What a colorful "leadership" and "talent" success story. We have built a first world country within such a short span of 40 years.
It started with the leader's slogan to make sacrifice without welfarism and necessity to hold back wage increases to build a society for progress, justice and equality.
People were honest and trusting listening to every good slogan and advice of leaders - self-sacrifice for the long-term good of the country, paying more fee increases and tightening the belt with wage cuts to meet all kinds of exigencies during the 1960s and 1970s for progress and justice. What they saw was good so they gave the leaders more votes for talents and leadership in election after election.
The leaders called their victory "mandate of the people". To show their leadership they came out with more slogans to build the country - law and order, "long term" good of the country, "pragmatism", "pay peanut you get monkey", "honest and corruption-free" government.
More voted them for leadership and talents. More choruses on leadership and talents of world class standard grew louder. So given such mandate where is the problem to change some GRCs and defamation law suits to control the oppositions. Where is the problem in increasing taxes and collect double on land charges and triple on vehicles to prevent congestion. What they said the people always believed and furthermore people have given them the manddate and mandate is good.
So they claimed that they have the best system of leadership government so in order to retain the best talents, people must pay the leaders the highest salaries. This is common sense. The whole government paid themselves from $100,000 pa to $2,000,000.00 pa. Then all the senior civil lords too need to be paid proportionately for they are all talents too. Some $80,000.00 pa in the junior technical category, while others climb on promotional posts that paid $200,000 - $600,000.00 pa as shown in HDB 2005 statement of account. Losses of $650 million is no object as they are easily covered by transfer from the consolidated account paid by HDB flat purchasers and vehicle owners.
Recessions came in 1980s-1990s, the numerous talents, and promising younger and olders ministers were tested for economic restructuring to value-added technology-driven model. Came more recessions 1997-1999 and 2000-2002. Talents and ministers told the workers they must retrain as the talents could not do anything much about China and India and the so-called structural unemployment that seems to be a world phenomenon.
Wages of common workers dropped to 3rd world and property prices touched bottom. People suffered high costs and could not make ends meet. Many business failures and bankruptcies.
Votes dropped from 75% average to 66.6%. The talented Ministers oblivious of their helplessness in restructuring the economy claimed another mandate and success following the first upturn of world economy in many years. It is only natural as this is generally known as following the wind direction or surfing the tide.
This is the success story of Singapore from first world to the third climbing up 3 places over the last 10 years.
How does this people's version of Singapore's success story compare with the daily reports of the States Times for a change ?
This is a much more realistic view compared to the fallacies created by our controlled media. For company monopoly, government could step in to place anti-competitive measures to encourage competition for the betterment of the consumers. Unfortunately, this cannot be applied to our government. Singapore has a lack of human rights and freedom of speech, which is extremely sad.