You wanna praise the PAP? Get your facts right first.

Once in a while, I would stumble upon a blatantly pro-PAP piece on the internet and I can never resist giving it the Limpeh treatment. Look, whilst I am blatantly anti-PAP, I believe that these PAP supporters shoot themselves in the foot by writing poorly, particularly when they make simple errors in grammar (unforgivable). I can forgive the bad English, but not when they get their facts wrong. So here's the piece in question by writer Jackie Loh, feel free to give it a read before you hear my response. There are 5 points in the piece and so I shall respond to each point in turn.

Let's get our facts right when talking about Singapore.

1) Population Control A.K.A. “Why are there so many foreigners in Singapore?”

There is a very different situation in the West - the situation in UK, Australia, USA, Germany, Canada etc simply cannot be compared to Singapore. Now the key problem in Singapore is that the government has imported huge number of PRC migrants from China to boost the population - some of these PRC migrants are highly skilled but a large number are very lowly skilled and do not speak any English at all. Heck, never mind speak English, some of them are barely toilet trained and poop in public! Whilst they are a source of cheap labour (and help boost the falling birth rate), they still push up the population density in what is already a very crowded country and thus cause a lot of friction between locals and new migrants from China.

Can any of these lowly skilled PRC migrants get a job in somewhere like Australia, Canada or the UK? No way, not in the million years - the bar of entry is set extremely high in these countries and you will need to be a highly skilled professional in order to gain access to these countries. So yes, there are Asian migrants in the West, but these are the right kind of migrants who are filling gaps in the labour market, they are welcomed in the West because migration is a lot more carefully managed in the West to ensure that unskilled, uneducated migrants are turned away and only the right kind of migrants are allowed to settle. The Singapore government, however, is far less interested in managing the quality of the migrants, much to the frustration of the locals who are so frustrated with this influx of PRC migrants.

Singapore has failed to manage migration properly. 

Thus the attitude towards migrants in the West is completely different from that in Singapore, simply because the situation is completely different. People in the West are not threatened by Asian migrants like myself because the system is extremely well managed in the West: undesirable migrants are turned away, they are not interested in getting cheap labour from places like China and India. It is all too easy to pander to racism and just assume that oh all Angmohs must be nasty racist and all Angmohs must hate Asian migrants - that is an extremely inaccurate and lazy argument on the part of Singaporeans who wish to argue against moving to the West. It couldn't be further from the truth - as an Asian migrant who has worked in three European countries this year (UK, France and Germany), I was judged on what I could contribute to the projects I had worked on, rather than the colour of my skin and I must say, I have been treated with so much love and respect in all three countries because I am a team player with something unique to contribute. It is just racist of Jackie Loh to assume that all Angmohs must be racist because they are not.

2) Treating the CPF system like it is a complete scam

I am not saying that the CPF is a complete scam, but it is an imperfect system that is not subject to enough checks and balances. There certainly can be improvements that can be made to it and I don't believe it should be abolished - it just has to be improved. However, many Singaporeans are way too stubborn to even engage in a sensible conversation about the improving CPF system. Their default response is to (inaccurately) claim that people in the West pay 40 to 50% in income tax (completely false of course) and that the low-tax system in Singapore is superior. Whilst I don't dispute the fact that Singaporeans pay far less in income tax, they also get far less back as citizens when you look at anything from education to health care - there is no such thing as a free lunch, you get what you pay for.

Citizens in Germany for example pay more in income tax but university education for Germans is completely free. Your average low-income family in Singapore may pay very little in income tax, but they would struggle to make ends meet if they had to put one or two children through NUS because NUS is certainly not free, unlike German universities. So you see, you have to take a much more holistic view of the bigger picture and not just focus on income tax per se. Open your eyes and look at the different ways the system works in different countries and you will see that many Germans are actually far better off than in Singapore, particularly those lower down the food chain. Thus I agree that it is not healthy to focus all our criticism on the CPF, the problem with the Singaporean system goes a lot further than the CPF system. 

