarin during a parliament session in 1992, he actually mouthed this, "One evening, I drove to Little India and it was pitch dark but not because there was no light, but because there were too many Indians around." The Singapore Government then, for reasons undisclosed, chose not to act against him for breach of parliamentary privilege, even though the utterance was hideously racist.

Choo lost his MP position in 1999 only after pleading guilty to a charge of abetting his brother-in-law to cheat a finance company by issuing false invoices worth $1,000,000 in 1990. Which means from 1990 to 1999, while he was wearing white and white, his heart was as dark as the night he drove into Little India. Under false colours, he was re-elected to office in 1991 and 1997, bearing the imprimatur of the PAP. In spite of being jailed and fined in 1999, this ex-convict and unrepentant racist was publicly honoured with the International Olympic Committee President's Trophy in 2009.

Malaysia's Public Service director-general Tan Sri Abu Bakar Abdullah just announced a performance-based remuneration scheme which gives government employees a pay rise of 7% to 13%. If he thinks that will help fight corruption in the civil service ranks, he should pay attention to the Singapore example.

Of Course It's Price-Fixing!

2011-12-08T09:49:00.002+08:00

In one of its rare successes in persecution, the Competition Commission of Singapore (“CCS”) issued an Infringement Decision on 23 Nov 2011 against 11 modelling agencies in Singapore for breaching the Competition Act (“the Act”). It stated for public record, "Trade or industry associations should not become the vehicle to facilitate price collusion or price-fixing."

When CCS ruled against the Singapore Medical Association (“SMA”) Guidelines on Fees in August 2010, it made clear, " In general, price recommendations by trade or professional associations are harmful to competition because they create focal points for prices to converge, restrict independent pricing decisions and signal to market players what their competitors are likely to charge."

Now put into context the action plan of the National Taxi Association (NTA), a trade union body representing some 12,000 taxi drivers, which has said it "is already in talks with other taxi companies and urges them to adjust their taxi fares as soon as possible."

You don't need to be a qualified civil lawyer like Mr Sng Kheng Huat to concur that the NTA statement "smacks of an attempt at price-fixing."

So why did the CCS declined to "comment "on individual cases or whether it is investigation a case"? Could it be because ComfortDelGro's major shareholder (12.1%) is Singapore Labour Foundation? We know the part about fixing the opposition, are they planning to fix the commuters too?

CCS is a statutory board established under the Act on 1 January 2005 to administer and enforce the Competition Act. The Act empowers CCS to investigate alleged anti-competitive activities, determine if such activities infringe the Act and impose suitable remedies, directions and financial penalties. Now go investigate and earn your year end bonuses.

Does this look like they need the money?

Too Good For Miracles

2011-12-07T08:34:00.001+08:00

A miracle is a rare event often attributable to divine intervention. For agnostics or atheists at large, a miracle can also be thought of as a perceptible interruption of the laws of nature.

The Train Miracle
The new fancy MRT signalling system has not been installed. The new trains on order won't be delivered until umpteen years down the road. Yet, inspite of these supposedly insurmountable encumberances, train waiting times managed to be shaved to an average 3 minutes. By simply tweaking the train schedule! The SMRT is adding more than 260 extra trips ahead of the December festive period, reducing the North-South Line wait at Yishun to 3 minutes, and the East-West Line wait from 6 to 4 minutes. Now why didn't they think of that before?

The Hospital Miracle
The project completion date was advanced not by 2 weeks, or 2 months. We are told, via Minister for Health Gan Kim Yong's blog, the new hospital at Sengkang will be on stream 2 whole years ahead of schedule - from 2020 to 2018! The last time a construction schedule was abbreviated so significantly was when the Marina Bay Sands ~~Casino~~ Resort was rushed into service to expedite collection of the $100 entry levy.

Two miracles in a row, it's almost enough to turn anyone into a religious convert. But just before you start believing again, they hit you with a property tax whammy. Just when inflation is about to knock your breath out following world wide forecasts of a gloomy future.

With home prices expected to fall 30 to 40 per cent over the next three years, Singapore's developers are already bracing for a moribund market and expect to take a hit in first-quarter earnings. The rebound they hoped for is turning out to be the stuff of dreams.

The Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) has decreed that 4- to 5-room HDB flat owners will have to pay $5 to $29 more property tax from 2012 onwards. Their justification is that property prices have been on the increase in the past years, without paying heed to what the doomsday sayers portend about the imminent future. Perhaps that's why they want to stiff you now, before the bubble bursts, and make them look silly for asking more money then. Adding insult to injury, they once again offer a one-off token rebate of $55, good for limited time only, while the hike will be in place for perpetuity. You expecting the IRAS will ever reduce the Annual Values (AV)? That would be a real miracle indeed.

No Comfort For Commuters

2011-12-06T10:47:00.001+08:00

The headline says it all - Singapore's largest taxi operator ComfortDelGro has its eye on the profit line. When it cites "strong population growth and an increase in tourist arrivals have resulted in a significant spike in demand for taxi", it was not trying to address a shortage in supply. There was no equivalent sound bite of "they can always take the next cab".

ComfortDelGro is no run of the mill transport company. It knows its action is implicit direction for other taxi operators to follow. The National Taxi Association (NTA) actually urged the other operators, Trans-Cab, SMRT, Premier, Smart and Prime, to join in the feeding frenzy. This selfish act is a move that will push up inflation which is currently running around two-year highs. In October the transport component, which makes up 16 percent of Singapore's consumer price index, went up by 10.5 percent year-on-year, faster than the 5.4 percent rise in the overall index.

NTA president Wee Boon Kim had the audacity to admit that Comfort Delgro had been in discussion with leaders from two of its branches over the fare issue in the past few months. They probably plotted in secret, and sounded out the official blessing for their greed before making the move. The "win some, lose some" strategy - token 20 cent discount for call booking - is as good as lifted from the government line when the distance-based fare structure was implemented.

You can bet your increased flagdown fare that the head of the Government Parliamentary Committee and Transport, Cedric Foo, won't be making strenuous objection on your behalf. As a matter of fact, he is already making pathetic excuses for the other side, arguing that the taxi industry is deregulated and therefore a free market. The committee he heads is just for show, another wayang to justify the MP allowance.

Let's hope the other cab companies will not sell their soul to the devil. Commuters can rally around and support them, and boycott the government linked entity. For once, let them have a taste of discomfit.

No Sluts Please, We're Singaporeans

2011-12-05T13:52:00.001+08:00

Superman dresses like this

The good news is that SlutWalk Singapore had a better turnout than the Occupy Wall Street "protest" at Raffles Place. Still the reported 650 was a pale shade of the 10,000 that showed up for a Pink Dot celebration on 18 June 2011.

The bad news was that the ladies that were at Hong Lim Park on 4th Dec were all "staidly" dressed. Maybe it had to do with the dress code stipulated by the organisers - come as you are, whether in t-shirt and jeans, in fishnets, in a sari, in a jacket, or in a tudung. All the eager photographers who converged at the event venue had to contend with, nay, hope for a sighting of a wet t-shirt at least since the skies did sprinkle some showers of blessing intermittently.

Constable Michael Sanguinetti, who started it all when he dispensed grandmotherly advice at a York University safety forum by preaching that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order to not be victimised,” would be a welcome male guest in most Asian homes. Especially those with female members yet to tie the wedding knot. Organizer Vanessa Ho even hid her active role in putting together SlutWalkSG from her from her parents "because of their conservative values". Just like some young women's choice of clothing are also kept secret from mom and dad, if they value the free board and lodging provide by same doting parents.

Women may or may not admit that they dress the way they do to attract men's attention. The difference comes about when the attention is welcomed, as in a eligible suitor of significant financial means, or unwelcome, as in the gawking stare of a casual road sweeper. Even Jimmy Carter confessed that he had an eye for the ladies as well as the White House, " I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times." Bill Clinton's weakness was a visible thong.

You don't need grandma to remind you to be streetwise, forewarned is forearmed. Even alpha males avoid walking into a dark cul-de-sac at Geylang since those fake Rolex Oyster Perpetual watches are so damn realistic even in broad daylight. You don't want to lose an arm, or worse, just because of the right or freedom to wear whatever you want.

Consolation Prize For Corruption

2011-12-02T10:12:00.000+08:00

It was not the report card they expected. Singapore is now placed fifth according to the latest ranking by non-governmental corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI). Significantly, the countries perceived by experts or their residents to be less corrupt - New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Sweden - all have heads of government drawing smaller salaries from the tax payers.

Mr Liau Ran, who oversees TI's rankings for East Asia, has this notion about corruption-free countries: "In many countries, you have to pay (and pay) to get things done." TI's ranking has a more stringent definition of corruption: abuse of entrusted power for private gain. What Liau missed out is that what we have is a pre-paid reward system for sanctioned corruption of morals.

Responding to Han Fook Kwang's concern about the ministerial pay policy remaining deeply popular, Lee Kuan Yew said this, "It is people's expectations - office is for honour. It is not."

He expands:
"We are in this part of the world where "money politics" is the culture, we're not in Europe, nor Australasia, or some region where different political cultures prevail, different standards of living and different population ratio. Are we able to maintain this system? You see your counterparts, their wives are bedecked with jewels. And yours?" (HT, page 123)

In case you miss the drift:
"Some Singaporeans believe ministers ought to do it for honour and glory. But how many will do it for more than one term? My generation did it because we had prepared ourselves to give up everything.
Can a successor generation do that? No." (HT, pages 125-126)

It would appear that the vaunted aspiration for attaining the Swiss standard of living was never about striving for the European benchmark of moral society, just the monetary hallmark. Hence the consoling pat on the back: Singapore remains the least corrupt in Asia, ahead of Hong Kong and Japan. The attempt at sophistry reminds one of an old communist joke:
"Following months of negotiations, the long awaited hundred-metre sprint race between American President John Kennedy and Russian Premier Nikita Khruschev finally took place. The Soviet First Secretary came in a respectable silver medallist, while the American President was unfortunately second from last."

Life Outside The Cabinet

2011-12-01T10:05:00.003+08:00

John Swire & Sons (South-east Asia) has appointed former Transport Minister Raymond Lim as a senior adviser to "provide both focus and expertise to efforts to develop and broaden the range of investments in the region." Little is known of the charter of the Swire Group entity which was incorporated only in August.

Swire Pacific Offshore (SPO) is the more well known local unit in the London based Swire Group, owner and operator of an extensive fleet of 75 offshore supply vessels (PSVs, AHTS) to support the oil and gas industry, including drilling, production, exploration, pipe-lay, subsea construction and FPSO operations. Lim was in finance before politics, one of the managing directors of Temasek Holdings and chief executive of DBS Vickers Securities. In a statement Lim said "I look forward to helping it grow in the region," presumably not in the land-based transportation industry.

The big question in everybody's mind is whether he is getting anything close to his former ministerial million dollar paycheck. In "Lee Kuan Yew, The Man And His Ideas" (Straits Times Press,1998), Lee himself said, "There's no way a prime minister can argue that any any minister can walk out of his cabinet and get this kind of salary." Not unless Swire pays its advisers big bucks. Fraser and Neave did. Lee Hsien Yang received $1 million as a business consultant after departing from Singtel, never mind if he had zero experience in food and beverage or property development.

It's interesting to note that nearly all the ministers who lost their appointments after May 7 have yet to get a "real job". After landing a Senior Advisor appointment with Malaysian conglomerate Kuok Brothers, George Yeo curiously labelled it as ""an informal arrangement." He added, " I'll join (the) private sector next year, " which makes one wonder what an adviser does for a living. Lim Hwee Hua seems more prolific in collecting "informal arrangements" (whatever Yeo means by that term), as senior advisor to global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) in addition to being appointed as a non-executive director at Jardine Cycle & Carriage. A recent update to her resume is an appointment as an independent non-executive director on Ernst & Young's Global Advisory Council (GAC). At least she's collecting all these stuff while she's out of the cabinet. Recall former PAP MP Dr Wang Kai Yuen, with 11 directorships under his belt, who used to lament that "some of the companies pay me as little as $10,000".

How Much Is $10 Million?

2011-11-30T09:29:00.001+08:00

The big news is that Lee Kuan Yew has pledged a personal donation of S$10 million to set up a Lee Kuan Yew Fund for Bilingualism to promote the learning of the mother tongue and English for preschoolers. This comes on the heels of Goh Chok Tong's speech at the Credit Suisse Philantropists Forum on 7 April 2011, when Goh made mention of the US$100 million from the family of the late Ng Teng Fong for setting up a fund for needy patients at a new hospital in Singapore. The Singapore government has an incentive for 2.5 times tax deduction for donations to Institutions of a Public Character.

