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Friday, Feb 01, 2013 - 00:33 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Pure Punditry

Warm Up

Rock Lee's Springtime of Youth - the spinoff's better than the main!

And a US soldier gets a double arm transplant after losing all his limbs in Iraq; wonder if something like this is in the pipeline nearer home? Legs apparently not recommended, though.

Was pleasantly surprised when the Ramly Burger stallholder called out chicken satu for me on my second visit - either he has an incredible memory for faces, or gained some profound insight into human nature on the job. Then again, it was either that or beef - or maybe they were out of beef.


Monsieur Jambon Clears The Air

Me: We have with us today the other half of our Master Political Hamalyst team, Monsieur Jambon, who incidentally looks to be in a bit of a huff.

Monsieur Jambon: Merde! You would be fed up too, if you had to face such barbarous unfounded arraignments as I have! Why, there has been idle talk, nay, vile slander, that I and Herr Ahm are one and the same, and that we have therefore been double-charging our clients. Pray tell me, has such rank debased nonsense ever crossed your ears? It is as well that Esquire Pants O'Sue is away in Mexico, or those rumourmongers would be getting cold feet about now!

But no matter - to lay the matter to rest once and for all, I shall pontificate, for the first time ever, at the same time as Herr Ahm! For this momentous occasion, never to be repeated, Herr Ahm will be teleconferencing from Hamburg, Germany, and it is only due to our longstanding partnership that we are charging only an additional 50%.

Herr Ahm: *on computer monitor* I think we can all agree that that's a bargain.

Me: His lips don't appear to be moving in sync.

Monsieur Jambon: Probably due to lag, haven't you watched programmes on Sopcast or other P2P Internet TV before?

Me: Curiously, the calendar behind his desk is three days out of date.

Monsieur Jambon: Like you never forget to tear the pages off your calendars either. Herr Ahm is a very busy ham.

Me: Actually, the whole setup looks amazingly like your local office. There are even HDB flats outside the window.

Herr Ahm: *badly out of sync* Look, I don't have time to waste on negative naysayers like you.

Me: And most importantly, how is it that Herr Ahm is speaking from the monitor, when the audio has been routed to the overhead speakers?

Monsieur Jambon: Crap, that's out of my range... *adjusts voice* I mean, whoever designs the acoustics of these rooms? Start with the actual important issues here, hello?


Tis' The Season To Be Sorry

Monsieur Jambon: Hokay, a quick runthrough. A couple of days after their crushing defeat in Punggol East, the incumbents have released the Population White Paper, "A Sustainable Population For A Dynamic Singapore", which Yahoo! News pithily summarized under the headline "Singapore population half foreigners by 2030: govt".

Herr Ahm: Well, this at least answers the question of why the by-election got scheduled on the 26th. If you recall, the incumbents had promised it by January back in November last year, before the Honourable Palmer affair broke on them.

Monsieur Jambon: Hey, they might have taken the opportunity to scale the road to Dubaification down from 7 million to 6.9...

Herr Ahm: Doubly appropriate given that it signifies that the citizenry are going to get screwed from both ends?


I say your standard of living improve means improve hor
(Source: SGAG)


Since they probably had enough residual sense of public sentiment to realise that the contents of the Paper would not exactly help in winning votes, and they couldn't very well delay its release, a March or April by-election would likely have been disastrous had the Opposition milked the issue, especially with the hot potato of AIM yet to be resolved, even assuming Budget goodies - and they couldn't delay the by-election too long either, for reasons previously explained.

That didn't leave much of a window, and somewhere in late January before the Paper came out became the obvious remaining option. True, they still got trounced, but they were at least spared the possible humiliation of a sub-40% vote share.

Me: That sounds very logical. But could they not have reacted with a toned-down population target?

Monsieur Jambon: I would say the incumbents still regard it as a nuisance hiccup and nothing more. Okay, your PM did bother to apologize yet again... before dropping the population bomb.

Herr Ahm: You know, the man actually said "Could we have predicted that... our population would increase so rapidly? I don't think we could easily have said that." I was flabbergasted! They control the number of employment passes and permits - with birth and death rates mostly constant, how could the government not know about the population explosion? That's kind of lame even by incumbent standards!

