| Yawning
Bread. 18 November 2008
One party good, two parties bad, says PM Lee. Again.
|
|
|||||
|
He repeated more or less the same argument last Sunday at the People's Action Party (PAP) conference. A two-party system cannot work in Singapore, he said, because it is adversarial in nature. Buttressing his point, he cited the example of Taiwan, describing its politics as "polarised" and "malfunctioning". One gets his drift: In any two-party system, politicians would naturally spend time trying to fix each other rather than attend to the country's needs. It guarantees neither good governance nor progress, he said.
|
||||||
|
One particular paragraph in the Straits Times report (at right) struck me:
Look carefully, and you'll see that it contains a condition – "As long as..." He mentioned it, and then quickly cast it aside, as if it was merely academic. But really, what if the condition is not fulfilled? Would a one-party system be better or worse? He didn't even come close to addressing it. Would you, dear reader, like to hazard a guess why he didn't dwell on it? Then he instructed his audience on the difference between a big country and a small one by taking the example of the US and Taiwan, his point being that big countries have a kind of strategic depth; they can absorb a spell of bad government or extreme polarisation and still recover. Plausibly that is true, though one might also point to the example of China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. A huge country was brought to the brink of chaos and mass starvation, not because it had an adversarial two-party system overzealous in fixing each other, but a dominant single party with untrammelled power. There is undue selectivity in Lee's examples. Why, each time when the Singapore government tries to parry demands for greater democracy, do they always use the example of Taiwan? * * * * *
The government changed hands after that election. John Key's National Party won 45.5 percent of the vote and 59 seats in the 122-member Parliament. The Labour Party's support fell 7 percentage points to 33.8 percent, giving them just 43 seats. [1] Helen Clark lost her job as Prime Minister after 9 years in office, as voters showed their unhappiness over the country entering a recession in the first half of 2008. Some analysts believe it will not pull out of it until 2009 as weak consumer spending, falling house prices and the global credit crisis bite. The National Party has promised to move quickly to legislate for further income tax cuts to take effect in April, increase spending on infrastructure projects, and start the reform of planning laws to stimulate the economy. [2] New Zealand stocks rose and the currency gained after the result. If you think the Labour Party deserved to lose because it led the country into a recession, why don't we ask whether Singapore is currently in a recession? Naturally, you will find the PAP government saying that they are doing everything possible to mitigate its effects and lead Singapore out of the doldrums as quickly as possible. I don't doubt that. But my point is that New Zealand too has a committed team to do likewise... and they didn't have to do without a two-party system and a fully functioning democracy. * * * * *
Passing judgement on their elected leader foolishly jeopardises Singapore's relations with Taiwan. It brings shame to us all when Singaporeans are seen as haughty and presumptuous. * * * * * Yawning Bread has for years been advocating some degree of proportional representation in our electoral system. The Singapore government is not in favour, for reasons too obvious to explain, though for public consumption, their argument is that it tends to lead to unstable governments. Full-blown proportional representation certainly does demand a lot more give and take among political parties (but I have never argued for full-blown proportional representation for Singapore), yet it is hard to say that the New Zealand example is all that discouraging. It is true that since its implementation in 1996, no party has ever won an absolute majority in parliament, but they've managed to form stable governments nonetheless, and budgets have been passed without much delay. Note, for instance, that prior to this election, Helen Clark had been prime minister for 9 years continuously. John Key managed to form a government within a week of the general election held on 8 November 2008. To the National Party's 59 seats, he secured 11 more from his coalition partners: the free-market ACT (5), centrist United Future (1) and indigenous Maori parties (5). This will give his government 70 seats in the 122-seat legislature – a stable majority. [4] In any case, don't go around believing that jockeying and horse trading only occur when there are coalition governments. The same happens within single-party governments, except that they tend to take place behind closed doors as each faction elbows its agenda forward. Yes, even within the PAP. I've heard not a few insider tales about what goes on. In this sense, you might even say that coalition governments are more transparent when their bargaining takes place in full glare of the media, which can't be a bad thing, can it?
* * * * * Strongman Lee Kuan Yew once mused about this. He told the media that if the PAP fails to deliver, he expects the military will step in. Brilliant. © Yawning Bread
|
|
|||||
|
Footnotes
Addenda None
|
|
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is clearly not embarrassed by his biggest
gaffe of the 2006 general election, the one where he said if voters sent
opposition members into parliament, he would be spending much of his time
thinking up ways to fix them.
