The key then is to alter the daily reality for Singaporeans,
in the words of the White Paper, to give the people a “good quality living
environment”.
Imagine a Singapore where the trains run smoothly with
multiple redundant lines to ease congestion and where a young couple seeking to
start a family is able to afford high quality public housing options without
being saddled by crippling loans.
The sad reality is that such a Singapore could have existed
today if not for the myopia of our economic planners.
A former senior Government bureaucrat, Donald Low, had in
his post-2011 GE analysis revealed that, “MOF routinely turned
down requests from MOT and LTA to finance new rail lines”. There are other pointed revelations in his
thesis which suggest that perhaps, the crux of this Population White Paper for
2030 rests primarily on our Government’s money men to overcome their tendency
to run Singapore like a giant profit-driven MNC and to stop equating
Singapore’s growth purely in terms of dollars and cents.
It can be argued that it is this profit-minded mind-set of
our fiscal planners which has basically eroded the carefully built-up trust or
social compact between Singaporeans and the Government. Nowadays, it is a commonly held perception
that this Government may give you one dollar through market subsidies or other
cleverly disguised cash hand-outs, but at the same breath, devise even more
clever schemes to take back two dollars; the ERP and COE policies are prime
examples of such puzzling fiscal earning schemes which irk Singaporeans
tremendously. As one of my friends wryly remarks in colourful Hokkien, “they
give you a drumstick but take back a chicken”.
The greatest irony is perhaps that these civil servants from
the Ministry of Finance, so tight-fisted with public expenditure that can help
Singaporeans, are strangely very generous and have no qualms whatsoever to
provide a mind-boggling $4 billion loan of our taxpayer money to a reviled
international organisation like the IMF.
In this now forgotten episode which happened last year, I truly applaud
Mr Kenneth Jeyaretnam for having the courage to doggedly challenge our DPM and
Finance Minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, on the legal
constitutionality of this loan.
The Population White Paper, in the end, is just a piece of
paper with numbers and words. The test
is not in the White Paper. The test is
in the resolve and will of the Government to fully fund the implicit
infrastructural development plan required to accommodate 6.9 million people by
2030 without worrying about imagined investment returns or financial risk and
to stop devising cunningly disguised plans to claw even more money from us, the
true Singaporeans, to pay for this new infrastructure plan.
The test for the next 17 years is to grow in a manner that
does not feel like what Singaporeans have painfully experienced in the past
decade or so. To match that desire for
growth among Singaporeans that is not measured on statistical investment
returns but on emotive intangible returns like quality of life and happiness
indices.
In short, the Government has to gain back the trust that
Singaporeans used to have in our public institutions through development
policies which have the Singaporean at its core. If not, the political price the Government
has paid thus far over this issue will be pittance once the anger in the
Singaporean core evolves into flames that will not subside.