Monsieur Jambon: Also, it turns out that the former PM had opined just a few years ago that Singapore's optimum population is five to five and a half million, which happens to be the current count. With all respect to the current PM, if it's him against his dad, I know who I'll be placing my bets on.

Me: *glumly* In that article, they were talking about 6.5 million "in the next 40 to 50 years" - somehow, this got compressed into the next 15 years; the haste, especially given the expected political costs, might seem slightly suspicious.

Herr Ahm: Hey, the Paper does credit "many Singaporeans from different walks of life" with helping to shape it.

Monsieur Jambon: So it can't be that bad, right?

*The MPAs look meaningfully at one another*

Monsieur Jambon & Herr Ahm: Would it be unprofessional to roll on the floor laughing live on air?


Not Adding Up

Me: The piece on "Is Population Growth a Ponzi Scheme?" has been making the Facebook rounds after the Paper came out, and if I may say so myself, the general implications are not that hard to derive. While I had thought that they would stick to a 30k net increase a year, the Paper indicates a 20k per annum average net import for citizens alone, and somehow manages to never directly state that there will be another million foreigners in all its 70-odd pages.

Monsieur Jambon: *whistles* That comes out to... nearly 60k net foreigners a year, or about 75k in total! Wow!

Herr Ahm: *nods* Your incumbents, they play big.


This is surely a novel definition of moderation!
(Source: hardwarezone.com.sg)


Monsieur Jambon: You know, this reminds me of how the increased GST has helped the poor.

Herr Ahm: It could be pointed out that getting new adult working citizens to shore up the dependency ratio is just delaying the inevitable, but it could be a total coincidence that the current crop of ministers should be happily retired by then.

Me: Actually, for the "supporting the elderly" problem, I thought that was what the CPF was supposed to handle, at least until it became common practice for people to wipe their Ordinary Account out to pay for their flat lease, which means that there will likely be blood in the streets if a deep correction ever occurs - but a discussion on that could go on forever.

Herr Ahm: Not only that, the numbers are totally out of whack. As mentioned in the criticism above, the annual baby shortfall below replacement level, the ostensible justification for opening the floodgates, is at most about 30k - why then is the plan to add more than twice that number? Plain cheap economic growth by fast expansion looks to be the answer.

Me: And for all the rhetoric about higher productivity and more white-collar jobs, I think this policy isn't going to encourage that. The foreign construction workers I've come across have all been nice chaps, but something struck me as being out of whack when I saw five of them dragging a garden hose. Anecdote it may be, but one worth thinking about.


An Ancient Story

Monsieur Jambon: Here, I'd like to shift the direction of this discussion a little. The Reform Party might not have gotten the support they hoped for in the by-election, but they did at least relate a pertinent tale in one of their rallies - the one of Alexander the Great who, upon receiving the only bowl of water available when marching in the desert, poured it into the sands that he might suffer with his men, some details varying.

Me: There happens to exist an almost exact equivalent in Chinese history, when Huo Qubing shared the imperial wine awarded to him by pouring it into a river, such that all his soldiers could have a taste; Yue Fei supposedly did something similar, so it seems that some gestures are universal.


"Just one drop per person. By this calculation, I should be drinking it all and some... by Zeus, you dare to say I also don't dare to listen."
(Source: thelosttreasurechest.wordpress.com)


Herr Ahm: Yes, this is it. Some decades ago, the incumbents enjoyed mass popular backing because people believed that they did what they had to for the public good. If this condition is satisfied, you can confiscate land for pennies, lock opponents up, hand out a few tight slaps or even chop some heads off, and still be lauded for doing so.

Unfortunately, nowadays, it's getting harder and harder to believe that, what with million-dollar salaries, multiple directorships and third properties prevalent among the incumbent rulers, while the average citizen wonders why he's working longer hours to prepay the rental for a smaller pigeonhole than the previous generation did and then not get a seat on the sardine-packed trains - but he's supposed to be better off, according to official statistics and projections!

Monsieur Jambon: *nods* It boils down to a matter of trust, the reserves of which may be wearing slightly thin here. Your incumbents have made a mantra of doing the right thing even if it is unpopular, but it is worth a note that picking the unpopular doesn't automatically make them right. There might be a not wholly-unfounded suspicion that it'll be the guys on top who'll make out like bandits, while the additional stresses outweigh any monetary gains lower down the ladder.

