Who to vote for?

Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Wong Kan Seng, says the loss of a few Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) will severely weaken the current cabinet.  He also says that leadership renewal will be impeded if the new People’s Action Party (PAP) candidates who are being introduced in 2011 as members in the PAP’s various GRC teams are not elected.

He should know, I think; he is a member in the party that saw fit to introduce the GRC scheme in 1988.  At that time, the ruling party stated that the scheme was being implemented in order to enshrine minority representation in Parliament (at least one member in a GRC must be a member of the Malay, Indian or another minority community in Singapore).  In addition, it was considered that a smaller number of larger constituencies might be able to manage Singapore’s public housing estates rather more economically than a larger number of smaller constituencies.

Whether the scheme has worked to achieve what it was supposed to achieve remains open to debate.  (Critics argue that, rather than working to enshrine minority representation in parliament, it has served to make Joe and Josephine Average-Singaporean more conscious of racial differences than they were previously.)  A more significant observation regarding the scheme seems to me to be that, as the DPM has openly admitted, it forces voters to consider whether they might, by voting for whomsoever they happen to consider might manage their local issues most effectively, be depriving the incoming government of a vital team member. 

Meanwhile, given that it appears highly likely that the PAP will be returned to power yet again, it’s the Opposition parties that are busy reassuring voters the PAP is big enough to withstand the loss of one or two incumbent ministers, if not five or six.  And it’s the PAP that’s telling them the opposite – i.e. that it might not be able to govern so effectively in the event that one or more GRCs should fail to return a PAP team to parliament.   

Interestingly, it is candidates standing for parties other than the PAP that are also reassuring voters that the ballot in Singapore really is secret and that the future PAP government won’t stoop to persecuting voters who didn’t choose to vote for it.

Shouldn’t it be the PAP that is seeking to reassure the voting public on these two matters?  Minister Mentor, Lee Kuan Yew, has tended to fend off criticism to the effect that Singapore’s democracy isn’t ‘a proper democracy’ by admitting that the democratic system that’s been developed in Singapore is indeed quite different to any democratic system that has been developed elsewhere, and that Singapore is better off as a result of that.  Meanwhile, it seems to me the PAP might have fared rather better over the long term had it dropped the idea that Singapore is supposed to be a democracy several decades ago and amended the constitution to reflect that it prefers to be the World’s most efficient and essentially inclusive single party state.