| Yawning
Bread. 29 February 2008, amended 3 March 2008
Of airports and demonstrations
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Now that's the stuff we should be carrying in our newspapers: more good
news about how Singapore is up there among the best. Changi Airport has been
ranked third worldwide for its service quality.
It would have been better if we had been first -- that would surely prove the moral superiority of our kind of democracy -- but third's not too bad, though it must have rankled that Kuala Lumpur's airport was ranked ahead of ours.
"The survey captures the passenger’s immediate appraisal of 34 airport service factors, from check-in through to departure at the gate." The top five, worldwide, were all in Asia-Pacific: 1. Incheon, South Korea Winners were also announced for each region and each passenger-traffic category. In the largest traffic category -- airports handling over 40 million passengers a year -- Hong Kong was top, followed by Dallas-Fort Worth and Denver. In the second largest traffic category, -- 25 to 39 million passengers a year -- Incheon led, followed by Singapore and Detroit. Kuala Lumpur topped its traffic category -- 15 to 25 million passengers a year -- followed by San Diego and Zurich. Hong Kong, on the other hand, was ranked top by a different survey. The Skytrax World Airport Awards [2] was based on more than 7.8 million detailed passenger surveys, covering over 170 airports, and conducted over an 11 month period throughout the world. Final passenger judging covered over 40 categories of product and service quality -- items such as terminal cleanliness, staff efficiency and courtesy, terminal signage and walking distances, as well as features like shopping, dining options, internet services. Security processing and immigration waiting times were also constituent factors of the survey. Singapore was tied with Incheon in second place, though in fact, the top three were very close in scores.
Meanwhile, Beijing opened its new Terminal 3, a massive futuristic complex designed by British architects Foster and Partners. It has a capacity of over 70 million passengers, and a floor space larger than London Heathrow's Terminals 1 to 5 combined. Still, projections suggest that the new terminal will run out of capacity in just a few years' time, such is the exponential growth of air travel in China. [3] Of course, whether service quality in Beijing will figure in airport passenger surveys is a different matter. * * * * * Among fellow Asean countries, only Burma (#164) and communist-ruled Laos (#161) and Vietnam (#162) scored worse. But, are signs of liberation in the air? In a Straits Times story 29 February 2008, it was reported that
Wong was quoted by the newspaper to say: "We are presently reviewing how we can further liberalise the use of Speakers' Corner as an outdoor venue for more political activities including demonstrations."
These incessant and highly selective reminders is spin at work. Another, less obvious, spin was the minister's repeated use of the term "outdoor demonstrations", which he carefully distinguished from "indoor demonstrations". "Demonstrations held indoors or within stadiums are permitted, as any disorder would be better contained," the Straits Times reported him to have said. It's an attempt at a linguistic trick. Indoors or within a stadium, it is a rally, not a demonstration. To say, "Oh, but we don't ban demonstrations in Singapore, so long as they are held indoors" is like saying we allow picnics, if they take place in your living room.
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A Straits Times reporter
called me at about 8:30 pm the same evening in the hope of getting a comment
from me about Wong's statement in parliament. It must have been an
unenviable task. Stressing that it was only a
very tentative mention of the possibility of allowing demonstrations at
Hong Lim Park (Speakers' Corner), she asked me what I thought about that.
The first thing that came to my mind, which I told her quite frankly, was that it was totally reactive to what happened during the World Bank/IMF conference in 2006, when opposition politicians Chee Soon Juan, Chee Siok Chin and others engaged in a stand-off with the police for days. Photographs of blue-uniformed officers linking hands to surround unarmed citizens wanting to speak and walk peacefully down a street were broadcast around the world, showing up a side of Singapore that was not in the least flattering to the government. The next time the Chees wished to try something similar, the government would want some wiggle room to avoid that kind of public-relations disaster. That was how I saw Wong's statement, I told the reporter. You can get an idea of what happened from this teaser made by Martyn See [4] for his video Speakers Cornered, detailing that October 2006 incident.
Coming back to the reporter's phone call, she pressed me for more comments, which didn't surprise me as I knew that what I had given as my immediate reaction would not be considered printable by the Straits Times. If I remember correctly, she asked what broader significance I saw in Wong's gesture. Very little, I said. It's far, far away from what true respect for civil rights means. They should stop all this censorship nonsense, especially over gay speech and other forms of expression, I told her. Nor should it be a matter of liberalising policy that only relates to Hong Lim Green. If it's only that, it's of no significance. We should be talking about all Singapore.
I was disappointed that the following day, the story carried no reaction from the public to Wong Kan Seng's statement in Parliament. I don't expect to be quoted each time a reporter approaches me -- I'm much more realistic than that -- but what I found noteworthy was that no third party was quoted at all. It was, as usual, a story that faithfully recorded what the minister said in answer to Eunice Olsen's question in parliament and no more. However, my mistake was to think that the reporter was working on an immediate story. In fact, it turned out that she had a follow-up story on Monday, 3 March [5], in which she recorded a number of different comments. "Civil society hails possible change as 'a step forward' but wonders how it would be implemented," said the standfirst. From what I said to her, this bit appeared:
I'd say the follow-up story was not bad at all. In fact, rather more complete than I thought would be possible. Might press freedom be on the move too? But there's still quite a way for
editorial freedom to go, for you'd notice that, as I pointed out, the one
person who has tried hardest to organise demonstrations -- Chee Soon Juan
-- was ignored. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
Addenda None
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