3) Complaining about Real Estate and Car Prices 

I am going to deal with real estate prices first: there is a direct correlation between population density and real estate prices. Land in Singapore is limited, it is a very small country so if the government is determined to grow the population to 6.9 million or even 10 million, then as a consequence, the real estate prices will increase as population density rises. When I was a young child in the 1980s, the population was barely 2.5 million - given how low the birth rate is, most of the growth to bring it to the current of 5.4 million was achieved through new migrants. If the government hasn't tried to grow the population so aggressively, then there wouldn't be such pressures pushing up property prices as a result. That is one correlation that is not hard at all to work out; so yes, you can definitely blame the government for this one.

Sure you can look at real estate prices in Tokyo, Paris, New York and Sydney and see that real estate prices are equally high in the city center - but there is a big difference: in those cities, people can retreat to the countryside outside the city where property prices fall away rapidly the further you get from the city center. Where can Singaporeans go? Once they get to Woodlands, they are already pushed right up against Johor - any further and they are in Malaysia already. There is just no where for poorer Singaporeans to retreat to unlike those in Japan, France, America or Australia - they are stuck in a city state with painfully high property prices out of their reach.

As for car prices, I fully accept that in a small country, you simply cannot have car ownership on par with a country like America or Australia. However, if you want to create a car-free society, then you must supply the locals with an affordable and efficient public transport system. This relates back to my previous points: the infrastructure for public transport had been laid out back when the population was a lot less than the current 5.4 million - can the network cope with 6.9 or even 10 million people in Singapore? I don't think so. The people who will pay the highest price for this are those lower down the food chain who will have to rely on public transport no matter how overcrowded it gets.

4) Difficulty of finding employment, even with a degree

I find it unbelievable that this writer Jackie Loh had the audacity to write about this topic without once mentioning the discrimination against male Singaporeans with NS liabilities - how the hell are male Singaporeans suppose to compete with their female and foreign counterparts when the odds are stacked against them? They have to serve NS and then any potential employer will have to contend with the fact that they have to disappear to reservist at the drop of a hat? That is the key problem facing male Singaporeans - but no, the writer chose to ignore the elephant in the room and chose to blame Singaporeans for being too picky when it comes to jobs? Good grief.

5) "Our government has transformed Singapore from 3rd-world kampung island to 1st-world global recognized state in a matter of 40 odd years."

This is completely wrong. Singapore was poorer in 1965 at the point of independence, but it was a thriving city with a population of 1.89 million - the British had left the country with surprisingly good infrastructure and industry, there were plenty of schools churning out a well-educated work force and Singapore at that stage was anything but a 3rd-world kampung island. By 1965, Singapore was already a thriving city of international importance - if Singapore was such an insignificant 3rd world kampung, would the Japanese and British have fought so hard over it during WW2? I am simply aghast at the sheer ignorance of some bloody stupid Singaporeans who are under the impression that Singapore was like this little kampung with no more than a few huts and coconut trees in 1965. Please read my two pieces here on the history of Singapore as some of you guys seriously need to go back to school to retake some of these history lessons. Jackie Loh seriously needs to go back to school for some history and English lessons (his English sucks).

Jackie needs some history lessons on Singapore!

Why is it so important to remember pre-1965 Singaporean history? I think it is important because it helps put everything in perspective: the PAP didn't create the greatest economic miracle in living history from nothing, no. They merely inherited a country that had already been set up very well by the British and whilst I don't want to diminish their credit for what they did achieve, imagine if they had taken over a real 3rd-world kampung island, like Pulau Rawa (near Mersing in Johor) which was genuinely a small kampung island with very little on it (though it has been developed in recent years for tourism). Now that's a real 3rd-world kampung island - let's see the PAP take on somewhere like Pulau Rawa and transform it into another Singapore, now that would be a real challenge.

So there you go, I don't have an issues with Singaporeans who love the PAP, but I do have an issue with writers who simply cannot get their facts write when trying to present a piece like that. This is just very poor journalism. I don't have anything against Singapore and I believe that Singaporeans have plenty to be proud of - so as to why Jackie Loh would resort to lying and misrepresenting the facts in his piece is beyond me. You know, it is entirely possible to write a pro-PAP piece, praising the achievements of the PAP without discrediting yourself by getting your facts wrong. As always, please feel free to let me know what you think by leaving a comment below, many thanks for reading.