Does PAP Administrator Want Khaw Boon Wan Out of Parliament??

In the latest saga, Tin Pei Ling allegedly scoffed at rival Nicole Seah who cried during a rally speech in a facebook entry. She reportedly posted, ‎”OooOooOoooh so that’s REALLY what happened? Wow, I think tears in parliament is worse than ANYTHING ELSE!”

Tin has since clarified that it was Denise He, one of her administrators who had posted the comments accidentally even though some remain unconvinced by her explanation.

We know, of course, that Nicole Seah was not in parliament, but the point is quite clear. “Tin Pei Ling” (here and for the rest of this post, I use inverted commas to represent whoever it is that posted using Tin Pe Ling’s account) is saying that Nicole Seah does not deserve a parliamentary seat because she cried during the rally, an act that that she could have taken to be indicative of weakness.

I wonder, though, what “Tin Pei Ling” thinks of Khaw Boon Wan who “choked back tears when he described how residents had been concerned about his welfare when he dropped by their homes” and spoke with “his voice wavering.” (Straits Times, May 3 2011, “Khaw: Residents have become personal friends“)

Does “Tin Pei Ling” think that Khaw, too, is worse than anything else?

I wonder also what “Tin Pei Ling” thinks of Kuan Yew who shed tears when he announced that Singapore was no longer part of Malaysia. Or what she thinks of Lim Boon Heng who cried and said that there was no groupthink in the PAP.

George Yeo’s Promise to Transform PAP a Worry

Let’s examine George Yeo’s promise to transform the PAP from the within. If his team at Aljunied does win the election, we can say that there are 2 main possibilities:

1. George Yeo’s team fulfills the promise.

2. George Yeo’s team does not fulfill the promise. 

Let’s see, then, if either scenario is necessarily good.

 

1. George Yeo’s team fulfills the promise.

We are not too sure how long it would be before the promise is fulfilled, but let’s just imagine that the promise is fulfilled after some time. And this period of time may not be short.

PAP voters who likes stability and those who buy into the idea that there is not enough talent in Singapore to have more than one strong political party or A Team may start worrying.

During the transition, there will be instability. We may see people being weeded. We may see people quitting. Or perhaps the people will remain, but it would take quite a bit of internal conflict solving before everything is ironed out. This is not at all going to be stable for the party and if there is virtually no opposition in the parliament, it may basically mean an unstable government too. If there are opposition MPs, they will actually be a force that will force the PAP to stay more united since they need to be united against a common “enemy”.

For those who buy into the talent insufficiency theory, if key personnel leave the PAP in the process of transformation, would the PAP not become a party with fewer talents since the new “talents” may not match the current ones (who are already the best of the best in Singapore)?

Then what happens to Singapore after the PAP is transformed? Will the new PAP be the way Singaporeans want it to be? What if it is closer to meeting Singaporeans’ expectations but still does not quite meet our expectations? Would it not be good to have enough opposition MPs around to give them an impetus to come closer to meeting our expectations? This is especially so if we simply see that even if the PAP is transformed, it may not be transformed permanently. What if it were to revert to its old ways? Again, the need to have opposition presence in the Parliament is important to prevent this.

Bottomline: The transformation of the PAP should ideally be carried out when we have a sizeable number of opposition MPs.

2. George Yeo’s team does not fulfill the promise, i.e. the PAP is not transformed.

This may not mean that the team does not try to fulfill the promise. There are two possibilities:

(a) Perhaps they try and fail, so the promise is not fulfilled.

(b) Or perhaps they do not even try to begin with.

Nevertheless, the scenario is basically the same for both (a) and (b): the PAP is not transformed; it remains the way it is.

It is quite likely, if the PAP is not transformed, that voters will no longer have the chance to vote for a different team in the next General Election. If the PAP is not transformed, it will still use the same old tactics to fix the opposition and weaken them. They may continue importing new citizens that tend to support them.

In fact, if the PAP is not transformed, perhaps voters may not be able to vote for George Yeo and his team in the next General Election even if the opposition is able to contest the PAP. This is because if George Yeo tries to transform the PAP and fails, he fails because there are forces that do not want to change. And these forces may not be happy with him for trying to change and may kick him out of the party.

We have to remember that, if the report by Today is accurate, George Yeo is promising that his team will be a force from within the party that will attempt to transform it. If the entire PAP is unanimous about changing, there would actually be no need for his team to attempt to transform the party since the members would all be in agreement when it comes to transformation and will go forward together. In this case, it wouldn’t matter if George Yeo’s team does not win the Election, so he claim that his team needs a strong mandate in order to be the voice of change in the party would not be valid.

If we assume that Georgeo Yeo made the promise in earnest, then we have to see it as an indication that the PAP could possibly splinter into two factions. If this happens, we cannot be sure how the PAP is going to govern Singapore. We need enough opposition MPs to make sure that they do a proper job.

Actually, if the promise that the PAP will be better is not going to be fulfilled, there is even less reason to vote for George Yeo’s team or the PAP in general.

Bottomline: If the PAP is not going to change, it is important to vote for the opposition now to at least pressure the men in white not to go too far.

Conclusion

Whether the promise is going to be fulfilled or not, it is a good idea to vote for the opposition.

Given that after the promise to change, we have the PAP distributing flyers smearing the Workers’ Party just before cooling day, leaving the Workers’ Party with little time to defend itself (a move which has long speculated to be the purpose of the cooling day law), is George Yeo’s team showing any signs of true change?

