When bar-top dancing turns into a morality tale

Yet it must speak volumes about Singapore that here, it IS an issue. It is so big an issue that the Prime Minister, no less, keeps peppering his speeches with references to it. He spoke about it in July, at the Remaking Singapore Thank-you lunch (see my article Bungee jumping gets you nowhere) and on August 17, he mentioned it again in the National Day Rally.

One of the points I made in the aforementioned essay is that bungee jumping and bar-top dancing have been imbued with such significance only because, frankly, that’s all the liberalisation we have really seen. It is the absence of any substantive loosening up, particularly in the political and civil society realm, that gives, by default, so much significance to these two "extreme sports". To put it bluntly, if not for these two, the Prime Minister would have nothing to talk about except economic gloom. That’s why they are mentioned ad nauseum.

But now, it seems, both the Prime Minister and I may have spoken too soon. I wrote, in the second paragraph of "Bungee jumping gets you nowhere" that "Bar hours have been extended" – another tweaking of the rules related to the general relaxation of entertainment regulations that included bar-top dancing. Earlier this week, I read a newspaper report that revealed that in truth, no bar has yet been allowed to open 24 hours.

When the relaxation of bar hours was first announced, there was a qualifier that it would only be for bars not located in residential areas. On the face of it, it is quite sensible.

In the recent news story, the reporter suggested that the most likely reason no bar had yet been successful in their application for extended hours was that the police had not decided which area was residential and which was not.

In response, the operator of Centro, a well-known dance club that is all gay on Sunday nights, pointed out that his club was smack in the financial district, and there’s hardly a residential building for a mile around. And the authorities still couldn’t accede to his application. 

I can think of two possible scenarios behind both these constipations.

The more exasperating explanation would be this: the middle levels of the bureaucracy are punctilious about existing rules, but can’t see the big picture and are all at sea when change is called for. They can’t follow through when a new policy is announced. They either don’t have the vision or the guts to make other necessary changes to give full substance to the new policy. Every little detail has to be referred up for a decision.

The minister says bars in non-residential areas can open 24 hours. And what does the bureaucrat do? He goes to this supervisor, who goes to the director who goes to the minister to ask the hapless chief to define, block by block, which is residential and which is not.

Until that happens, well, nothing happens.

The more sinister explanation is something we see in many other countries, so let’s not think it can’t happen in Singapore: it is that of a bureaucrat setting out to undercut the minister’s policy. The minister says bar-top dancing is to be allowed. The bureaucrat dusts off an obsolescent rule to crack down on it, or at least to check on it more often and thus take the fun out of it. The minister says bars can open 24 hours if such and such a condition is fulfilled. The bureaucrat drags his feet working out the details of the condition.

And why would a bureaucrat do that? A little story that W B Kelley recounted [1] on SiGNeL, the gay mailing list, would be instructive:

Quote:

This reminds me of some Chicago history. In 1961, Illinois became the first U.S. state to repeal its sodomy law, which prohibited same-sex intercourse either in public or in private. Yet for years afterward, Chicago police wishing to arrest gay men continued to charge them under the law against "public indecency," which purports to punish sexual activity committed in public view. Under that law, the sexual activity need not be intercourse; it may simply be sexually oriented caressing.

Into the 1970s, police automatically treated same-sex dancing as "public indecency," even though they obviously didn't treat different-sex dancing in the same way. They also often invented testimony that an arrestee had lewdly touched another bar customer or an arresting officer (which would be public indecency), or that the arrestee had offered or agreed to accept money for sex (which would be prostitution, still a crime). In fact, a 1966 newspaper article quoted the chief of the Chicago police vice squad as saying that the sodomy law may have been repealed but he was going to enforce God's law.

    -- W B Kelley. 
       Excerpt of an email posting to 
       SiGNEL, 22 Aug 2003

Lower level officers can bring their own agenda into their work, as the above illustrates.

* * * * *

In fact, as Singaporeans, we don’t need to hear about Chicago. We should all be acutely aware of our very own morality tale called Suzhou Industrial Park.

Let me digress here for the benefit of non-Singaporeans and give a bit of background: the Singapore government invested lots of money -- how much has never, as far as I know, been publicly disclosed -- in Suzhou town, near Shanghai, trying to create a replica of economically successful Singapore there, complete with public housing and first-class industrial estates. It would reap billions more in rental income and property sales, if done right. However, their joint venture partner, effectively the Suzhou town government, instead of putting in their share of help, immediately copied everything that the Singapore government did and set up its rival industrial zone and housing quarter. It beat Singapore at its own game, winning investors into their industrial park with deals, perhaps both financially and politically irresistable. The Singapore government appealed to the central government in Beijing to get the municipal government to live up to their contractual obligations and to act ethically. The central government said, yes, yes, of course, consider it done…. and then did nothing.

Was the central government unable to control the municipal government, or were they not sincerely prepared to intervene?

It is ironic that Singapore claims we are always conscious of the need to differentiate ourselves from other countries in Asia. We must be clean and transparent when they are corrupt. We must be efficient when they are tied up in paperwork. We must speak with clarity when they tend to perambulate obliquely. We must be able to move fast and seize opportunities when others lumber along.

(With reference to the last point, the idea of allowing people to dance on bar counters arose over a year ago, in May 2002, and only now is it being implemented. It has taken over a year and quite few Prime Minister’s speeches to get to this point.)

Yet the issues raised by the uneven implementation of new entertainment polices point to the exact opposite. In the light of all this backtracking and obfuscations, we’re no different from totalitarian China, licence-raj India and not a few banana republics.

Any way we look at it -- whether it’s a timid no-balls administration that can’t make any follow-up decisions, or a bureaucracy determined to undercut the minister’s new polices, or a government that was never sincere, not even about the peanuts of liberalisation they’ve had to give out -- it’s not a pretty picture. It may well be a new morality tale of how not to do something.

Yet, the Prime Minister keeps saying Singapore's future lies in greater liberalisation, which the relaxation of entertainment regulations is supposed to be merely the curtain-raiser.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

1. Kelley recounted this story in relation to another subject, not bar-top dancing or longer bar hours.
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