It piques one's curiosity to ponder how generous is the gesture. Clues come from the contributions of his three children. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the highest compensated politician in the whole wide world, is donating $100,000. Second son Lee Hsien Yang, who used to pick up $4 million in a good year at Singtel, which he left mysteriously for a $1 million a year appointment as business consultant at Fraser and Neave (he is now chairman), is donating $50,000. Daughter Lee Wei Lin, who took over after the then-Director of the Singapore National Neuroscience Institute Dr Simon Shorvon was booted out (the British General Medical Council and British High Courts sided with Shorvon in his dispute with the Singapore Medical Council), is also donating $50,000. Except for Dr Lee, the paltry sum is probably only a fraction of their 13th month bonus. She had once said of her father's psyche: "The word charity did not sit well with him". At a time when Singaporeans gained a reputation both at home and abroad for their eagerness to open their wallets to anyone in need (Nepalese twins, Yishun siblings, Huang Na kidnapping), daughter Lee blamed the press for its "propensity" to sensationalise stories that helped bring out "the gullibility of Singaporeans".

With the aforesaid in mind, so how much is the $10 million pledge worth? If he had intended to put Scrooge to shame, that could be 25 percent of his liquid assets. If he was a real skinflint, it could be 1 percent, which means he has at least $1,000 million in loose change. Even if the out-of-character largess was only 10 percent of his bank balance, it would imply that all those years of public service have earned him at least $100 million. Something must be wrong with the mathematics here.

BTW, don't buy the book "My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore's Bilingual Journey" thinking it will solve all your problems in acquiring a second language. This is what the author writes: "My big mistake... in the midst of our messy, massive exercise to revamp the education system, I realised I had been wrong in my premise (that anyone intelligent will be able to master languages)". Not everyone gets paid handsomely for making mistakes.

The Long Voyage Home

2011-11-29T01:39:00.004+08:00

23 Oct 1947-20 Nov 2011

In 1977, lawyer Francis Khoo fled Singapore to avoid being detained by the notorious Internal Security Department (ISD). The Ministry of Home Affairs claims he was wanted for questioning because a number of people arrested in February of that year "for activities to rebuild the Communist United Front in Singapore" had "implicated Francis Khoo for involvement in the group."

In 1977, the twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2 blasted off to take advantage of a planetary alignment that occurs once every 176 years. Travelling a billion miles every 3 years, they flew past Jupiter (1979), Saturn (1980), Uranus (1986), Neptune (1989), and onward to infinity and beyond. After 34 years in space, Voyager 1 is 18 billion km away; Voyager 2 is 14.5 km away. That's close to the theoretical 19 billion km distance where the solar system ends. The spacecraft carries messages from earth, music and greetings, etched in old styled phonographs. In 1977, nobody heard of a CD.

Francis Khoo Kah Siang spent those 34 years in exile.

In an obituary notice on Friday 25 Nov, Mrs Khoo said that her husband was involved in the legalities of forming a Citizens' Co-op to save the doomed Singapore Herald.

"On May 27, 1971 - after the Wee Cho Yaw fiasco - a pro-tem committee of "five concerned citizens," namely University of Singapore's economics lecturer Dr Lee Soo Ann, lawyers Francis Khoo Kah Siang, political scientist Patrick Low, bank officer Mok Kwong Yue, and architect Tay Kheng Soon, stepped forward and issued a statement calling upon the people and government to "support our efforts to set up a co-operative to purchase the Singapore Herald and turn it into a Citizens' Paper."
(The Media Enthralled: Singapore Revisited, Francis Seow, page 95)

Although Lee Kuan Yew had reluctantly absolved the CIA of "direct involvement" in the operation of the Singapore Herald, he had persisted in his stubborn belief that other U.S. propaganda agencies were likely financiers, such as the U.S. Information Service and the Voice of America. The Singapore Herald was accused of creating unwelcomed "pressure points on the government" and had to be stopped at all costs.

The international reaction was scathing:

"Singapore is a one-party State and bears the injuries that all one-party States do to themselves.
Those who see the power of the Singapore government and the lengths to which Lee Kuan Yew is prepared to go to hang on to it are frightened by what is likely to be the result of it. In Singapore the question is being asked more often these days: what is the point of being the best fed, best administered, best education nations in Asia if that nation is also one of the least free."
(The Australian, 21 May 1971)

Francis Khoo is free at last. At 64, he takes his place among the heavenly stars.

Lack Of Political Judgment

2011-11-28T09:37:00.003+08:00

Just like Lily Neo has endeared herself to her constituents by speaking up, and actually shouted out on one occasion in parliament, for the less fortunate, veteran MP Inderjit Singh has always vocalised the unpleasant truths. That's why both have never been promoted to a higher pay grade. For Inderjit Singh, there's also the discrimination factor, "Singapore was not ready for an Indian prime minister."

Like the voice of the prophet preaching to the wilderness, Singh recited the litany of serial abuses inflicted on a hapless nation: housing, transport, immigration, etc. He nailed it when he termed "a state of denial" when the government, by obfuscation and selective use of statistics, condemned future generations to a life time of servitude by insisting that public housing is affordable. That state of denial is still in place, the supply may have been ratcheted up, but the 30 year repayment onus has not been relieved. On the "growth-at-all-costs" fetish of the master planners, Inderjit Singh revealed that "the Government expected that if the economy grew, then all Singaporeans would also benefit indirectly a over a period of time." The same premise for the subprime crisis.

First-term MP Intan Azura Mokhtar said, "Respect is necessary in treading through diverse views and beliefs, while empathy is required to show care and understanding of different backgrounds and circumstances." It would appear Inderjit Singh will never be accorded a modicum of that respect. Why else did his political master not understand the ground sentiment regarding housing and foreign talent policy and called for an election at a timing it misjudged as "sweet"? Maybe he should quit while he's still ahead - public lamentation that housing and economic growth were mishandled is not a smart career move - John the Baptist was beheaded because King Herod's wife was less forgiving.

Ugh! Not a reprise of the "Upturn The Downturn" routine!

Political Jokes

2011-11-26T13:12:00.002+08:00

"A political joke is often the only weapon available to those who live under a totalitarian regime," the author was quoting from the first ever book of Communist jokes by emigre Yevgeny Andreevich. To test his hypothesis that jokes brought down the Communist system, Ben Lewis went beyond literature survey and ventured into countries like Romania for proof. That's where a spelling mistake with the name of Nicolae Ceauşescu - a minor alteration to "Nicolai", and the word means small penis in Romania - could send you to jail. And that's no joke.

The problem with grim jokes is that the laughter is time limited, and then you realise it's suddenly not so funny after all. That's when the Bee Gees lyrics go, "Oh, if I'd only seen that the joke was on me." Some of the anekdoty (Russian for jokes) could have been written in our context.

Take the current scheme of things when motoring will get so expensive that only millionaires can afford to drive down the NSE which wipes Rochor Center off the map of Singapore:

"Have you noticed that at every petrol station there is now a doctor and a policeman on duty? The doctor gives first aid to those who faint when they see the price, and the policeman interrogates the ones who fill up about where they got the money from." (page 169)

It's no help when clowns can still get into parliament through the outrage of the GRC system. Even the phony Tan who promised to speak for the people won't tell the truth about the national reserves because he swears by the OSA:

"A factory worker is sentenced to 15 years in prison for calling the secretary of the local party an idiot. After the sentence is read out, the lawyer protests that the penal code calls for only a maximum of 5 years for insults of this kind.
The judge corrects him: 'We didn't sentence the defendant for offending the secretary, but for divulging a state secret.' " (page 73)

But laughter grinds to a halt when each time the thin-skinned screams 'sedition' and files a police report when he could have simply turned the other cheek:

"A dissident arrives at a remote village, to which he has been exiled.
Everywhere seems deserted, but as he gets towards the centre of town he notices an overpowering horrible smell. In the main square he comes across a big crowd of people standing quietly in a lake of sewage coming up to their chins. Suddenly he falls in. He starts flailing his arms and shouting in disgust. 'Yuk! I cannot stand this! How can you people just stand here not doing anything?'
They reply, 'Shut up and keep still, you are making waves.' "(page 240)

And yet they wonder why people are still complaining:

"A dissident walks out of his house, It's starting to rain. He looks up and says in indignation: 'They always do just what they want'.
The next day when the dissident walks out the sun is shining brightly. He looks up and says in indignation, 'Of course. For this they find the money.' " (page 234)

In the penultimate of his 312 page volume, the author concludes that through joke telling, people inside the Communist regimes, including the leadership, admitted that Communism was "laughably" wrong. The jokes brought down Communism, in that the sense that they were intrinsic to the critique of Communism, shared eventually by the leadership and citizens, which led to its fall. But what has this got to do with us, excepting the fact the MIW still call each other "comrades"? Ah, that's where the definitive anekdot comes in:

"What is the definition of Capitalism?
The exploitation of man by man.
And what is the definition of Communism?
The exact opposite" (page 60)

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

2011-11-25T16:35:00.001+08:00

Olympus fans are worried what the financial shenanigans will do to the 92-year-old optical company which gave us the endoscope (also referred to as a fiberscope) and more recently, the micro four thirds technology for the camera buffs. Michael Woodford, ex-CEO and whistle blower, is calling for a shakeup of the corporate (mis)governance which wiped out 80 percent of the company's market capitalization. Can one gai-jin undo the harm that creative book keeping unleashed? And if that doesn't get your knickers in a knickers in a twist, the accountants seem to be busy here too.

Property experts are asking why K-REIT paid Keppel Land $1.57 billion for a 99-year lease of the OFC Building which has 999-year tenure. In a market that has lost most of its sizzle, and a economy that is buffeted by bad news, domestic and international. Keppel won't be asking awkward questions, it will book a net gain of $492.7 million from the transaction. REITs depend on rental income from properties held in its portfolio. When businesses go broke, as they do in a looming recession, the rent will not be paid. You don't have to be a sophisticated investor to appreciate that. You definitely do not want to just "trust the management to do the right thing." Just ask the long serving workers at Olympus. There's only one clue for the K-REIT mystery: "the payoff is better with acquisitions than getting the existing assets to perform."

Which reminds me of the time a property agent, and a blood relative at that, tried to sell us a piece of pricey real estate. On paper, we could make the down payment, and the rent, presumably from expatriates sponsored by Fortune 500 type companies, will "take care of the loan servicing." For 30+ years, we get to see someone enjoy the premises we possess only on paper. The agent gets his fat commission upfront, and won't be around to make sure there is a tenant to make the numbers match. The relative is no longer on talking terms. Which could explain why, no bank officer tried to sell me a Lehman linked investment instrument.

Recession Proof Jobs

2011-11-24T09:28:00.000+08:00

In July this year, civil servants were paid a mid-year Annual Variable Component (AVC) of half-a-month's salary (0.5-month) plus a S$250 quantum. Sources said the government is considering an additional 0.75-month bonus plus a dollar quantum for the year end bonanza.

On Monday it was reported Singapore faces a sharply lower economic growth of 1.0-3.0 percent in 2012 amid an export slowdown, and more bad news about the debt woes in Europe's that could trigger a global crisis.

The projection is worse than the previous estimate of 2.5-3.5 percent and well down from the 5 percent predicted for 2011 earlier as demand in Europe and the United States was drying up. Even China manufacturers are not immune to the imminent meltdown, as they suffered the weakest month of activity in 32 months.

Growth, the lack of, is not the only ill wind around town. "This does not factor in downside risks to growth, such as a worsening debt situation or a full-blown financial crisis in the advanced economies," the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) said in a statement. "Should these risks materialise, growth in the Singapore economy in 2012 could come in lower than expected."

So what if the world falls into the abyss of recession? The Singapore civil servants still get to collect. Tell that to the AMD staff who were laid off with Christmas just round the corner. Industry experts say the American chip maker was simply taking austerity measures in the face of the countdown to Armageddon. For them, bonus would mean surviving the forthcoming downturn to stay in business.

Analysts from Nomura financial services group are hoping the government may step in with a stimulus package when the next budget is unveiled in February 2012. Doesn't matter. Whether the stimulus package works or not, they'll still be rewarding themselves for a job well done. One thing's for certain, the salary review Gerard Ee is (still) working on won't be implemented until after the Christmas presents are opened.

Hot Button Issues

2011-11-23T08:24:00.001+08:00

The LTA may have missed the humor - tuck yew! why can't you recognise Singapore genius when you see it? - but the message of the sticker has universal application: "Press Once Can Already".