In fact, voters cannot really tell if George Yeo is making the promise as himself or if he is “nominated” as the one to make the promise because he is one of the PAP minister-grade politicians who have received the least flak during the Election campaign.

Ironically, George Yeo’s promise to change the PAP may itself indicate the PAP’s unwillingness to change. It is a variation of the old PAP rhetoric that there is no need for opposition in the Parliament and that the PAP is alone sufficient for all purposes, even “oppositional” forces.

It is a cliché by now, but vote wisely.

Give Yourself, not the PAP, a Chance

Often, when I tell people which party I will be voting for, I get told that that I should not divulge it because it is secret. And I would start clarifying that the secrecy of the vote is not a requirement for the voter to keep his/her vote secret but rather an assurance that the vote is confidential unless the voter chooses to divulge it. Yet, some are unconvinced, perhaps because there is so much justifiable and/or unjustifiable fear in Singapore that it does not even seem possible that the confidentiality of the vote is guaranteed and the guarantee is interpreted as a repressive or restrictive mechanism instead. Of course, it does not help that the clause is often recited together with an injunction to vote—voting is mandatory—that is by no means universal.

Perhaps the irony of the secret vote is but a symptom of a larger problem with socio-political domain in Singapore. I know politically aware people who are unhappy with the PAP’s policies and criticize the PAP for its tactics at maintaining its political hegemony, which is not at all anything surprising. Except I also know that some of these people are voting for the PAP, even with the prospects of 87:0 after the Election tomorrow. It is lamentable that the PAP has more voters than supporters and wins one election after another even when it lacks supporters, even when it is not necessarily even preferred over the opposition.

It becomes interesting, then, to ask what it is about Singapore under the PAP that makes for transcendental ludicrousness. Singaporeans have in recent years become more aware of the drawbacks of the PAP’s policies. In fact, many are not simply aware but are actually experiencing the drawbacks firsthand. Yet, it does appear that despite new awareness, old habits and old assumptions die hard.

There is, for instance, a rather strange belief about the PAP and political stability. Sure, Singapore has, for a long time since the PAP came to power, not been politically unstable. But why do people seem to think that there will be political instability if there were 30 opposition MPs in the Parliament? Why do people seem to think that there would be political instability if the PAP were no longer the government? Even if Singapore is not the most democratic place in the world, it has the structures of a democracy in place and there is no reason that Singapore would become politically unstable with the presence of opposition MPs. It is not as if there is going to be a civil war the moment the opposition becomes the dominant party instead; if there is going to be one, wouldn’t it be the PAP (now the opposition) who starts it even though it is currently being praised for bringing about stability. It is also not as if there is any opposition party that harbors aggression towards other countries and voting them into power could lead to war. People simply cannot understand that a change in the make-up of the government is not political instability. It is just change. And change takes place even if the PAP is the only party left in the Parliament.

One of the craziest reasons that has been given for voting for the PAP: you know they are going to win (or “You know the opposition won’t win”). So? Conversations will usually end here or the subject is changed. It is as if the predictability of the Election results is a reason to perpetuate its predictability. In Aljunied, there are voters who will repent (to borrow Kuan Yew’s vocabulary) by voting for the PAP before they have even sinned. Which begs the question of whether repentance is even necessary. Similar reasons given for voting for the PAP include “Everyone also vote for the PAP one lah” or the patently preposterous but certainly enlightening “I don’t like their policies but it has become a habit to vote for them.”

It is unintentionally enlightening. People are starting to exfoliate the dry, coarse skin of the PAP’s policies and even rhetoric. But a greater change is necessary. Beyond the skin, people need to recognize how the PAP has wired their minds and make an effort rewire them. Unfortunately, five decades of political hegemony during which the PAP is virtually god has left a large portion of the population unwilling to think and lazy to invest any effort to recognize the conditions that have constructed their worldviews and undying habits. In other words, uncertainty seems like a fearsome zone than the increasingly uncomfortable comfort zone to which they have been inured. This is perhaps the greatest success of the PAP. It is difficult to win hearts and minds and keep them, but it does not matter at all if you could colonize them and shape their landscapes.

No doubt, Lee Hsien Loong has used the word sorry in his speech (and that is, I remind the reader, different from saying sorry). No doubt, George Yeo has said that the PAP needs to transform itself and review the way it governs. But even if we assume naively that the effort to the truly sincere, there is no way to tell if the PAP will see what it has got wrong. In fact, it is more likely than not that the PAP will ultimately rely on new indicators to afford alienating or offending Singaporeans, but will continue to be the same in essence. In other words, it can well become stronger without becoming better. There is little indication that the PAP will change the main thrust of its economic policies. There is even less indication that the PAP will change liberate politics or retreat from its obsession with engineering society. There’s no indication that the PAP will tell the Straits Times to maintain journalistic integrity instead of being biased towards it. Is it possible that the PAP is wired in such a way that it is unable to change even when it realizes the need to, just like the voters who are dislike the PAP but vote for the PAP? The PAP has so thoroughly engineered Singapore that it could well be a victim of itself.

Singapore needs change. But, first, the people have to want change. And show it.

We have seen members of the PAP shed tears and express regret. If we assist them in eradicating the opposition from the parliament, we could well be the ones to shed tears and express regret in time to come. For PAP-voting readers who may just have that little tinge of indecision: Vote for the opposition. Vote to oppose the PAP or vote to oppose the self that has never managed to manifest itself in you.