There is some merit in NOT carpet bombing the news. I read ST’s coverage of Day 4 and got thoroughly confused about what’s happening. Stuff kept getting repeated. Quotes got repeated too. Seems no one person is looking over the whole coverage.
And those boring, boring headlines. Yesterday’s headline was about a “major’’ shift in planning infrastructure. Today’s ST headline was yet another “major’’ shift in the economy. I don’t think anything quite beats the headline for the first day of debate : that the White Paper was for “the benefit of Singaporeans’’.
Here’s where the smaller papers do much better – pick the relevant points and home in on them. But I suppose ST has to labour under the burden of being the newspaper of record (of sorts).
BT homed in on the G’s objections to a total foreign labour freeze advocated by the Worker’s Party while Today gave an excellent account of the PAP-versus-WP sword play. I could follow it, because each cut and thrust was well juxtaposed, with relevant backgrounding. I thought its insertion of PAP MP Lim Wee Kiak’s apology to WP’s Low Thia Kiang right at the top of the article was a stroke of genius: It reflected how tense and impassioned the debate had become for Dr Lim to tell Mr Low to “turn up his hearing aid’’. Ooh, what a cut! For which Dr Lim was good enough to apologise for.
Sorry. The rant above was just me using my ex-journalist lens while reading the newspapers.
Back to Day 4.
You know, I almost expected an apology from Mr Wong Kan Seng. This was the minister who presided over the whole population growth and who turned on the tap big-big. He was a pretty tough nut then, putting down criticisms of immigration. I guess he was only doing what he had to. I wish he had said more about those years of exploding numbers, never mind that PM Lee had already said that the G lacked foresight then.
I also wish (well, almost) the WP had never put out its paper. Then we might get down to tackling some points in the White Paper instead of witnessing point scoring, jibes and snide remarks. Then again, if the WP didn’t, we wouldn’t be having a debate on whether the tap should be shut tight, or opened slightly. Clearly, the WP’s no increase in foreign workers position is being attacked, both in and out of the House. I can’t agree with the WP either. No increase at all? Rather too drastic. I know it’s the WORKERS party, but it can’t mean that it is so totally against employers as not to give them a bit of room to hire a few more people? By the way, ordinary Singaporeans employ foreigners too, as maids. And nursing homes need foreign helpers too.
I want to see the PAP MPs and Nominated MPs get down to other issues.
Can we, for example, have a clear definition of what is the Singapore core? I don’t think PAP MP Alex Yam’s use of the apple – which he brought into Parliament – quite makes it. You eat the apple (which I presume stands for foreigners) and you throw away the core!
So must the Singapore core be born and bred – as WP’s Sylvia Lim put it? Or can we be Singaporeans out of conviction and choice, as Manpower Minister Tan Chuan Jin said quoting the late PAP ideologue S Rajaratnam?
Hopefully, this can be settled today. Along with it, I hope the sentiments of the minority communities can be addressed too. I count at least three Malay MPs who have wondered if the racial makeup will stay the same and the status of Singapore Malays in 2030. Then there was an intriguing comment by Nominated MP R Dhinakaran on the worries of the Tamil-speaking Singaporeans being swamped by the non Tamil-speaking Indians.
The Eurasians? Speaking for myself, I don’t care lah. But I don’t know if others do.
Bertha Harian 
4 responses to “Duelling on Day 4”
I guess The Eurasians are sitting back and watching the show.. let me go check with some friends.. that will be rather interesting!
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Why hasn’t anybody challenged the government’s insistence that the citizen PMET population will go from 50% to 75%? Because it’s populist. Because it’s an easy way out. Because we’ve always been told, and this has been a very long held and unchallenged assertion, that we’re “moving towards a knowledge based economy”.
Everybody should just get real for a minute. If our nation’s real bugbear is dependence on foreign labour, part of the solution is to scale back on this PMET project. We’re running out of locals to wait tables in restaurants, and the government wants an additional 1 in 4 of the citizen workforce to work in an office? Nigh on everybody wants to be a PMET. Employers don’t “need” more PMETs because everybody wants to be a PMET by default. Artificially forcing the issue makes little sense.
It’s bad politics to tell anybody that they or their kids shouldn’t be university graduates. But on the macro level, does saturating the proportion of graduates improve productivity? In 2011, nearly 50% of citizens aged 25-39 held bachelor degrees – up 125% from just five years before that – but economic productivity has shrunk in that time.
This change of the PMET population, and our constant opening of universities, really points at one thing. There will be a very, very large, college-educated middle class, with precious little disposable income, no cars to drive, jammed MRT lines to look forward to, nobody to wait the restaurant tables and they will all be really pissed off about… income inequality. Mark my words.
So much for the knowledge economy. I’ll be damned if it turns out that our brain waves alone can cement bricks together and rustle fallen leaves into neat stacks every morning. In other countries, like Hong Kong, there’s not so much of a complex about educational attainment or occupation – a builder’s salary is 25% of a doctor’s. That’s a complex that we should be trying to break down, not reinforce.
I got the figure wrong, it was from 50% to 66%, but my point stands.