Within one week, the hot button of religious sensitivity was pushed importunately one time too many. Unless you played truant during physics class, you would have recalled Newton's third law of motion in his "Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis": To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction. If you wanna push, be prepared to be pushed back. Even experts don't profess to have all the answers.

Lesley Hazleton (born 1945) is an award-winning British-American writer who specialises on the history, religion and politics of the Middle East. She has described herself as “a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about being a nun." She is an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery, agnostic because she does not claim to know that a deity does not exist. Her recent book, "After the Prophet: the Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split", was a finalist for the 2010 PEN-USA nonfiction award.

Lesley Hazleton: “The fact that so few people do actually read the Quran is that is so easy to quote, that is to misquote. Phrases and snippets taken out of context what I call the highlighter version which is the one favored both by the Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim islamphobes…”
Listen to her first before you push another button.

More Time To Repent

2011-11-22T09:11:00.000+08:00

Once upon a time we were told the MRT congestion could not be relieved owing to constraints in the existing signalling system. Yesterday, Minister of State (Transport) Josephine Teo said there are simply not enough trains to run two-minute intervals throughout the morning and evening peak periods.

It was announced that a total of 35 trains will be added to the present fleet in the next 4 years. 5 arrived in May, but we are not told if they have been put in service. "We are fully committed to expanding the train fleet in order to improve frequencies in order of train arrivals," she chirped to a skeptical public. "You can always take the next train," was no longer politically acceptable.

Teo blamed the manufacturers for the tardy progress in the production line. The world has only a handful of train makers she claimed, naming Siemens (German), Alstom (French) and Bombardier (Canadian). Obviously she hasn't heard of other players like Hyundai-Rotem and the Chinese builders for the Chinese Ministry of Railways (MOR). Incidentally Bombardier's Derby plant is cutting jobs after losing the big Thameslink contract to Siemens - they should be hungry for a Singapore order. Building rolling stock is not exactly rocket science. Has anybody considered our local shipyards who construct engineering behemoths like state of the art floating rigs for deep sea exploration offshore Brazil? In the heydays of the containerisation buildup, many of the trailers and prime-movers for the container port were assembled from components sourced from Fruehauf and other brand names; the formula could be repeated.

Teo gave another excuse for the wait. The bigger fleet will take advantage of the new signaling system which reduces the spacing between trains, scheduled to be ready only by 2016. There will be no shortcut, the period for repentance will not be abbreviated.

To Gerald Giam's question if there was "no forward planning done", Teo answered, "there is advance planning but projecting demand and ridership is tricky business and hard to get 100-percent right". The same excuse could have been made for the housing shortage, hospital shortage, flood controls shortage. And have you seen the graph for economic growth? Even a drunk driver can steer a straighter line. Definitely lots of slapping required.

Tempering With The Law

2011-11-21T01:04:00.006+08:00

The police is investigating an offensive Facebook posting. On Saturday, YPAP's chairman and vice-chairman, Teo Ser Luck and Zaqy Mohamad, visited Huda Kindergarten to apologise in person. Is that an admission of guilt, being accessory to a criminal act, and willingness to accept the punishment according to the laws of the land? If not, why the orchestrated photo op in the mainstream media?

Zaqy Mohamad should know better than to interfere when a police investigation is in progress. The officers of the law should be allowed to proceed with their work without undue influence. Zaqy alludes to same arms-length approach in his own Facebook posting - "leave it to the relevant authorities and let the law to (sic) run its course" - but is pictured arm-twisting the Huda principal, presumably to to withdraw the police report he lodged:

This has to be Teo Ser Luck' attempt to "balance the usage of traditional media like newspapers" since "the Government is now learning to use new media effectively" (his own words, no less).

Unfortunately there was more than one police report made about the rhetorical question concerning a bus load of young Muslims. Maybe that's why a fall guy was needed. Someone who could have cut and pasted any of the graphics from google images available online. Someone who expressed a personal outrage like Wafa Sultan, the first Arab Muslim woman who dared to challenge Islam. Wafa Sultan could be wrong, but she provides ample evidence for her own persuasion. Evidence that invites reasoned debate to change her mindset. She's one gutsy Muslim sister. Only the asinine would charge her with sedition.

Religion was never a recommended topic for polite dinner conversation, in Singapore or any other part of the world. That doesn't mean intellectual deliberation should be held hostage to the madness of McCarthyism. During the McCarthy era, reckless, unsubstantiated accusations and demagogic attacks were made on ordinary citizens to serve the politics of the day. When common sense finally prevailed, contrived punishments which came about were later overturned, mischievous laws would be declared unconstitutional, dismissals from employment declared illegal or actionable, convoluted extra-legal procedures challenged in open court. That was in a country which embraces democracy.

The best we can hope for is that the law will be fairly administered, and seen to be fair.

Priority For The Greater Good

2011-11-19T10:02:00.002+08:00

Who would imagine this scene, Singapore rolling out the red carpet literally for a couple joined in gay wedlock. They even named an orchid after him - the "Doritaenopsis Sir Elton John". Elton and his partner David Furnish were similarly attired in track suits, so it was difficult to tell who actually wears the pants in their household. And who changes the baby diapers.

That could be one reason for the big welcome. The message that gays can help boost the population growth statistic without worrying about the bothersome TFR. A colleague had a quick put down for the alternate lifestyle: homosexuals are unnatural because they can't reproduce. Well, it looks like she could be wrong. Baby Zachary makes three.

And if Elton John signs up for a red passport, little Zachary will grow up to play golf at Orchid Country Club in the north and then zip down the spanking new North-South Expressway to Marina Bay Sands for a session at the baccarat tables. He probably will have to choose between a Porsche, Ferrari or Lotus Esprit, that's 3 COEs less for the lesser mortals. That's also one way to double the GDP by 2025.

Too bad the Rochor Centre folks have to be evicted to make way for the grandiose plans. "I hope they understand that their sacrifice is for the greater good, " said their MP Denise Phua. Latter claims to understand that there are residents who are angry with the move, adding, "It's difficult but we have to accept the Government's decision". Way up north, Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew could not assure the Nanyang Pho Heng association whether their request to move back to their original site after all the dust has settled would be entertained.

Major road works for the NSE project will begin from 2015. Both Lui and Ms Phua should take note that the next election is due in 2016.

Managing The New Media

2011-11-18T09:00:00.002+08:00

Speaking at the Project Reach discussion on strategic engagement of new media, Teo Ser Luck lamented that a Facebook post by someone from an opposition party gathered " a lot of likes and hero worshipping", but a similar message posted by a PAP member resulted in criticism. That was before he was alerted to the posting by a PAP youth wing member of a photo of a Huda Kindergarten school bus, labelled "Bus filled with young terrorist trainees?"

Tampines resident Firdaus emailed YP vice-chairman Zaqy Mohamad, and latter's comments are illuminating:
"The YP has throughout the years, brought in its members through the branches. They would have demonstrated a certain level of interest and commitment towards the Party before they would be referred by a trusted comrade for membership. The reference would largely be experiential; with the referrer’s knowledge based on his practical and personal encounters with the potential member."

Zaqy's initial response ("My Holdingt Reply Last Night') to the email stated this:
"However, I am informed that the photo posted was made earlier in the year some time in Feb. XXX had joined YP much later in June."

Note the lifeline extended to the racist: the offending post was made before the party membership card was issued. It would appear "a certain level of interest and commitment towards the Party" is all that is required of membership, moral inaptitude and innate prejudices are presumably secondary considerations. The Ku Klux Klan probably shared similar recruiting philosophies.

Initially YP leaders contemplated an internal investigation before taking action, a protracted process that calls for a vote by the central executive committee. Teo Ser Luck, who expressed disagreement at the Project Reach meeting with the IPS survey finding that the recent GE was not a "Internet election", knew he had to cut his losses, and arranged for the black sheep to resign, and the Facebook account deactivated.

But three police reports have already been lodged, including one from the principal of the Islamic kindergarten maligned. It remains to be seen if the final outcome will be a repeat of the "investigation" involving a certain Marine Parade GRC MP. After all, Teo did say the Government is now learning to use new media effectively, but it is still essential to "balance with the usage of traditional media like newspapers to tap into different communities".

A Glimpse Of Things To Come

2011-11-17T08:49:00.002+08:00

Click to see what was planned all along

McKinsey&Company is obviously privy to information that is not available to the average Singaporean. Put in another way, foreigners are trusted with future plans while citizens are treated like mushrooms - kept in the dark and fed with sh_t.

What the planners have in mind:

Year	2007	2025
Population, thousands	4,589	5,487
Total GDP, $ billion	172	415
Per capital GDP, $'000	51	91

Thanks for the heads up, "Kindness"@ November 16, 2011 5:08 PM

Meanwhile lawyer Hri Kumar Nair, MP for Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC, is saying the southern stretch of the NSE has a much smaller impact on building owners than the northern stretch. The occupants of 567 units in the affected HDB blocks at Rochor Centre will have a hard time swallowing this bitter truth - that they were never really proud owners of their residential flats, at least not in the eyes of the Government promoting home ownership.

Another One Bites The Dust

2011-11-16T09:08:00.002+08:00

By now it is quite clear Bukit Brown is not just about making way for a new expressway, the plot of land is too lucrative an opportunity for real estate gains to miss. Could Rochor Centre, slated to be bulldozed for the North-South Expressway, be the latest sacrifice for another property development goldmine?

Residents like retiree Wong, 72, who has stayed there since 1978, will miss seeing the National Day fireworks from his 17th floor flat. Others lament the loss of convenience of the nearby supermarket, banks, eating houses and 3 communal facilities - kindergarten, community centre and a home for the aged. It remains to be seen if the advantages of the site will be enjoyed by the new occupiers of fancy high rise condominiums which foreigners are permitted to purchase.

The route for the new expressway is close to 4 MRT stations, namely Caldecott, Novena, Little India and Bugis. If accessibility is available by rail, why build roads to service the same locations? The LTA has made plain their intent cut the number of cars on the road, yet they embark on the exercise to shave driving time from the north to the city by 5 minutes. With COEs currently in the stratospheric region, only the filthy rich will benefit from the time saver. Anyway, what's 5 minutes caught in traffic for a guy whose other car is a Lamborghini?

On paper, relocation benefits are generous. A resident living in a 3-room 67 sq m HDB flat will be compensated $434,400 to $485,300 for their apartment. We are told a 3-room 67 sq m new flat in Kallang is estimated at $348,000 to $401,000.

Officially the average size of HDB flats has shrunk by 5 to 10 per cent over the last 20 to 30 years, the reality is far worse. Surely a 3-room Rochor flat built in the 1978 era can't have the same 67 m floor area as a new 3-room flat in Kallang. Recently HDB chief executive Cheong Koon Hean received lots of flak for asserting that "Smaller flats doesn't mean lower quality of living", her line of defence for "Hey honey, I shrunk the flat." Looks like somebody at LTA is about to be lambasted for another con job foisted on the people.

Big Boys Preferred

2011-11-15T10:00:00.002+08:00

Years ago, an engineer visiting Panasonic Japan was waiting in the lobby when he noted a vendor delivering machined parts in a small plastic bag. His host later told him it was one of their many subcontractors who supply precision components by operating a small lathe from their homes. Back home, he told an EDB officer Singapore should have similar supporting industries. The officer said he had mooted a similar idea, but was shot down.

Lim's former employee said, "There is the sense that the Government prefers to work with established companies, not start-ups." He was referring to a Lim Kian Wee who funded his own greenfield operation to develop a electric vehicle (EV) with a range of 900 km per charge. Another entrepreneur, Clarence Tan invested $250,000 to realise his own dream of manufacturing a 2-seater air-conditioned EV. Tan also felt that the Government could have done more to support them.

The official initiative Electric Vehicle Taskforce - led by the Energy Market Authority and Land Transport Authority - launched an EV test bed for related technologies in June. The big boys invited include Daimler, Mitsubishi, Bosch, Renault and Nissan.

Tan had sought assistance from the National Research Foundation (NRF) in 2009 to test bed his battery system, but did not even receive an acknowledgement of their request. NRF denies the claim. Their spokesman says proposals are evaluated by expert panels and a successful proof of concept (POC) grant must demonstrate not just technical viability but also a high degree of commercial readiness.

