“WE ALL know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”
So says Jean-Claude Juncker, the long-serving Prime Minister of his small, wealthy city-state Luxembourg and the recent President of the European Commission. His famously pithy dictum comes from his lifetime spent at the highest levels of politics. It is a comment on how many governments know what necessary changes their country needs, but seldom bite the bullet because these changes will be political suicide.
“In other words, in those countries, governments find that doing the right thing is not politically feasible, and then political leaders of all parties default to populism or short-termism to stay in power,” said Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong last week (17 Sept) at the Annual Public Service Leadership Ceremony.
This popular short-termism has real-world consequences. Highly-developed countries are not immune. Just look at France. Not that long ago, the Macron government pushed pensions reform through to try and restructure the nation’s volatile economy. Its reward was two no-confidence votes brought against it. Now, it has lost political power to populists who claim immediate and easy solutions to the difficult matter of the economy — and who aim to overturn the pension reforms.
Also consider how the populist Truss budget of September 2022 put the United Kingdom in months-long economic distress. This budget’s populist plans backfired spectacularly, crashing the pound, sent interest rates soaring, and overall added more misery to the cost-of-living crisis facing ordinary citizens. It included the country’s biggest tax cuts in 30 years, and was an attempt to please voters during politically-turbulent times for Truss’s party.
A strong mandate from Singaporeans: reaching long-term goals
Singaporeans are the shining counter-example to Juncker’s realpolitik dictum, however.
Singaporeans have always given the PAP government a strong mandate. And the PAP government has repaid that trust by always being upfront about the difficult choices needed, to turn Singapore from Third World mudflats to a First World metropolis.
It is this strong mandate from Singaporeans that allows us to reach long-term goals. This trust from the people, lets the PAP Government plan — and complete — policies and infrastructure for Singapore’s long-term prosperity.
“Rising incomes have enabled everyone to enjoy a much higher quality of life — better education, better healthcare, better housing, and better jobs,” said SM Lee. “We have overcome major crises together as a nation: severe recessions, regional troubles, and the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“All this has only been possible because Singapore has been well-governed all these years,” he added.
All this success is vastly different from countries where governments change often, and necessary policies do not happen — or are cancelled because of political expediency.
We have seen how big infrastructure projects fall apart when governments of the day change. For a small city state like Singapore, that can spell disaster for the economy and for Singaporeans. Large scale developments such as the Jurong Lake District, Changi Airport Terminal 5, the Long Island project and Tuas Mega Port, would not have gone ahead.
Nor would the $100 billion pledged to fight climate change in Singapore over the next 100 years be conceivable. Singapore would not be the region-leading pharmaceutical hub it is now, where pharmaceutical companies open research facilities to innovate vaccines against the next inevitable public health pandemic.
These are all the PAP Government planning ahead and having the ability to stay the course for the next generation of Singaporeans. It is just as previous generations of PAP leaders planned and persevered for today’s.
A strong mandate from Singaporeans: the ability to make necessary decisions
Not all necessary public policies are popular politically, though. The recent GST increase is one everyday example. It funds a large portion of public goods, including the public healthcare system and taking care of Singapore’s rapidly-ageing population..
“As our spending needs increase, we need to make sure revenues continue to keep up, and that means taking difficult political decisions to raise taxes when we need to,” said SM Lee on the GST increase.
It was the responsible course of action for Singaporeans — and made possible with the years of a strong mandate from voters.
The PAP Government also took care to announce the GST increase to Singaporeans years in advance, noted SM Lee. This includes during the 2015 General Election (GE) campaign, where PAP leaders frankly said that they could see the need for the increase down the road.
“The Minister for Finance Heng Swee Keat announced this [increase] in the 2018 Budget and to make sure — make absolutely sure — everyone got the message, I said this again the next year at the 2019 PAP Party Convention,” said SM Lee.
Explaining the GST increase clearly to Singaporeans before the GE campaign, is a clear example of the PAP government putting the welfare of Singaporeans ahead of electioneering.
“This was a political decision. We knew it would cost the ruling party some votes, but we felt strongly that we needed to be responsible and upfront with voters,” said SM Lee.
Of course, the PAP Government has also developed a comprehensive $8 billion Assurance Package as well as GST vouchers, for Singaporeans.
Source: Ministry of Finance
This help means that most Singaporean households will not feel the impact of the GST increase for at least five years, while lower-income households will not feel the impact for 10.
Remember Juncker’s dictum: Singapore is not exempt
Things can go awry for Singapore in these future years, however. As SM Lee noted, Singapore is a counter-example of Juncker’s dictum — but not exempt.
“We too are subject to the same political pressures and incentives that other countries face,” said SM Lee. “As growth becomes harder to come by, as revenues become less buoyant, and as our politics become more fiercely contested, things can go wrong for us too.”
“If electoral margins get slimmer, the government will have less political space to do the right things. It will become harder to disregard short-term considerations in decision-making,” he added.
“The political dynamics will become very different,” concluded SM Lee. “Singaporeans must understand the dangers this creates.”