Me: We've been dragging on a bit; so what does the political future hold?


Constituency Hopping

Monsieur Jambon: Ooooh, the fun part! Just call me Napoham. We begin with a helicopter view:


The East is for the taking
(Original source: wikipedia.org)


The opposition... ah heck, the Workers' Party, has plenty of tasty options open to them - all the constituencies bordering their core stronghold, with the possible exception of Ang Mo Kio, can realistically be captured. True, the incumbents got 64.79% in Pasir Ris-Punggol, but that was against a pretty lightweight SDA team; other than that, they never broke 60%.

Probably the tastiest of the lot would be East Coast, where they have already achieved over 45% in 2011, and now that they have experience in taking over GRCs, a 5% swing is far from unlikely. Joo Chiat is even shakier, with the incumbents polling just over 51%, but one supposes it might more plausibly just disappear off the face of Singapore, as previous inconvenient constituencies have tended to.

A glance at the map indicates that cynical gerrymandering might not be effective for much longer, though. None of the surrounding areas are that safe, all the more with Marine Parade possibly both losing its bulwark and further having to turn over more personnel. Personally, I would have the NSP concentrate the bulk of its efforts here, and field an undisputed "A" team.

Herr Ahm: Let us proceed by systematically examining matters at the party level. Here, I propose categorizing the Opposition into three tiers, Premium, Middle and Spoiler, on current reputation. The definitions are based on the estimated average percentage of votes they would take when standing in a constituency, under various circumstances as described:

Premium Tier: Workers' Party
Straight fight vs. incumbents: 45%+
Three-cornered vs. incumbents & Middle Tier: 25%-40%
Three-cornered vs. incumbents & Spoiler Tier: 45%+

Middle Tier: National Solidarity Party, Singapore Democratic Party, Singapore People's Party*
Straight fight vs. incumbents: 35%-45%
Three-cornered vs. incumbents & Premium Tier: 5%-15%
Three-cornered vs. incumbents & Middle Tier: 15%-30%
Three-cornered vs. incumbents & Spoiler Tier: 30%-40%
[*Premium Tier in Potong Pasir, if it still exists]

Spoiler Tier: Reform Party, Singapore Democratic Alliance, New Entrants*
Straight fight vs. incumbents: 25%-35%
Three-cornered vs. incumbents & Premium Tier: <2%
Three-cornered vs. incumbents & Middle Tier: <5%
Three-cornered vs. incumbents & Spoiler Tier: 1%-35%
[*without extenuating factors]

As you can see, the Spoiler Tier is characterized by them almost surely losing their deposit if up against anyone but another Spoiler Tier party. This reality also explains why the WP felt it unnecessary to negotiate - especially in areas where they have pounded the ground, it's the other side's name on the line, and I feel them rightfully having an attitude of "If you think you can outshine us, bring it on!"

Monsieur Jambon: Perhaps you have been a tad too hard on the so-called Spoiler Tier? As far as I can see, their motivations are in the right place. Do you think that they still have a political future?

Herr Ahm: Of course. If they can afford S$16000 to put down as a deposit, and some more spare change to throw at rallies, anyone can have a political future in Singapore! If however by political future you mean them actually winning an election, then the short answer is no. It'll take such a massive attitude transplant that they may as well be restarting under a new brand name. Heck, that could help.

I mean, the route to plausible electoral success is not that complicated - pick a spot, build an active grassroots, press the flesh and get some small stuff done, don't take the bait to commit obviously dumb acts and get yourself sued into oblivion, and leave the incumbents enough rope to slowly hang themselves, which they have been happily doing.

Monsieur Jambon: This sounds exactly like the WP plan.

Herr Ahm: I tell you, they're shrewd operators. They're wisely playing down their momentum - since there's still so much potential to make inroads without committing to any big concrete vision, why risk it? They can very well ride to 20 or 30 seats this way, and then the real talking can begin.

Me: Uh, we're running short on time and attention - perhaps wrap it up?

Monsieur Jambon: We'll leave the individual party analysis for another time, then, and finish with a marked contrast of High Up There versus Together With Us.



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