One man must be familiar with the hurdles experienced by innovators like Tan. If Sim Wong Hoo did not pack his bag and headed for the US of A, the world would not have heard of Soundblaster. He, too, was rejected by EDB. Sim coined and made famous the term "No U-turn syndrome" to describe the social behaviour of the Singaporean mindset of conformity to higher authorities before taking any action. The strait jacket has to be cast off if creativity is to bloom.

Mind the speed bumps ahead

The Right Answers

2011-11-14T10:18:00.000+08:00

Students sitting for the A levels must be having sleepness nights, tossing and turning in bed, wondering if their answers submitted will satisfy the examiners' expectations.

Compared with the transcript of a CNBC interview with Lee Hsien Loong in 2009, it was obvious the answers fell short of the latest queries directed to him. Maybe it's the new normal in action, maybe things haven't changed a wee bit.

Asked whether cancer had "humbled" him, Lee said, "I think I try to be myself and that's the best way and people will accept us as we are." Notice the use of the royal "we" and not "me", since the life threatening event had affected him personally and not, touch wood, the nation at large. And he can tell segue on to tell the questioner, "It's not our role to be lords and masters and I think that's quite fundamental, which every elected politician must remember in a democracy." The corollary of that statement must be, since full democracy is not yet in place, lords and masters will continue to reign.

And the world knows too well what goes on in our city state, best illustrated by the mainstream media blackout about the prestigious LI Freedom Award 2011. Surely the old man will rather be accorded with that prize instead of the Ford Theater thingy. Sharing honours with the likes of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (Burma's democracy leader) and Vaclav Havel (former president of the Czech Republic) is just not the same as standing on the same stage as Julie Andrews.

Asked if there was an unfair image of Singapore portrayed in the West, Lee's response was puzzling, "It's like looking at the tail of the elephant and thinking 'that's the animal'." Now, what does that mean, coming from a guy who also said, "You have to depend on people who will be productive, be skilled, be imaginative"? Just focus on the tail and ignore the elephant in the room? Theres' a Chinese saying to the effect that if one draws a cartoon, it's not necessary to sketch in the intestines. One doesn't need a wild imagination to see through the fog of deception.

Elderly Institutional Care Review

2011-11-11T09:57:00.001+08:00

The teacher was both exasperated and embarrassed. She was leading her troop of primary school tiny tots to visit single room flats, an exercise in altruism intended to inculcate empathy for the less fortunate. But the little brat refused to step through the doorway, saying the room smells funny. Fortunately the septuagenarian occupant was hard of hearing, and was spared the hurtful remark.

But the kid was still a kid, with all his needs attended to by his doting parents. At the other end of the age spectrum, the senior citizen was supposed to be taken care of by the younger generation, her own children if she had any. Even a brief social visit was welcome palliative for her lonely existence.

Most of the nursing homes in Singapore are staffed by foreign workers, with filipinas in dominance because of their literacy in English. These are also relatively younger than their elderly charges. While they go about their assigned duties professionally, distributing medication or disposing of soiled adult pampers, not all of them have the empathy to dispense. The video footage of an old woman being abused by the staff of Nightingale Nursing Home at Braddell Road may have shocked some Singaporeans, but the harsh reality is that it is probably a more common occurrence than anyone would care to admit. The young foreign nurses have their own set of growing up pains, be it boyfriend problems or just scrounging enough money to send home. The ideal caregiver would be a Singaporean nurse in her retirement years. She has the skills and the mindset to care for someone who could be a contemporary of her own mother, or grandmother. Apparently these are not in short supply, but they have a niche market in being highly paid private nurses, caring for the well-off in their luxurious private residences.

Speaking at the conference organised by the Centre of Enable Living (CEL), Chan Chun Sing said "We know in the Asian context and culturally, we frown upon moving into institutional care. We think that it is against our values of filial piety to put your parents in the institutional home." Hence the government initiatives to build "Senior Service Centres" where the elderly are supposed to provide emotional support for their own kind, presumably for those who can feed, wash and clean up after themselves. The old looking after the old. It makes sense. Then he suggests something more in character with his unfathomable logic: use the new media and create one-minute YouTube videos on care giving to improve home care for the elderly. Honestly, I don't know what to say.

Moral Education

2011-11-10T09:29:00.001+08:00

If there was a contradiction of terms, Education Minister Heng Swee Keat must have missed it. At the unveiling of a "character development" toolkit, Heng said that character-building is a long-term process. MOE introduced an ethics syllabus in 1959, civics and moral education in 1992 and 1994, and national education in 2007 (recommendations on NE made by Committee of Supply per Mr Lui Tuck Yew, Minister of State (Education)), just 4 years ago. Note the intervals are getting shorter and shorter. Maybe the latest guidelines for Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) will have an even shorter shelf-life.

One principal at a SAP school in the West made a lasting impression on parents and guardians some time back during an occasion of the announcement of the PSLE results. She asked the pupils assembled in the school hall to stand up, to turn around, and face the moms and dads seated at the back. Take a bow, she told the kids, for without their patient love and nurturing, that day in school would not have been possible.

On the wall of that hall, the school had painted in large characters the values it aimed to impart to the young minds:
礼 (li) - courtesy
义 (yi) - righteousness
廉 (lian) - integrity
耻 (chi) - sense of shame
忠 (zhong) - loyalty
孝 (xiao) - filial piety
仁 (ren) - humanity
爱 (ai) - love

A committee member of the St Joseph's Institution Old Boys' Association commenting on the new MOE initiative said that teachers must be prepared to venture out of their comfort zone. Really? Is it hazardous duty to teach, amongst others, righteousness, integrity or a sense of shame?

Shame - 耻 (chi) - is not just about exposing the navel line, as in the Abercrombie & Fitch ad. It's about the shame of setting a bad example, of lying to the people you pledged to serve, of hiding behind manipulated data, while enriching oneself by ripping off taxpayers. It's moral hazard pure and simple, and teachers should not be afraid to call a spade a spade.

Even The Dead Are Not Spared

2011-11-09T08:30:00.003+08:00

Mahathir once caused a major upset when he said some of his people were pampered from the womb to the tomb. Lucky them. As for us, it's more like being made to pay and pay for progress from the cradle to the grave. Even those souls resting in peace at Bukit Brown are not spared.

Detractors allege that the deluge of MSM coverage about the grave development was intended to mask the more news worthy item about the Liberal International (LI) Prize for Freedom 2011 Award accorded to a Singaporean, given to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the promotion of freedom and human rights. Past laureates of the Prize include Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (Burma's democracy leader), Vaclav Havel (former president of the Czech Republic), and Mary Robinson (former president of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights).

Between the living and the dead

In addition to a wordy post in his Facebook account of 5 Nov, BG Tan Chuan-Jin was given a two page spread in the Sunday Times. Despite the copious deluge of verbosity, the general would not, or could not, provide a positive answer when confronted with the request for an re-alignment of the road, more time for historians to document the graves, relocation of certain tombstones, or simply keeping some clusters as "cemetery-parks". Not exactly very difficult demands for a high ranking officer and gentleman.

His prevarication defeats the prose in his post, "Our history and heritage is precious. They are anchors to our past even as we look forward to our future". He repeats the charade of having "discussed with some members of Heritage Society, met a few personalities passionate about the place and importantly, to talk to the Hokkien Huay Kuan." But when it comes to decision time, it is obvious where he stands: "I have taken a look at our 2025 plans and beyond till the middle of this century. The Bukit Brown area would be required for future developments." How's that for killing off a discourse?

Tan's pseudo remorse, "We could have done better", sounds remarkably like a page taken out of PM Lee's last ditch apology at the eve of elections, "And if we didn’t quite get it right, I’m sorry, but we will try and do better the next time." So this is the new approach the incumbents are embarking on to engage the citizens. Smoke 'em and fool 'em. Maybe this ex-soldier may not be as "in-your-face" as the kee-chiu character, but his graveside manner has room for improvement in the sincerity department.

Hot Air About Electricity

2011-11-08T09:46:00.001+08:00

The managing director of Singapore Power says of the need to look for cheaper fuel, "I am already worried about next year's electricity prices." Obviously that concern was not about the financial impact on Singapore house holds. You see, electricity here is not subsidised because the Government claims it wants to encourage people to conserve energy and cut wastage. Meanwhile one old geezer is allowed to keep the room temperature of his office at 22 degrees Celsius, and that of his bedroom at 19 degrees Celsius. At taxpayers' expense.

If that gets you hot under the collar, note that last year, oil accounted for 17 percent of fuel for electricity production, natural gas for 77 percent, and waste and other sources for 6 percent. Yet that secret formula for calculating the household electricity tariff rate is still indexed against the price of oil.

During 2001-2003, the electricity market was "liberalised" to permit the privatised power stations to compete in providing power to about 10,000 non-residential consumers. The fruit of privatisation is delivered to the industrial giants, not to lesser mortals in their HDB cubicles. Oh yes, we know, the Gahment wants to encourage people to conserve energy.

All the hot air about alternative sources of fuel sources is of no practical value to the average Singaporean if they are simply alternate excuses to hike the electrical bills. The HDB began a $31 million 5-year trial in 2009 to supply solar power for common areas like corridors and stairwells. Meanwhile the residents living and studying inside their flats continue to pay exorbitant prices. And praying that the Town Council charges won't be raised to cover the expensive solar panels.

The really dumb idea has to be buying electricity from remote overseas foreign facilities, considering the pitfalls of grid security and the power source's political sustainability. Indonesia is building coal firing plants at Batam, with intent to sell electricity to Singapore and diverting the cleaner gas fuel to serve it's own Java instead. Are the recent lessons of being held hostage for drinking water from Johore so easily forgotten? Remember how the Japs turned off the pipeline at the Causeway and made the the British soldiers cry uncle? Asian Development Bank energy specialist Zhou Aiming is only scratching the surface of a potentially volatile situation when he pointed out that "countries trading electricity need to iron out interconnection standards and terms of the trade countries", conveniently choosing to skip the political realities.

The Energy Market Authority estimates Singapore currently uses at most one third of it's licensed 9,890 MW power generation capacity. Scrap all the fancy talk, how about giving some of the excess capacity to the citizens? Or is that reserved for the next pre-election hand-out?

More Research Required

2011-11-07T00:04:00.006+08:00

Did you know that the MP for Tanjong Pagar GRC Lee Kuan Yew once wished someone had invented air-conditioned underwear? Describing it to the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1999, he said that it could be "a light polyester air-conditioned undergarment, enclosed around the neck, wrists and ankles, and battery-operated". True to form, the Straits Times ran it as a straight story on page one. A month later, it published a 1455-word feature article quoting local academics and engineers hot for the idea, complete with an illustration of how a "cold suit" might work.

Reuters has jumped on Sunday Times' story, about the revelation by the director of Singapore's National Neuroscience Institute, that her 88-year-old father has sensory peripheral neuropathy, a condition that impairs the conduction of sensation from his legs to his spinal cord. "This makes his walking unsteady, as many Singaporeans have already noticed," she wrote. The daughter added, "I think with medication and simple precaution, he can continue to be of service to his country and the world." In other words, no need to dock his pay. A Bangladeshi worker who lost one or two of his fingers in an industrial accident may no longer be deemed employable, but an MP who can't walk to the meet-the-people-sessions need not worry about the pink slip. That's another advantage of the GRC - you're hoping for a by-election maybe?

Coincidence or not, there seems to be no shortage of research work on robotic ambulatory studies in Singapore. From the polytechnics to NTU, the complex dynamics of a humanoid locomotion are already well covered. Apparently the technology is well within reach, compared to refrigerated Calvin Kleins.

The worrying part is not automatic control of the limbs, but the cognitive portion above the neck. We are told someone diagnosed with sensory peripheral neuropathy has full functionality of his brain. Which makes it puzzling for us lesser mortals to understand why he had to tell his daughter to "Let the readers know I have sensory peripheral neuropathy." Has communication with the common man broken down?

At a tree planting ceremony yesterday, he said the problem started when he was 86, a secret he kept for 2 whole years - maybe he thought it might disqualify him from the electoral sweepstakes. Many Singaporeans would have already noticed extra hands were on the spade, from the sar kar (dialect expression for "the third hand") general, to steady the gardening effort for the photo op. Who's giving who a leg up?

Risky Business

2011-11-04T10:27:00.002+08:00

Events certainly ended on a sour note when the 211 investors who bought DBS High Notes (HN5) lost their appeal for the recovery of about $18 million worth of products linked to bankrupted Lehman Brothers. Chief Justice Chan ruled that "Illiteracy, whether linguistic, financial or general, does not enable a contracting party to avoid a contract whose terms he has expressly agreed to be bound by." Laymen will ask, how can one express agreement to terms he did not understand in the first place?

