Transforming The PAP (2)

Assistant Professor of Law at the Singapore Management University Mr. Eugene Tan has described Minister Mentor (MM) Lee Kuan Yew and Senior Minister (SM) Mr. Goh Chok Tong’s retirement as cabinet ministers as ‘a magnanimous act of statesmanship and a powerful expression of humility (Today, Monday 16^th May, 2011)’.

Previously, in a comment in reply to the Sunday Times, MM Lee had said ‘Both former PMs withdrawing from the government will indicate that it is not government as usual, and that the PM (MM Lee’s own son, Mr. Lee Hsien Loong) can and will revise and revamp his policies going into this new situation’.

MM Lee would not be MM Lee if he had been able to resist the temptation to add ‘It is vital to avoid a situation were people vote to have more Opposition for Opposition’s sake’, of course.  What matters is that, even without that addition, the people of Singapore should be made to understand that the People’s Action Party (PAP) really does mean to implement some changes in during this next term of Government.

What changes and why?  An article at www.theonlinecitizen.com, ‘What exactly is the change in PAP’s promise?’ suggests that ‘In the 2011 general election, the people voted for change, not just in communication, but in policy.’  I’m not so sure they did, however; one could even go so far as to argue that 60.1% of them voted in favour of having things remain pretty much the same as ever, in fact.  The problem writer, Mr. Howard Lee, has so nearly but not quite put his finger on then isn’t whether the PAP can amend its policies in such a way that can make them appear any more attractive to the 39.9% of people who voted against the PAP but whether it can do so without making them appear any less attractive to the 60.1% of people who voted for it.

‘The PAP has forgotten that the key crux of discontentment is no longer that the PAP does not listen, but rather that the PAP has gone overboard in pretending to listen,’ says Mr. Lee.  Once again, I would argue that the PAP has been listening and evolving in recent years; it only looks as if it hasn’t because the people of Singapore have managed to evolve themselves even more rapidly.  As recently as 10 years ago, the bulk of the griping one heard was covert, discernable if you went out of your way to deliberately listen for it and – and this is most important! – were able to appear as a ‘safe repository’ for people’s complaints.  Neither the PAP nor any government department was perceived to be a safe repository and, let’s face it, 75.3% of the vote in the 2001 election does sound like a fairly convincing mandate.