Mind the Gap

There’s an all new cartoon strip in Singapore, courtesy of those clever people at www.gov.sg.  Scroll down the page to find the heading ‘features’ on the right hand side.  The Hows icon looks a lot like the Under One Roof icon. 

For those who can’t be bothered to view the strips for themselves, the Hows are a family of five that’s comprised of a mother and father (55+ years old), two grown up daughters (of unspecified ages as yet, although one of them is married and already pregnant) and one son-in-law.

Thus far, through their various interactions with one another, the Hows have served to remind Singaporeans that ‘Flat buyers and sellers have different interests’, and ‘Re-employment is a win-win for both employers and employees’, amongst other things.  A. finds the strip rather too ‘in your face’, and imagines its appearance in newspapers might prove counterproductive.  I, meanwhile, am fascinated to notice the extent to which the Hows might be seen to represent not exactly the cream of the Singaporean society but a family of essentially contented HDB-dwellers, classic Joe and Josephine Average Singaporeans if ever there were any.

Young Melissa How and her husband Peter might have needed to moderate their expectations in order to be able to buy a home of their own, for example, and at least they were able to buy a home.  Elsie Tan might have needed to retrain in order to find herself a job, and yet she rose to become ‘one of the 100 model workers honoured by the labour movement’ in the strip that appeared just two days after the one in which she first came up with the idea of going back to work.  Are there really ‘enough flats for everyone’, as the caption for April 14^th’s cartoon says there are?  Is re-employment always a win-win for both employers and employees?  The problem, it seems to me, is that, even if the government could prove these statements to be true, the real Mr and Mrs Average Singaporean might tell them, ‘We’re sorry, and we don’t want to stay active and save more for our retirements; what we want, actually, to be able to retire.  And we don’t want to have to moderate our expectations in order to be able to buy a home either; what we want are dream homes and quickly!’

In an episode of the British comedy classic, Fawlty Towers, a disgruntled guest describes the view from her window as ‘Not good enough’.  ‘What did you expect to see out of a Torquay hotel window?’ asks an incredulous Basil Fawlty.  ‘The hanging gardens of Babylon?  Herds of wilderbeests sweeping majestically across the plains?’  The PAP government in Singapore might be forgiven for feeling equally bewildered when it hears that Singaporean’s are less than 100% satisfied with their lot.  Hasn’t it provided the populace with 10s of 1000s of new homes since it first came to power?  Hasn’t it guaranteed that their savings can grow faster when invested in its Central Provident Fund (CPF) than they can in any plain or simple bank account?  Its youngest candidate in the upcoming election, Tin Pei Ling, has been just about hung, drawn and quartered on YouTube for describing the cost of education in Singapore as ‘very low’ and, as far as I can make out, university tuition fees at least really are quite low in Singapore as compared to those in either the US or the UK.

What might Singaporeans have been promised, I wonder, that should have left them feeling more disappointed than grateful?  And, as long as their standard of living appears to them less than it should be, how can the PAP be expected to catch up the difference for them?