Joining the wealth of reading material documenting the financial meltdown of 2008, authors Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera ("All The Devils Are Here", Portfolio/Penguin 2010) illustrate that even for quants well versed with the Black-Scholes formula for pricing options or VaR model for attaching a dollar value to risk, "nobody ever thought CDOs would be WMD". That was the senior VP in structural finance at Lehman Brothers speaking in November 2007. The bits and pieces of mortgage loans put together by subprime companies metastasized into an alphabet soup of toxic products with exotic names like ABS, ARM, ABCP, MBS, and RMBS. If these read like rocket science, it's because actual rocket scientists - mathematicians and physicists - were hired to use quantitative methods, and not stock and bond fundamentals, to create the complex risk models for high tech finance. Add the bad guys in the industry who gull customers into taking on expensive mortgages - and paying exorbitant fees - which were securitized into incomprehensible derivative deals and you've got a potent mix. Eric Hibbert, another Lehman Brothers executive, described one First Alliance Mortgage Company (Famco) as a typical sweatshop specializing in "high pressure sales for people who are in a weak state". He added, "It is a requirement to leave your ethics at the door." A money lender who bucked the trend said, "Just because Johnny jumped off the bridge doesn't mean you have to follow."

Johnny's latest fling in town seems to be with CFDs, Contracts For Difference which hinge on the bet on the movement of an asset - stock, currency or commodity - without owning the asset itself. The sweetener is that investors pay only 10 percent upfront for the leap off. But if the CFD shares dive, the full cost of the loss could wipe out that initial outlay, and euphoria of easy money, easily. Those who dabble in shares will recognise the similarity to margin trading. The generous broker who promptly opens a margin account for you will be just as quick to make the margin call, when something interesting like Greece makes the headlines.

The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed by Obama on 21 July 2010 requires derivatives to be traded on an exchange - and subject to regulatory controls that these instruments avoided during the subprime crisis. But greed can never be regulated. When things go horribly wrong, like the credit event kicking in for HN5, the good judge will simply remind you, "We think it appropriate and timely to remind the general public that... a person who signs a contract... is bound by the terms of that contract."

Who's Doing The Policing?

2011-11-03T09:10:00.001+08:00

Gazetting a blog is not internet policing. *palm-face*

In the CNA Talking Point episode "Policing The Internet", MP (Tampines GRC) Baey Yam Keng claimed that the Ministry of Law sees the internet as another platform for real world criminals to operate from, and people need to be protected from fraud, cyber-bullying, etc. The timing of gazetting online blogs had nothing to do with policing the internet, he said with a poker face. While at it, he might as well add that the president's addendum had nothing to do with the online revelations about the circumstances of his son's 12 year deferment. The wording of the Ministry of Law statement on the subject goes like this:"The proliferation of new media has brought about new challenges to the rule of law and the ministry will review legislation to deal with harmful and unlawful online conduct". Smells like a good-cop-bad-cop routine is in play.

Here's how real world politicians feel strongly about the subject:
US Foreign Secretary William Hague: The fact that criminals and terrorists can exploit digital networks is not "justification for states to censor their citizens."
UK Prime Minister David Cameron: Governments "must not use cybersecurity as an excuse for censorship or to deny their people the opportunities that the Internet represents."

Cameron and Hague were speaking at a two-day International Cyber Conference in London. Their stance contrasts with calls by Russia and China for tighter regulation of the Internet through binding international treaties. No prizes for guessing which camp Baey or his comrades will be more comfortable with.

Confronted with Ravi's clarification that the much bally-hooed case of cyber-bullying did not involve Singaporeans, Baey had to concede that crime was not the only raison d'être for the internet policing, "Yes, political concerns could be one of it". Since the mainstream media shy from highlighting instances of duplicity, netizens will just have to be extra vigilant and do their patriotic bit for the country.

"What citizens do online should not, as some have suggested, be decreed solely by groups of governments making decisions for them somewhere on high," US Vice President Joe Biden said in his contribution delivered via videolink from Washington. Hear! Hear!

Be Careful What You Vote For

2011-11-02T10:26:00.001+08:00

Suppose you had signed up for an expensive package of on-demand movies in glorious full HD (1920 x 1080), but discovered that most of the programming is in pathetic DVD resolution (720 x 480). Fortunately the new MDA guideline stipulates that cancelling charges must be pro-rated, on new contracts capped at 2 years. But what is the recourse if you voted for a president who fails to deliver on your expectations?

The Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) seems to be embarking on another "education exercise" on behalf of the powers seated on high. Coming after an earlier survey debunking the effects of social media on the last election, they have produced another study to prove that voters got it wrong, again.

Apparently a majority of respondents believe the elected president is there to ensure the Government manages the economy well. Some even believe he is free to speak publicly on national issues that are important to us. 66 percent of those surveyed actually thinks the least he could do was to make sure the Government does what it promised during the hustings of the general election. In other words, for 4 million smackeroos, this guy better justify his existence. What we don't want is another free loader who summarises his years of service with a memoir aptly titled "Why Am I Here?"

Indeed, why is there a president, installed at great expense to the taxpayers, if all he does is shake hands with foreign visitors and speak out for the people only when he has been given permission to do so? If he requires official authorisation just to open his mouth, where will he find the authority to disagree with the government's spending of the reserves and object to appointment of cronies to high office? With this godless government in office, personal religious and moral conviction is already checked out at the door.

If there is a legal basis to nullify the election outcome, nobody is interested to explore it. One constitutional law expert even proposed using TV drama to "educate" the people, so they won't feel short-changed. "Have a 24-part Channel 8 drama on some features of the presidency, showing crises and so on, set the date at 2050. You might actually succeed." SMU lecturer Eugene Tan is less sanguine, opining that any Government attempt to educate voters will be perceived as trying to "straitjacket" the office. The soap opera continues.

The New Game In Town

2011-11-01T11:04:00.000+08:00

The total workforce in Singapore comprises 2.1 million residents (citizens and PRs) and 1.1 million foreigners. Labour economist Hui of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy deduces that the overall jobless rate is about about one third less than the official resident unemployment rate of 3.0% as of June 2011, (i.e. 2%), since all foreigners have jobs. But how did 1/3 of the jobs available in Singapore end up going to foreigners?

Minister of State Tan Chuan-Jin knew the answer in hi sheart when one CEO accused of hiring too many foreigners disclosed his company's workforce figures which, in Tan's own words, "didn't make very good reading" for a company based here."

Yet when Mr Yeap of the Singapore Shell Employees' Union pointed out that Singaporeans were retrenched while foreigners kept their jobs during the downturns of 1986 and 1998, Tan, now sitting on the same side as Lim Swee Say and SNEF president Stephen Lee, challenged Yeap if that was a fact or perception. That sounded awfully like Shanmugam's assault on Pritam Singh's presentation of the unpleasant truth in parliament, tantamount to imputing Yeap "purveys lies and dishonest opinions". It was like Yeap had to "put your hand on your heart and say, this is what I believe in." Yeap didn't blink, "It is a fact, that's why I raised it here."

Labour chief Lim Swee Say didn't exactly help with his warped version of events - that the Job Credit Scheme helped keep jobs, while foreign work passes were allowed to expire without renewal. In other words, foreigners lost jobs, Singaporeans kept their jobs. SNEF's Lee qualified that foreigners on contract were let go, but at least he was honest enough to concede, "This does not mean no Singaporeans were retrenched." So when Tan urged his audience to distinguish perception from reality, maybe he should have commanded Lim Swee Say to stop daydreaming and come down to earth.

Oddly, it is the same Tan who announced the new guidelines purportedly designed to take aim at discriminatory hiring practices such as job advertisements that stipulate foreigners are preferred, and preferential hiring of foreigners over suitably qualified Singaporeans. Which makes one wonder whether the general is acting on inputs of perception or reality, or just engaging in theater. Shanmugam's words come to mind again: "When members speak here, (with) their personal views and their integrity to speak their personal views and speak from their heart, there are no games that need to be played."

Selecting Good People

2011-10-31T09:10:00.000+08:00

People who had a recent opportunity to attend a SHELL recruitment interview will be familiar with the CART system which they are assessed against: Capacity, Achievement, Relation skills and Technical skills. MP for Tanjong Pagar GRC Lee Kuan Yew says the Singapore civil service adopted Shell's human resource methodology to select people based on HAIR qualities - their helicopter ability, their power of analysis, their sense of imagination and their sense of reality.

Nobody in their right minds will dispute his comment that the Shell criteria makes a lot of sense, and that there are a lot of good civil servants in the system. But who are the ones who actually get promoted?

The helicopter ability - we assume this refers to the vision to see the forest instead of the trees, and not the helicopter hop into parliament via the GRC system - was evidently not demonstrated in the Orchard Road floods situation. The brown liquids swirling about Starbucks were not from their coffee machines. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Was it analysis that led to the housing shortage, and congested public transportation system? Academics clamouring for access to the raw data are eager to run them through their own set of computations, and see whether the computer should be blamed. As we know, drug offence incidences can be on the rise or ebb, depending on the number crunching system opted for.

Imaginative powers, coupled with euphoria from being cocooned in the ivory towers, can be pretty deceiving. Problem is, the Swiss standard of living imagined by some may not be translated easily to those at the bottom of the food chain. Especially those collecting used cardboard for subsistence. For them, a million dollar salary or $150,000 allowance can only be a figment of imagination.

And what's more unreal than the level of compensation accorded to some civil servants? Observing the recent parliament in session, one notes some of the performances by the MPs, those who bothered to show up at all, are downright surreal. Said PM Lee: "This is not just a show, it's not just theatre." Prove it.

Refresher Course In Politics

2011-10-28T08:59:00.001+08:00

With his tousled hair, the questioner looked like a Rip Van Winkle who was rudely interrupted from his long siesta to do some productive work. Rising just in time to catch the tail end of Low Thia Khiang's speech, he asked: "My question is, in what way does he think the field is not level for the opposition party?"

Mr Low made it easy enough for a 4-year-old to understand, "To cut it short, simply put it, that the GRC system is something which has not given the opposition a level playing field." One member sitting directly behind Low was visibly trying to stifle his snicker. Man, how long has the guy been sleeping?

By now, every kid in a Singapore school knows what gerrymander is. It is the root cause why you get to see your MP only once a year. Why should he or she bother to visit the constituents if the electoral boundaries are re-drawn every time before a general election is conducted? Why risk a health hazard by shaking hands with a fishmonger or pork seller (depending on the story telling) when one could be clinking champagne glasses at a "good class bungalow" ward?

It was the nineteen-century Governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, who has given his name to a practice that undermines democracy. He is said to have drawn up a district map of the United States. A cartoonist then satirized the shape of one electoral region by adding a head, wings, and claws and declaring, 'That will do for a salamander.' Another retorted, 'Gerrymander'. Thus a word was born that refers to a practice of manipulating electoral districts unfairly in order to secure disproportionate representation. ("Dining With Terrorists", Phil Rees, Pan Macmillan 2005, page 187).

It may be argued that even with the advantages of carving up the country to give one political party a majority in many districts while concentrating the voting strength of the other party into as few districts as possible, a SMC candidate still has to put in some token effort as some core residents may not have been afftected by the geographical redistribution. Not so the GRC guy. The chap who was introduced with much pomp and ceremony in one constituency can end up parachuting into another kilometers away in a wink of an eye. And guaranteed a ride into parliament. Such is the level playing field in local politics.

Wisdom From The Past

2011-10-27T08:54:00.004+08:00

In the temptation scene of the 2010 Chinese blockbuster "Confucius", the sage(played by Chow Yun-Fat) said in response to an immodest proposal from Nanzi, the infamous consort in the Kingdom of Wei: 微臣從沒見過, 如斯好德如好色的人

That line is from the Analects of Confucius 9.19:
The Master said, "I have yet to meet a man who loves Virtue as much as he loves female beauty."

There are many interpretations of the sage's message of self cultivation, one being that if people love virtue as much as they love female beauty, then they will discard immorality and return to rectitude. Xie Liangzuo expresses it best:
"Loving a beautiful woman or hating a foul smell - these are examples of sincerity. If one could only love Virtue the way one loves female beauty, this would mean sincerely loving Virtue. Unfortunately, few among the people are able to do this."

