(as posted in reply to Mansonm at Feedback Unit on 12.4.2006)
I did not say in my previous post that the government are not elected to represent the people so your point about government being elected by the people to represent them are superfluous.
The key issue I have raised include : whether it is right for the government to pass laws to increase its ministers salaries and bonuses or laws which have granted extensive discretions to civil servants and judges to decide who and how much to punish people for presumed wrongs.
In doing so, are our leaders still representing the interests of the people.
Despite all our forumers' feedbacks with examples and facts, leaders are so far still seen as very determined in persisting in passing and enforcing such laws. See examples such as the handcuffing of motorists for non-topping of his petrol tank to three quarter mark at the causeway.
See many feedbacks regarding double-charging people on land and triple-charging them for vehicle ownership or usage to create only more and more surpluses only to allow them to claim superficial and dubious success.
Many of us forumers have given many substantiated views on how the government has under the past Goh Keng Swee doctrine consistently pushed up their own wages thereby resulting in our whole country suffering from high costs of living. Such assumptions seem to have backfired for we have not succeeded in upgrading our economy to value-adding or technology driven model nor have we succeeded in creating better paying jobs for the people. On the other hand wages have dropped considerably since 1970s even if the government wages have doubled and tripled throughout this period.
Many of us have been urging the government to change such autocratic rule and assumptions by making major changes to past policies as posted.
Simple accounable corporate governance will tell the ministers it is wrong to continue with NKF way of accumulating surpluses in the face of high costs of living and our loss of competitiveness.
PM Lee should look into such feedbacks as basis of solving problems. He could empower the younger ministers in solving problems and not encourage them to justify old policies and pretend they do not exist.
In particular, he should uphold the sanctity of the constitution and not gerrymander it with GRC and electoral redrawing to gain advantages for itself. He should see the bigger things and bigger interests of the whole nation and not the narrow interest of his own party succesion.
In particular he should set personal example of conducting a fair and equitable administration of justice for all by pursuing genuine creative and entrepreneurial technology-driven economic restructuring to ensure our survival. The simpler solution is to increase taxes and recover costs to the fullest will not create jobs.
I will stop here by only touching on certain obvious and most common problems raised by forumers here and not go on to bore you or anyone.
What do people see of the changes made. We only see numerous attempts to justify past policy errors with gerrymandering of one kind or another. There is a lack of proactive or creative solutions to problems.
Even if the whole media and TVs are presenting many good news about job market recovering lately the fundamental problems are still not solved and people are still suffering from unemployments and high costs of living versus their dropping wages and property mortgage debts.
Even if there may be first-class debates with MM Lee on TV with the students and their constrained and controlled journalists, what have been achieved in real terms?
Continuing gerrymandering of past policies and non-admission of the above-stated problems is the most serious problem now facing our whole country.
There is no more one-man-one-vote election to throw up the best of our political talents to take up further up our sociosphere. The whole system has been gerrymandered into a one-man-one-block system which favour the incumbent party.
Our freedom of speech and electing the best representative from the one-man-one-vote system has been radically altered.
Citizens may in due course lose their right even to post opinions and views in blogs or websites may soon disappear.
So with the above-stated explanation of my various feedbacks, I hope you will realise that it is not enough to claim that govenment is elected by the people and thereby it can do what it likes and claim that what it does was for the interest of the people.
What is certainly not true is the assumption the government has the mandate to pass laws to increase its own ministers' salaries to the highest comparable to bosses in the private sector without due process of independent panel assessments of apple-to-apple study and comparison and adoption of performance-assessment system.
Our autocracy is slowly becoming a farce with government even putting up laws to increase their own salaries and bonuses.
If MM Lee or PM Lee like to debate with citizens to show his policies are still working and relevant and not the cause of many of our current problems, he should debate such real issues on TVs with with some students or assembled panel of journalists who are too constrained under the press licensing laws to give good views.
Even if all the laws have been legally passed with due procedures and processes, even if the leaders have been plausible in explaining them, to the students, it remains their duties to serve the people's interests and not the interests of their own parties.
We can have good corporate governance only when the leaders are able to stay accountable in passing good laws and implementing them in the interests of the people as a whole and not of the party.
If our leaders cannot correct their past errors, and do not admit them as problems, they are simply not objective and creative people to govern the country in the next election.