Singapore, for its own good, needs to embrace more debate about accepted “truths” concerning meritocracy and the primacy of economic growth.



This view was espoused by public policy expert Donald Low and writer Sudhir Vadaketh at a panel discussion Tuesday evening for the launch of their book “Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus”.



“The reality of the changing context requires quite serious rethinking about aversion to welfare, how we deal with inequality, whether elite governance is the model best suited for an increasingly-democratising Singapore,” said Low, who is associate dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.



Low and Sudhir argue that Singaporeans are no longer as willing to rally behind beliefs that they may have “delivered the goods" for the People’s Action Party-run government over the past half century.



Sudhir, a writer formerly with the Economist Intelligence Unit, noted that the government had turned into an impenetrable fortress of bureaucrats spewing doctrines and rejecting ideas that do not jive with their narratives. This attitude, he said, is bad for the individual and for the country, making people afraid to engage in debate and to voice their views.



Low noted that after spending 15 years in the civil service in Singapore, he has seen the space for the contest of ideas shrink. His book co-authored with Sudhir, he said, was a plea to bring back “cognitive diversity” and debate, which has been sucked out of the system.



On aging population and social spending



On the way to tackle the country’s ageing population problem, Low said the government has been focusing excessively on mitigating the looming “silver tsunami” rather than preparing people to adapt to the demographic shift.



“'We’ve got this ageing tsunami, right, so let’s try to build this wall against (it) by increasing our foreign labour force from 1.5 million to 2.5 million'. We still think too much in terms of mitigation and I think we should be thinking a lot more in terms of adaptation,” he said. “How do we fund retirement security of Singaporeans, how do we pay for healthcare, how do we get Singaporeans to work longer; how do we adapt society to a much larger elderly population?”



Low also shared that, in his view, the PAP is appearing to shift economically from right to left (from an aversion to welfare to an increase in social spending), while politically it looks to be largely remaining entrenched in the conservative camp — a situation that Low said a visiting professor described as “populist”.



On the other hand, even though the Pioneer Generation Package (PGP) appears to signal the party’s shift to an increase in social spending, Low noted that just 30 years ago, in 1984, state spending on healthcare formed 60 per cent of the total, a figure that dropped progressively to roughly 25 per cent over the 25 years that followed.



“You realise that we are in a sense making up for the fact that in the past 30 years, the government has been pulling away state support for healthcare,” he said. "If we had not tried to shift cost to Singaporeans, we probably would not have needed the PGP.”



“I think there’s a bit of skepticism on my part,” added Sudhir, who described the reforms so far as “a kind of window-dressing without real substantive change”. “(It’s) just sort of patching up holes here and there before we get to the next election,” he added.



Shifting toward more liberal politics and culture



What does it mean to shift to a more liberal political and cultural position?



For Low, it’s about according migrants equal rights, abolishing Section 377A of the Penal Code, increasing the risk-pooling mechanism in the government’s social spending as well as instituting greater political reform in the form of wider media freedom and more transparency in data shared, as some key examples.



For Sudhir, a politically liberal government pursues and implements changes that are morally right, even if only a minority segment of the population is advocating them.



“On 377A, even if it’s only a minority (who support its abolishment), we still have to do it; it’s the morally right thing to do. And the fact that we’ve not done it reflects a lot of things on our society,” he said. The section criminalises sex between men.



Commenting also on the need for media freedom, Sudhir said Singapore’s current lack thereof “damages the level of discourse in the country, it damages our knowledge economy, it damages so many things”.



Why fix it if it’s not broken?



The system that’s being run by the PAP in Singapore has worked to ensure progress, growth in wages for most Singaporeans and ensured a burgeoning and rising economy over a good half-century, but Low and Sudhir point out that the party’s focus on material benefits is a self-limiting one because it underestimates how diverse Singaporean society has become.



“The policy changes the government pursues will invariably produce winners and losers,” they wrote in the book’s preface. “Without a wider debate over the kind of society and economy Singapore should become in the future — and without an acceptance of the unavoidable contests of political values and ideologies that will increasingly characterise Singapore’s political future — a strategy of appeasing Singaporeans’ angst over bread-and-butter issues will always be a self-limiting one.”



Hard Choices – Challenging the Singapore Consensus is available at Bookhaven in NUS and selected outlets. It can also be pre-ordered from Amazon.























































