Confucius puts it more explicitly in Analect 9.24:
The Master said, "When a man is rebuked with exemplary words after having made a mistake, he cannot help but agree with them. However, what is important is that he change himself in order to accord with them. When a man is praised with words of respect, he cannot help but be pleased with them. However, what is important is that he actually lives up to them. A person who finds respectful words pleasing but does not live up to them, or agrees with others' reproaches and yet does not change - there is nothing I can do with one such as this." ("Confucius Analects: with selections from traditional commentaries," translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett Publishing 2003)

In the aftermath of the recent skirmishes in parliament, one Minister has acknowledged that his political party does not have the monopoly of talent. If the exercise turned out to be a moral education for our schools, the lesson is timely.

The Quest For More Information

2011-10-26T11:08:00.001+08:00

Was Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, the right person to ask if his ministry would consider looking at the suitability of a Freedom of Information Act for Singapore? He's probably still sore WikiLeaks revealed the Minister-in-Charge of Muslim Affairs since 2002 "has a more open-minded interpretation of the Koran" and said his Puerto Rico born wife converted to Islam to "satisfy the conservative standards of Singapore".

Academics, economists and sociologists are demanding more than the "pledge to share more information." They want the raw data, instead of the ad hoc releases from the official propaganda machine. We have seen how Lawrence Wong massaged the MOM statistic about how the bottom 20 percent income earners stagnated over the past decade. Wong broke the numbers into first half of the decade with a negative plunge, and second half of the decade with the recovery, emphasizing the second to cover the pain of the first, and ignoring the same end result: real monthly income change for the 20th percentile of 0.3% for 2001-2010.

Researchers and university dons seem to focus on the two hot-button issues - foreigners and wages. But the data which merits closer scrutiny is the costing for the HDB flats. Recall the "Report on The National Kidney Foundation" dated 16 December 2005 by KPMG which stumbled across the TT Durai style of accounting:

6.11.1 The NKF reported in its Investment Report 2004 that it enabled its patients to save in excess of $3.5 million in treatment costs by providing subsidies for costly medication and by bringing down drug prices.

6.11.2 We found that the amount of such savings was derived from the difference between the prices charged by NKF and a notional market price of drugs based on estimated annual consumption in 2004 instead of the difference between the prices charged by the NKF and the actual prices of drugs paid by the NKF. These savings were reflected in invoices given to patients.

6.11.3 We found that the stated cost of drugs dispensed to patients as reflected in the invoices closely approximated the market price of the drugs.

One may argue that, going by the dictionary definition of subsidy, being "Monetary assistance granted by a government to a person or group in support of an enterprise regarded as being in the public interest," HDB flats are subsidised. But what if the actual accounting is a facsimile of the NKF model? In his last dying gasps as Minister of National Development, Mah Bow Tan muddied the waters further by adding the notion of national reserves into the costing.

There is anecdotal evidence that the subsidised medication from our Healthcare system may be sourced cheaper across the Causeway. In the Michael Moore 2007 documentary "Sicko", Americans crossed the border to Canada for more affordable medicine. Since Singapore is a duty free station, there should be no significant disparity in prices of pharmaceutical products in JB. Unless the bean counters have a different philosophy in preparing the books. Will a Freedom of Information Act provide any illumination in such murky waters?

The Media Re-Visited

2011-10-25T00:24:00.001+08:00

Responding to Pritam Singh's call in parliament to improve communications with Singaporeans in the digital age, MP Indranee Rajah (Tanjong Pagar GRC) asked Mr Singh if he thought there was indirect control of the mainstream media by the Government. Cued by the scent of blood, Law Minister K Shanmugam joined in the gang bang and pressed him "to put your hand on your heart and say this is what I believe in."

Pritam Singh could have easily neutered the ravenous predators by quoting from WikiLeaks cable referenced 09SINGAPORE61:

¶3. (C) Singapore journalists tell us they are increasingly frustrated with the obstacles they face in reporting on sensitive domestic issues. Reporters have to be careful in their coverage of local news, as Singapore's leaders will likely come down hard on anyone who reports negative stories about the government or its leadership, Chua xxxx xxx (strictly protect), the new Straits Times (ST) U.S. Bureau Chief (former China Bureau Chief) told Poloff January 6.
......
Chua lamented that the ST editors have all been groomed as pro-government supporters and are careful to ensure that reporting of local events adheres closely to the official line.

Or highlight the appointment of Lee Boon Yang as director of Singapore Press Holdings on Oct 1, in preparation for re-election on Dec 1 to make him Chairman of the Board. Surely there are sufficient senior staff within the organisation to merit the post after years of faithful service? Lee is another of those ministers who can't seem to be able to find a real job in the private sector after being retired in 2009.

Or go further back in time to quote the observation of the Australian Committee of the International Press Institute (IPI):
"Many politicians in free countries, sensitive to exposure of their weaknesses and failings by the press, thirst for the very powers which Mr Lee Kuan Yew threatened to employ in Singapore. Such threats are a menace not only to newspapers and newspapermen everywhere but also to the already dwindling liberties of all free men." (ST, May 28, 1959)

And if anyone still misses the point, here's a no holds barred advisory from ST Editor Leslie Fong,
"Where the issue in question is one over which the government has taken a determined stand, there is no doubt whose view will prevail. Should any journalist feel that he cannot accept such an outcome, then resignation is the only honourable course open to him. This is just one of the harsh realities which the press here faces." (Roger Mitton, "The Long Story, What Role For The Press? Singapore's Answers", Asiaweek, September 25, 1992).

Please treat our journalists kindly. These guys are under tremendous pressure.

Comic Relief

2011-10-24T00:21:00.003+08:00

How can you write a book and not deliver the facts? The author does not elaborate on many details, readers have to piece together the links between Thaksin, the coup and the role of the palace. Ezra Vogel was criticized for a 900+ page tome that gives little away about his subject, Deng Xiaoping. But Deng is dead. Tom Plate's Thakshin Shinawattra is alive and well in Dubai, trying to "make do" with US$100 million at his 7-bedroom, 2-stories-plus-basement Emirates Hills villa. Why didn't he just ask?

Plate is worried about lèse-majesté, the Thai laws that protect their King and Queen from unfavourable commentary. Although mention is made of the WikiLeaks report - about a war against Thaksin and Prem Tinsulanond as schemer-in-chief for the palace - he allows Thaksin to shy away from the topic by saying "if I were to comment on this, I would say, let's forget the past." If Vogel's biography about Deng leaves readers hungry for more, Plate's third book of his Giants Of Asia series makes one wonder why he chose Thaksin as a case study if he can't get the simplest truth out of him.

He lets Thaksin argue his wife's Land-Purchase Deal was above board because it was done through a public auction. He lets Thaksin present the sale of Shin Corporation to Temasek as a divestment to deflect criticism of mixing politics with private business. Instead of confronting Thaksin with the low price wife Pojaman paid - one third of the prior-assessed value - and the clever structure of the Shin deal to evade Thai taxes, Plate parks the inconvenient details at the back of the book, under "Appendix".

Who cares whether Thaksin has 8 or 12 cell phones? Or how many passports he carries. Or that he used the work site toilet while making impromptu check on the construction progress of the Suvarnabhumi Airport. Or that that he loses when playing golf with Goh Chok Tong. Thaksin blames the weather in Singapore, "Yes, and maybe also the helicopter security overhead all the time... bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-boo all the time." [laughs] (page 83). Wait a minute, who pays for the "helicopter security"? Aren't we told the PM's package is all pay but no perks?

If you go for that kind of reading material, here's how the two pontificate over Mahathir's pension (US$3,000 a month) and Thaksin's salary as Prime Minister of Thailand (also US$3,000 a month - but no pension, according to Thaksin) :-
Tom Plate: "Speaking of Lee... someone said to me, 'Do you realize that Lee Kuan Yew, as minister mentor', even when he was only a minister mentor, not the prime minister, 'was making a government salary of millions of dollars a year? What do you think of that?' "
Plate ask Thaksin, "You know what Lee Kuan Yew has said?"
Thaksin: "What?"
Plate: "He said, 'pay peanut, get monkey!' "

The book is still unavailable in Bangkok, despite being in bookstores in other cities in the region such as Singapore. But don't waste your money, just borrow it from the National Library for comic relief.

Master Class

2011-10-22T11:13:00.005+08:00

Uncle is rejuvenated each time he recalls, eons ago, being thunderstruck when Francis Seow addressed the rally at ~~Cheng San~~ Eunos, reminding the massive turnout that only one person in history can credibly claim the ability to rise from the grave. The policeman standing next to him was more shocked when he, in his naïveté of youth, uttered aloud spontaneously, "Omigosh, this guy could be our next premier!" The cop was fidgeting with a cheap model Ecolac attache case, crammed with 3 or 4 vintage Walkman-type recorders, gathering material surreptitiously to sue the pants off any politician with a careless word. How was he going to erase the truth expressed from the groundswell?

It must be déjà vu for him, coupled with a touch of nostalgia, to read the print version of Low Thia Khiang's masterly performance in parliament. How we wish parliamentary debates were broadcast live on TV. The sight of court jester Lim Swee Say and company cringing at his words, squirming in their seats, must be priceless.

"I think is is high time the PAP MPs refrain from using this (pitfalls of a welfare state) as a red herring to kill debate on alternative solutions and mechanisms to those proposed by the Government." Ouch!

"It seems to me that more often than not, the policy trade-off was biased against the people, especially those who are adversely affected." Double ouch!

Low expands on Lim's CBF doctrine

Low made reference to the threshold of pain, using the colloquial expression tahan (Malay for withstand), that citizens have stoically experienced while putting up with bad governance instances that inflicted the scorch of housing woes, infrastructure shortcomings, foreign hordes, etc. The list is long, and too painful to regurgitate. "But when the people tak boleh tahan, the Government will get hit during the election, " reminded Mr Low. Lim Swee Say must have asked of the genie from the magic lamp of his wacky bed-time story, wishing "to be beaten half to death." Be careful what you wish for, Mr Lim, look at what just happened to Gaddafi. Even an euphemistic version of his inglorious finale must be tough to tahan.

After the shock and awe of the brass knuckles, Low laid on thick with the velvet gloves, "I am happy to note the PAP has done some reflection on ground reactions, and the Government has responded to some of the concerns of the people," alluding to PM Lee's pledge on Thursday (adding to the longer list of earlier, yet to be delivered, election promises) to strengthen the social safety net.

Omigosh, this guy could be our next premier!

Advocates Of Terror

2011-10-21T00:07:00.004+08:00

DPM Teo Chee Hean invoked all incantations of ghosts of spectres past like "Marxist conspirators" and "domino theories" to scare the daylights out of you and justify the retention of the ISA. Halloween isn't even due till October 31st. For the record, Vietnam fell and the dominoes never did tumble into Thailand, or other SEA countries, as the fear mongering Americans predicted. Teo maintains ISA is a shield to protect us from terrorism, and other nasties such as foreign subversion, espionage and racial agitation. But who is terrorising who?

Writing in "Dining With Terrorists," Phil Rees noted that the United Nations spent 17 years trying to draw up a definition that all its members would accept, and failed. No armchair journalist, the author actually travelled afar to dine (hence the title) with advocates of armed conflict like Hamas, Tamil Tigers, Albanian KLA, Colombia's FARC, Taliban and Chechnya fighters, to find out if the old adage that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter still applies.

Prior to September 11, the United States of America often aligned with "freedom fighters" confronting colonial power. After all, America itself was birthed from violent rebellion against oppressive British colonialists. The Boston Tea Party, the revolt that sparked the War of Independence, was an act of heroism or terrorism, depending on which side of the Atlantic you stood. (page 18)

Then "terrorism" was a term applied to violence committed by non-state actors developed after the Second World War. As nationalist groups throughout Asia emerged to overthrow their colonial masters, British and French governments used the term to describe their adversaries in news reports. In Malaysia, insurgents fighting the Brits for national liberation were simply called "CTs", communist terrorists.

Post 9/11, Palestinians brandishing AK-47s present the face of terror on television screens. Ironically, underground Jewish militias like the Stern Gang and the Irgun Zvai Le'umi, were also terrorists in the Middle East. Yitzhak Shamir, who later became Israeli Prime Minister, wrote an August 1943 article entitled "Terror", for the journal of the Stern Gang, "First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today." Even Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela's ANC was not squeamish about employing violence to overthrow apartheid.

The compact edition of the Oxford Dictionary defines:

Terrorism: n A system of terror. 1. Government by intimidation as directed and carried out by the party in power in France during the revolution of 1789-94; the system of "Terror". 2. gen. A policy intended into strike with terror those against whom it is adopted; the employment of methods of intimidation; the fact of terrorizing or the condition of being terrorized.

