Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s decision to set up a committee to review ministers’ salaries shows his resilience again. This isn’t the first time he is trying to help his People’s Action Party make up for lost ground after an election setback.
Belt up for a trip down memory lane.
It was past two in the morning but Singapore was still wide awake. In many homes across the island, people huddled in front of their television sets to watch a press conference that was being telecast live… On the screen was a grim-faced Lee… fielding questions from a roomful of reporters… Lee was understandably grim… The ruling party had suffered its biggest drop in majority votes…
That was Lee Kuan Yew, the year 1984, when the PAP won the elections with 64.83 per cent of the votes, a steep plunge of 12.8 per cent from the 1980 general election.
I am quoting from the book, Men In White, by Sonny Yap, Richard Lim and Leong Weng Kam. As the book says:
… for the first time, two opposition candidates were returned, confirming that the 1981 Anson by-election win by J.B. Jeyaretnam of the Workers’ Party (WP) was no fluke.
Note the similarities with this year’s election results. The PAP won 60.1 per cent of the votes this year, down from 66.6 per cent in the 2006 elections, and for the first time the opposition won a Group Representation Constituency – Aljunied GRC. Six opposition candidates were elected to parliament – more than ever before – all from the Workers’ Party.
The similarities don’t end there. In 1984, the book says:
PAP had tempted fate by rolling out one controversial policy after another…
Two were especially controversial.
- The graduate mothers policy. The 1980 census showed that the better educated women were not marrying or, if they did, were producing at the most two children. Less educated mothers were having more children though they were less able to give them a good education. So, to encourage graduate mothers to have more children, in 1984 Lee Kuan Yew gave them their pick of pre-school or primary school for their third child. “It sparked off a public outcry,” according to Men In White.
- A proposal to raise the retirement age. Worried about Singapore becoming an ageing society, Lee Kuan Yew got Howe Yoon Chong, a former civil servant who became health minister, to study the problem. But the Howe Yoon Chong Report, as it came to be known, angered the people. The reason: It suggested raising the retirement age from 55 to 60, and eventually to 65, and accordingly raising the age when people could withdraw their savings from the Central Provident Fund, a government-managed pension scheme.
The people deeply resented the graduate mothers policy and the proposal to raise the age for withdrawal of CPF savings. This was noted by the PAP in a post-mortem report after the 1984 elections. The report said:
The CPF proposal suggested that people could not be trusted to look after their own money even in old age. The graduate mothers policy… implied that not every citizen’s child could be equally talented or valued, and worse, their parents too were not equal.
Guess who wrote the report?
Lee Hsien Loong. He was a political newcomer then, elected to parliament for the first time from Teck Ghee (a constituency which no longer exists) with 80.4 per cent of the votes. But he was drafted into the task force that did the post-mortem. The task force was set up by Goh Chok Tong, who became deputy prime minister in 1985, and was chaired by Ong Teng Cheong, who later served as president of Singapore from September 1993 till September 1999.
Read more about the 1984 elections and the post-mortem report in Men In White. It says:
… the party had to revamp its image (said the report). People had come to see it as arrogant and unfeeling… People needed to be engaged emotionally.
Those were the conclusions drawn by Lee Hsien Loong, before he became PM, and others involved in the post-mortem report.
Support for the PAP dropped even lower, however, in the 1988 elections, when it won 63.2 per cent of the votes. In the 1991 elections, it won just 61 per cent – almost the same as this year. In 1997, it won 65 per cent. In 2001, after the national security scare following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America, the PAP won an astonishing 75.3 per cent of the votes. But in 2006, the PAP vote slipped back to 66.6 per cent.
PS: This may be my last post on Singapore for a while. I may not be able to blog for some time from later this week.
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