There are two sides to a coin - one head and one tail.
Under our system, all the laws and rules are made in such a way that our leaders and the ruling party will benefit from such laws and rules first before the citizens will presumably benefit.
This system places the party's interest higher than citizens' interest or aspirations.
Citizens will be brainwashed by the media controlled and used by the state with threats of defamation to present all policies and news as if they are benefiting them but not the other side of the coin which show policies and implementation are benefiting the ruling party first.
So when they say we must change certain laws or pay our ministers higher or highest salaries they say that will help us to retain talents, it will be "Head I win and Tail you lose" again and again.
So we the citizens have seen after many years we are being brainwashed into thinking that our leaders are the world's best and deserved to be paid the highest salaries. The truth is have they really succeeded in improving our citizens' standards of living to the world's best or highest. Try to look at the fact by conducting an independent survey. See for yourself whether our standard of living has like the ministers' salaries been rising since the 1980s. Citizens are now mostly earning lesser and lesser wages while costs are climbing higher and higher with lots of profiteering by HDB and URA and LTA below the budgets with more and more younger people becoming world's most educated unemployed with their jobs taken over by citizen-displacing foreigners.
When our leaders say that they must ensure racial harmony, they will pass laws and make rules in such a way that they will drive out potential good talents and prevent contending parties to put up their best candidates.
They will on one side of coin show that GRC is good and will ensure racial harmony but in effect - on the other side of coin - their attention is to prevent the alternative parties to present their best candidates or citizens from using their right to choose the individual best candidates.
In this way, the GRC will the incumbent party to use its organizational advantage as to bundle a minister with their weaker candidates and new faces while the oppositions or alternatives and citizens will be less able or unable to choose the best individuals in an election.
When their policies and system of government is top-down and autocratic we will forever have to listen to all kinds of concepts and assumptions which are not proven but presented in such a way that citizens will keep hearing nice-sounding thing that in globalization we need to retain or attract talents with paying them higher salaries. But look carefully with their top-down system they are driving away true and effective talents and yet they can cover up all problems with such utterances. To the people it will look like they are the greatest people when world economy or economic cycle turns to their favor and they could increase more fees and taxes they are good leaders who increase GST and GDP but in actual fact the citizens are suffering more and more to give them a better report card.
The whole benchmarking of ministers' salaries is - on one side of coin - to attract or retain talents - done is such a way that it will give our leaders and their own kind the highest rewards.
On the other side of the coin is that should they fail to retain talents, they will not be seen as failures of the system. They will be paid the highest salaries and bonuses and no talents is no problem.