Teo resisted against replacing the ISA with a Terrorism Act as the Terrorism (Suppression of Bombings) Act of 2007 would not allow pre-emptive action against those who have not yet committed overt deeds that warrant prosecution. Arguing against the right of public trial, he claims "the very airing of these incendiary issues in a public trial can further exacerbate an already volatile situation." Which speaks volumes about the lame discourses in parliament. The ISA is more terrifying than one can imagine.

Quiz: Was Muammar Gaddafi killed by "terrorists"?

Myth Of The Three Ms

2011-10-20T01:11:00.000+08:00

Both Dr Fatimah Lateef (Marine Parade GRC) and Non-Constituency MP Gerald Giam of the Workers' Party made mention of elderly parents' heavy reliance on their children's Medisave accounts to settle medical bills. Despite the announcements of more hospital beds in the pipeline, such as the extra 200 beds for Kwong Wai Shiu Hospital, the affordability of healthcare remain a thorny problem to be addressed.

According to the World Health Report 2000, Singapore is ranked 6th for Overall Performance. However, if you look at Annex Table 7, "Fairness of financial contribution to health systems", Singapore is ranked 101th, sharing the dubious honor with Lebanon, in a list of 191 countries. The measurement of achievement in fairness of financial contribution has reference to a household's payment towards the health system through income taxes, value added tax (GST), social security contributions (CPF), private insurance and out-of-pocket payments. Singapore spends only 3% of the national GDP for healthcare, the balance of the burden rests on co-payment. No wonder the system has been described as potentially a "very difficult system to replicate in many other countries."

Singaporeans contribute 6.5 - 9% (up from 6 - 8% before September 2010) of their earnings to Medisave, a significant chunk of the CPF cut. According to the Ministry of Health (MOH), the average out-of-pocket hospital bill for C Class hospitalisation, after the 80 per cent subsidy, is about $ 1,097. The level of savings in MediSave as at end 2006, is $ 9,300 at the 50th percentile, but what is the MediSave account balance for the 20th percentile ? How many have less than $ 1,097 in their MediSave accounts?

Even for the better off, big bills are always a threat. To ensure that Singaporeans can afford catastrophic bills - and have to depend on a caring Government to help out - they are strongly encouraged to 'risk- pool' by taking up MediShield. The brochure says MediShield will pay up to 80% of the actual expenditure, always subject to the claimable limit. You need cash for the co-insurance and deductible, a deductible that starts at $1,000 and goes up to $3,000 for the aged who really need the financial cover. Although Medishield was conceived for longer hospital stays, the daily charges - $450 (normal ward), $900 (ICU) - are not exactly peanuts.

Medisave will not be enough for wards higher than Class B2 and private hospitals, is the explicit warning on the CPF website. For stronger protection, private medical insurance plans are recommended under the Private Medical Insurance Scheme (PMIS). From October 2005, the Central Provident Fund (CPFB) privatised its MediShield Plus plans through a Tender Evaluation Committee (TEC) chaired by Mr Gerard Ee, same guy taking his time evaluating the bloated ministerial salaries. Funny how his name pops up in all the right places.

Medifund is an endowment fund set up by the Government to help needy Singaporeans who are unable to pay for their medical expenses. SGH makes it clear Medifund help is for patients who are facing financial hardship. It is not an entitlement. Patients have to fulfil certain income criteria before the applications can be approved. In most cases, the program will only assist with 60 percent of the expense. In 2006, $39.6 million from Medifund was given to 20,000 to 30,000 patients for a record 301,126 successful applications - average payout of $132 per application. Be prepared to beg.

So has Singapore’s Healthcare policies met the needs of the people? If they have, the Government would not have bothered to announce plans to boost healthcare infrastructure and manpower in the next 5 years. The Ministry of Health is also re-looking means testing, introduced in 2009, "While continuing to target subsidies, we will rationalise and streamline the means-testing approaches." One last word on means testing in Singapore: People with no income, such as retirees or housewives, have their subsidy rate pegged to the Annual Value of their homes. The IRAS in its infinite wisdom has determined that AV is the estimated annual rent of your property if it were to be rented out. Even if you are using it as a basic roof over your head. Rationalise that.

Betting On The Bank

2011-10-19T08:53:00.003+08:00

Temasek is sitting on a paper loss. Their hoarding of 430 million of Stanchart shares (18.2% estimated at £5.9 bn) started with the purchase of a 11.5 % stake from Khoo Teck Puat's estate in 2006. Then Stanchart shares were trading at £15.24, when the exchange rate was S$2.90 to £1.

Stanchart shares are currently trading at £13.73 (yesterday's quote); the highest level reached during last year was £19.75. The British £ has also taken a pounding, diving from S$2.90 to S$2 yesterday, a stomach churning plunge of 30%. Yahoo! Finance indicates today's range will be £1.9907 - £1.9937.

So what fool (as in "fool me, hah?') would bet that the Stanchart share price would go up 27% in 3 years' time? That's a tantalising return of 9% per annum, assuming the pound-euro correlation doesn't get any worse. Reuters is reporting a sterling drop, as latest UK data adds to the gloomy outlook.

That's the premise of Temasek's of bond offer. The zero coupon bonds which mature in 2014 can be exchanged for Stanchart shares at ~~£36.29~~ S$36.29 per share during a 3 year holding period, a 27% premium over Monday's price of £14.29 on the London Stock Exchange. Or get your cash back 3 years later with zero payout. That's worse than the pathetic rate of return for FDs at local banks. What Temasek gets in return is an opportunity to offload its bad investment to a bunch of daft investors.

A remisier friend said the stock market is founded on the greater fool theory - one fool buys, and hopes for another fool to come along and pay a higher price. After the debacle of the Lehman shabby deals, is this type of business still legal? Bank of America Merrill Lynch is the lead manager and sole book runner for the bond offer.

Happiness Is Not For Everyone

2011-10-18T09:49:00.001+08:00

Conceived as a measure to relieve traffic congestion, the ERP system was a stillborn from day one. Whether one is rushing to work, or heading home for quality time with the family, the rare alternative route, if one is available at all, would be destination to another traffic jam. Take the train, and risk another hold-up, as in yesterday's instance of disruption at two sections of the MRT system. Both were attributed to train faults, probably euphemism for mechanical failure or another botched maintenance job.

So exactly how does changing the operating hours of the north bound CTE from 5.30 to 8pm, instead of till 10.30 pm on weekdays, ensure a smooth traffic flow? It doesn't. The real reason behind the scam is found in Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew's Freudian slip, that there was room to shorten the evening ERP hours in selected areas, "especially if personal benefits outweighed economic ones." Need we expound on who benefits from the ERP charges collected?

When extended evening ERP hours were introduced for the CTE in 2007 - right after GE 2006 - motorists had highlighted the move will hit those who value dinner time with the family, instead of another night out at the karaoke lounges. It took them till now - after the election setback of GE 2011 - to "give motorists greater flexibility in timing their homebound trips."

No wonder Sylvia Lim's call for more a more holistic economic indicator, one that includes happiness, fell on deaf ears. "Prosperity and progress are certainly important, but they cannot be ends in themselves. They should be the means to an end - the happiness of Singaporeans as a whole," she said. Trust the dense Cedric fool to insist that happiness is not a universal attribute, that a smile in a Bhutan is different from a smile in Singapore. By his logic, because "we are exposed to the seas, exposed to the onslaught of competition from the world, we were dealt a different deck of cards", we should wipe the smirk off our faces. Except for those laughing all the way to the bank to collect their GDP-linked bonuses.

The Take Down Of Temasek

2011-10-17T00:23:00.005+08:00

Sinestro (Mark Strong) told Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) in Martin Campbell 's Green Lantern, "The Corp is only as strong as its weakest link." The Sunday Times reported that a man who has been linked to the Temasek Review sociopolitical website was arrested last month for offences under the Parliamentary Elections Act. Dr Ong's alleged transgression was conducting an exit poll during the general election on May 7.

Little is known about the regulation about an exit poll. More people are familiar with the Cooling Off Day ruling that was breached by the Kate Spade MP from Marine Parade GRC and her mysterious administrator friend. Latter was supposedly given a police warning but, unlike the accused doctor, her picture was never published in the mainstream media.

Australian company UMR Research also conducted a pre-election poll between May 3 and May 5. The survey findings were published by news wire agencies such as Associated Press, Reuters and Deutsche Presse-Agentur before the polling stations in Singapore closed at 8pm on May 7. UMR spokesperson David Utting claimed that it did not run afoul of the Singapore laws, "UMR has not 'published or caused to be published' this opinion poll in Singapore...it was released in Germany. AP published it." AP, Reuters and Deutsche Presse-Agentur apparently have not been invited for coffee by the police to help in their investigations.

Professor Ang Peng Hwa, director of the Singapore Internet Research Centre at the Nanyang Technological University, said that the law was "very broad". Political risk consultant Azhar Ghani noted that the issue does not lie in whether the poll was done by an overseas company but on the law which is "silent" on where the publication of survey results could take place: While election advertising regulations specifically mention the Internet, the law on election surveys does not, Mr Azhar noted.

Like the police investigation of Tin Pei Ling, we will probably never get to the bottom of the story. Especially since PM Lee appointed her as a member of the Home Affairs and Law Government Parliamentary Committee (GPC) while the investigations were still in progress. Frankly, most of us don't give a damn - she will serve as a constant reminder of the the tumour in the system. What pricks our curiousity is whether the doctor's troubles have anything to do with the take down of Temasek Review. The scant information available is that the site is located overseas.

The Pension Report Card

2011-10-14T00:15:00.001+08:00

Thanks to input from a reader (anon@October 13, 2011 4:03 PM), we know how Singapore is ranked according to the Global Pension Index 2011. The Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index compares retirement income systems around the world and rates them based on their adequacy, sustainability and integrity.

The following table shows how Singapore fared when compared to 15 other countries:

The Singaporean index value fell from 59.6 in 2010 to 56.7 in 2011 due to a reduction in each of the three sub-indexes, including "Adequacy", which carries a weighting of 40 percent . The Adequacy sub-index represents the benefits that are currently being provided, such as "Benefits", "Savings", "Tax Support", "Benefit Design", and "Growth Assets", all of which must sound Greek to the average Singaporean. The people who are enjoying these benefits seem to be in the top income tax bracket.

The report attributed the fall in index value to 56.7 in 2011 to several reasons: a lower net household saving rate, reduced pension coverage and the effect of some new investment rules. Let's hope the last bit does not refer the games that GIC and Temasek plays with our CPF.

Grade C (index value 50–65) is given to a system that has some good features, but also has major risks and/or shortcomings that should be addressed. Without these improvements, its efficacy and/or long-term sustainability are questionable.

Interestingly, mention is made of common challenges in flaky retirement income systems which include "Reducing the leakage from the retirement savings system prior to an individual’s retirement". Oh yes, we recognise the leak to the HDB coffers, but how to plug it?

Here's how the country stands in the overall scores:

1 Netherlands - 77.9
2 Australia - 75.0
3 Switzerland - 72.7
4 Sweden - 72.6
5 Canada - 69.1
6 United Kingdom - 66.0
7 Chile - 64.9
8 Poland - 58.6
9 Brazil - 58.4
10 United States - 58.1
11 Singapore - 56.7
12 France - 54.4
13 Germany - 54.2
14 Japan - 43.9
15 India - 43.4
16 China - 42.5

It looks like the Swiss standard of living is still a long way to go.

Down And Out In Singapore And Other Countries

2011-10-13T08:45:00.006+08:00

You've paid your taxes, your CPF contributions, completed your National Service obligations, yet you perennially worry about ending up like one of those who can't afford to retire. According to the latest CPF Life Report, about 60 per cent of Active CPF Members will have only $67,000 or less in 2013. That's less than the current CPF Minimum Sum of $131,000, money barely sufficient to tide you over the evening years.

Suppose you are old, single, and have no income or property.

In Australia you get an Age Pension after age 65 of A$689.00 per fortnight (approx S$1,700 per month).

A Pension Supplement of A$58.40 per fortnight to offset GST, Pharmaceutical, Telephone, Utilities expenses.

And a Pensioner Concession Card that entitles you to:
- reductions on property and water rates
- reductions on energy bills
- a telephone allowance
- reduced fares on public transport
- reductions on motor vehicle registration
- free rail journeys

In Canada you get the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and The Old Age Security pension (or OAS or OAS-GIS).

The Canada Pension Plan (CPP) is a contributory, earnings-related social insurance program. In 2011, the prescribed contribution rate is 4.95% of a salaried worker's gross employment income between $3,500 and $48,300, up to a maximum contribution of $2,217.60. The employer matches the employee contribution, effectively doubling the contributions of the employee. When the contributor reaches the normal retirement age of 65, the CPP provides regular pension benefit payments to the contributor, calculated as 25% of the average contributory maximum over the entire working life of a contributor.

The Old Age Security pension (or OAS or OAS-GIS) is a taxable monthly social security payment available to most Canadians 65 years of age or older. As of July, 2011, the basic amount is C$533.70 per month.

The Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) is for low income pensioners who earn little or no other income. The Old Age Security is supplemented by a Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), which is considered non-taxable income. As of July 2006, the maximum supplement for a single individual with no other source of income is C$597.53.

For a guy with no CPP, the OAS-GIS would pay out C$533.70 plus C$597.53 (approx S$1,300 per month).

Sets you thinking, doesn't it?

Of course it's all paid for by the taxpayers. In Australia only those earning above A$6,000 ~~a month~~ pay tax (starts at 15% rate), in Canada combined federal/provincial taxes kick in at 9.9% for the first C$20,000 (annual income). But comprehensive medicare is thrown in for free. Baby deliveries are F.O.C. at public hospitals in Australia. In Singapore, on top of income tax and the regressive GST, 36% is put away for CPF every month. Why are we still fearful of getting sick at old age?

The Ministry of Health is blowing a trumpet about its vision to "enable all Singaporeans to live well, live long and enjoy peace of mind." You may ask the Minister a simple question, "Where's the beef, Mr Gan?"

Hang On To Your Day Job

2011-10-12T08:56:00.001+08:00

Responding to a question about what Singapore could do to narrow its income gap, Lee Kuan said in October 2009, "'Never mind your Gini coefficient. If you don't have a job you get zero against those with jobs." The 4th year social sciences and business student from the Singapore Management University had asked him what Singapore could do to help its bottom 20 per cent.

True to his plans, Ministry of Manpower (MOM) data released yesterday showed that while middle incomes rose more than 10 percent over the past decade, the bottom feeders at the 20 percentile stagnated. Even the statisticians had to admit the Gini coefficient was "high", comparable to Hong Kong, New York and Los Angeles, cities which attract movie stars and other high flyers. But don't blame Gong Li or Jet Li (no relation) for picking up a red passport, focus instead on the multi-farious government promises that were supposed to help the poor. As in the President's pledge to "seek high quality, inclusive growth that benefits all citizens, not just the lucky few". Lee didn't even bother to attend the opening of parliament to hear that line, he's off on another high flying junket to receive some legacy award. Lucky him. Doubtless, Abe Lincoln must be rolling in his grave.

On the jobs front, although unemployment rate was at 3.1 percent, jobless Singaporeans aged 50 and above stayed unemployed for longer periods - 12 weeks, compared to the average 8 weeks for all citizens. The MOM report said they were too discouraged to pound the pavement on another futile job search.

Ex-minister George Yeo, 57, unemployed since May 2011, should be delirious and jumping up and down like Tom Cruise did on Oprah's sofa. He just beat the odds and landed a Senior Advisor appointment with Malaysian conglomerate Kuok Brothers. Strange enough, he's not popping the champagne bottle yet, but played it down as "an informal arrangement." As in guanxi, the Chinese euphemism for quid pro quo. He said, "I'll join private sector next year. Not decided yet what or where." Which is curious, considering that the Kuok Group, run by "sugar king" Robert Kuok, dealing in chemical, scrap steel and fertilisers, is as private sector as they come. Unless they have plans for government projects, and Yeo is fearful of compromising his Official Secrets Act obligations. The guy was minister for information and the arts, health, trade and industry, and foreign affairs - surely he must be good for something. Unless it was pure wayang all along.

The Dagger Behind The Smiles

2011-10-11T09:32:00.002+08:00

District Judge Lim Tse Haw must have pinched himself to make sure he had not dozed off and started to hear weird stuff. The businessman in the dock was claiming that he was physically abused by the police for 4 hours. Even at Abu Ghraib, the tormentors didn't use soiled underwear to cover the heads of detainees.

Torture, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture (an advisory measure of the UN General Assembly) is any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession. The motive for torture can also be for the sadistic gratification of the torturer, as in the Moors murders carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in Greater Manchester, England. Human rights supporters argue that, under torture, a man will confess to anything.

The judge's reaction was to recommend that prosecution reassign another investigation officer (IO) for the case. Judge also granted the prosecution's application to remand the accused for another week. One can imagine the eager boys in blue salivating in anticipation of another opportunity to work on the prisoner again.

The words of the accused's wife has been heard countless times before, "Don't you think that he deserves a fair treatment? He is innocent until proven guilty." Why is it that the presumption of innocence, sometimes referred by the Latin "Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat" (the principle that one is considered innocent until proven guilty) such a difficult concept for the law enforcers?

The police refused to comment on the grounds that the case is before the courts, except saying, "If criminal offences are disclosed, police would not hesitate to bring criminal charges against he errant officer." And then immediately proceeded to point the threatening dagger in the opposite direction, warning that "appropriation action will be taken against anyone who makes false allegations."

The bard rightly pointed out in Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 3:
"Where we are, There's daggers in men's smiles"

We Should Be So Grateful

2011-10-10T08:51:00.003+08:00

This has to be a uniquely Singapore social phenomenon. After jacking up public transport costs, the Government attempted to soften their heartless image by offering to give away 200,000 vouchers for $20 coupons. Steve Jobs is said to have walked 6 miles for a free meal at a Hare Krishna kitchen, but to date only 92,000 applications for these free transport vouchers have been approved. It beggars to ask, why is the take up rate so pathetic?

The generosity of the Government was also publicised in the Ministry for Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) offer of help for Eldercare subsidies. A targeted 5,600 households are supposed to benefit from a 25 percent subsidy to offset day care and home help costs for the elderly. The take up rate for this scheme has yet to be reported.

A quick check with the Eldercare Service Locator at the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) website shows that most of the centres are "Voluntary Welfare Organisations not under Government Subsidies". Those that qualify for subsidies are under the "MOH Purview". Which presumably means subject to the much detested MOH Means Test that Minister Khaw Boon Wan said will not be introduced during the 2006 electoral hustings, but quietly implemented after the election was over.

For those looking for a leg up with a nursing home, there are other hoops to jump through. Patients have to be graded Category I through IV, using following sample parameters to assess qualification for assistance:

Mobility dependency
Feeding dependency
Grooming and Bathing dependency
Toileting dependency
Cognitive or mental issues
Nursing care needs

The patient has to be classified Category III or IV before financial help is even discussed.

The transport vouchers amount to $4 million, the MCYS effort is estimated at $5 million. These are big numbers for those in dire need of financial assistance to offset the $300 to $500 per month charges at the 22 day care centres that presumably qualify for Government subsidy. Nursing homes charge more, as much as $2,000 a month. Compare the largess set aside for the citizens to the $4 million paid to a Mr Tan annually, and another $4 million budgeted for the upkeep of the Istana. What was the descriptive used by Mrs Goh Chok Tong? Peanuts.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

2011-10-08T10:26:00.001+08:00

An Advance Medical Directive (AMD) is a legal document that you sign in advance to inform the doctor treating you (in the event you become terminally ill and unconscious) that you do not want any extraordinary life-sustaining treatment to be used to prolong your life. The law allows Singaporeans who wish to make an advance medical directive to do so. The AMD Act was passed in Parliament in May 1996.

Dr Lee Wei Ling, director of the National Neuroscience Institute, told The Straits Times why she was among the first to sign the Advance Medical Directive, "When I say I will carry on until I cannot carry on any more, I have no intention of lingering." According to her, dad also signed an AMD years ago, but said not to tell her mom. Although some doctors took pains to stress that the AMD is not the same as euthanasia whereby one omits treatment or gives treatment with the intention to kill off a patient, the practical reality of cost to sustain life is obviously in the equation when the Government is not prepared to pick up the bill. Not everybody in Singapore can afford round the clock nursing to care for someone diagnosed as terminally ill.

But what the fish is the Office of the Public Guardian trying to achieve with the "Lasting Power of Attorney"? The Mental Capacity Act, which took effect in March last year, allows people to appoint a third party to make decisions for them "if and when they become unable to make decisions for themselves". The OPG is tasked to protect vulnerable people who have lost their ability to take care of themselves as a result of intellectual disability or problems associated with illness and old age, such as dementia. Apparently 1 in 12 Singaporeans aged 65 and above is likely to develop dementia by 2020 - which sets you wondering what is the mental state of an 88 year old. With this piece of paper, authority and responsibility is passed to the nominated caregiver. Which means Ah Kong can be kicked to a dump in Batam, Bintang or Johore even if the old geezer wants spend his last days, and last penny, at a resort style nursing home in the Bahamas, or marry Anna Nicole Smith like the elderly oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall did at age 89. But if grandpa has zilch in his CPF, do you think his kin will want to be legally committed? It's probably another variant of the Maintenance of Parents Act, which provides for Singapore residents aged 60 years old and above, who are unable to subsist on their own, to claim maintenance from their children instead of the State. If you are looking for Guaranteed Income Supplement for seniors like the Old Age Security (OAS) program, you'll have to move to Canada.

Acting Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports Chan Chun Sing decided to lead by example by appointing his wife to take charge of his welfare should he turn cuckoo prematurely. Maybe he is in a better position to recognise his own mental state. Which kind of explains his televised antics at the Tanjong Pagar nomination center in May.

I sign off here, and I'm set for life, right?

Remembering Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T08:51:00.002+08:00

Click to see the many facets of the man

While the world mourns the passing away of Steve Jobs (1955-2011), the man who put together the breadboard for the Apple computer was Steve Wozniak. Wozniak teamed up with Jobs, whom he met in the early 1970s, with Wozniak playing the role of the tech wiz and Jobs the marketing guru.

Their first product, the Apple I computer, had no provision for internal expansion cards. The Apple I was purely a hobbyist machine, a US$25 microprocessor (MOS 6502) on a single-circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM and a 40-character by 24-row display controller. It was similar to the Altair 8800, the world's first commercially available microcomputer, except that the Altair's expansion cards enabled it to be attached to a computer terminal and be programmed in BASIC.

One could argue that the Apple story is a triumph of marketing over technology. John Sculley had the Newton, the first-ever Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) in 1992, but it was Steve Jobs' genius who made iPhone the product of choice. Even Wintel diehards will have to admit Steve is a hard act to follow.

Exit Plans

2011-10-06T09:54:00.007+08:00

When the boss asks you to surrender the key to the executive toilet, you have to be real daft not to get the hint. The euphemism used for Lee Kuan Yew was "to facilitate leadership renewal in the party", a tad prettier than the "make room for personal priorities" excuse for Hsieh Fu Hua's departure as President of Temasek Holdings. Hsieh, rumoured to succeed PM Lee's wife as chief honcho, was in office for only 17 months. Lee has been at the Central Executive Committee for donkey years.

Also stepping down from the PAP CEC are Goh Chok Tong, Lim Boon Heng, Wong Kan Seng, George Yeo and Lim Hwee Hua. Former Potong Pasir MP Chiam See commented, "These are all very senior ministers who are stepping down. This marks the end of the Lee Kuan Yew era." Well, not exactly. The lady has yet to collect her CPF. Lim Hwee Hua slided into Parliament via the Marine Parade GRC route in 1997 and joined the CEC in 2003. She was obviously the collateral damage for George Yeo's Waterloo at Aljunied. Lim become woman minister on 1 April 2009, when she was made Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office and Second Minister for Finance and Second Minister for Transport. Lim is not the first woman minister to be booted out by the electorate. That dubious honour goes to Dr. Seet Ai Mee, Minister of State at the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Community Development, who was defeated by Ling How Doong at the 1991 polls. Some said she was brought down by the handshake with a fishmonger. Dr Seet said it was a pork seller. Whatever.

No tears will be shed for Lim Boon Heng (the original cry baby), Wong Kan Seng, Goh Chok Tong or George Yeo. Lim Kim San once told a young banker during a moment of candour, "One thing about the PAP, they take care of their own. If not for them, I'll be sleeping on the streets."

But who's taking care of the people of Singapore? Among the names tossed up to fill the vacancies, one of them is none other than the "kee chiu" general Chan Chun Seng. Yup, the guy who said our country won't last longer than the Lanfang Republic ("states of Singapore’s size rarely survived beyond 100 years"). Which means those who signed up for the overpriced HDB BTO flats might never get to see the end of the 99-year lease. Which way to the exit door?