Salaries For Fat Cats

In April 2007 and January this year, the salaries of top civil servants and ministers were revised upwards again "to keep pace with soaring private sector salaries". But, in the light of economic doldrums island wide, the Public Service Division apparently had to bite the bullet and announced that the 2009 salary revision for this group has now been deferred (not cancelled). The original game plan was that the already over paid top civil servants and ministers were supposed to get another pay rise in January next year. It was to be the third adjustment to bring public sector pay to 88 per cent of the private sector benchmark, a move announced in April 2007.

Ministers and top civil servants will now get a pay cut of up to 19 per cent next year. The Civil Service is also reducing the year-end bonus payment for this year.

The guiding benchmark, we are told, is set at two-thirds of the median pay of the top eight earners in each of the six sectors: multinational corporations, lawyers, bankers, accountants, local manufacturers and engineers. What piques one's curiosity is that, despite endemic bankruptcies, and wide scale retrenchments in private corporations, the government released data show that all indexed professions in the private sector, excepting accountants (probably the lot working for Lehman Brothers and the like), are earning 11 to 35 per cent more in 2008 than in 2007.

Commenting on the pay cut, Mr Teo Chee Hean, Minister in charge of the Civil Service, said: "Public sector salaries follow the market up and down. The mechanism we introduced last year to link a significant proportion of the salary of senior civil servants to the performance of the economy is working as intended. This mechanism allows salaries to respond more rapidly to market conditions." Maybe the minister has another set of figures for his speech.

The facts on hand seem to suggest that the formula used to calculate the ministrial paycheck is not as straight forward as claimed. Like the formula used to calculate the tariff rate for electricity, the mathematics involved will probably take several man-years to explain.

The Public Service Division also took pains to highlight that the Prime Minister has and will continue to donate all increases in his own salary after the April 2007 revisions, to good causes for five years. Note "good causes" and not "charitable organisations."

One Party Rule

Two-party system cannot work here, says PM Lee (18 Nov 2008, Straits Times)

A two-party system cannot work in Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said on Sunday.

This is because it is adversarial and guarantees neither good governance nor progress.

As long as the People's Action Party (PAP) changes itself and continues to provide clean and good government, and the lives of Singaporeans improve, the country is much better off with one dominant, strong, clean party, he said.

Speaking at the PAP annual conference, Mr Lee highlighted two examples of how the two-party system worked: The United States and Taiwan.

Concerning the US, he noted that Mr Barack Obama had campaigned on the theme of 'Change we can believe in'.

The President-elect would now try to change the direction of the country because that was the nature of the system in the US: One party changing what the other has done once it is in power.

The US could afford such change because it was a big country, said Mr Lee.

'It has a big pool from which to find political talent. Mr Obama will be able to find many able people to hold his administration... According to one report, they are all waiting beside their telephones waiting for the phone call.'

He added that while Republican presidential candidate John McCain might have given a 'very gracious' concession speech after he lost to Mr Obama, that will not alter the stark reality of adversarial politics in the US: The Republican Party will be doing all it can over the next four years 'to undermine the Democratic Party, and in the next elections, beat it, and get back into power'.

The US could withstand such an adversarial system because of its size: 'Whatever happens, the US will still be there. Eventually, problems will be put right and life will go on.'

In smaller countries however, there was no guarantee 'that if something goes wrong...you can put Humpty Dumpty together again', he noted.

He cited Taiwan as an example of how two-party democracy had been detrimental to people's lives.

In 2000, its voters, unhappy with the 'corrupt' and 'stale' Kuomintang (KMT), voted in MrChen Shui-bian's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

But after eight years of his presidency, they saw the 'sad results' - a stagnant economy, polarised politics and worsening corruption.

So they voted him out, and returned the KMT to power.

But the KMT found it was not so easy to get the economy restarted or to restore good government and have a less polarised political environment.

The Taiwanese today are disappointed with President Ma Ying-jeou because his campaign promise of instant improvements has not materialised, said Mr Lee.

Yet the alternative to President Ma in the form of the DPP leader would do no better.

Taiwan would qualify as a democracy by Western standards because it has had two changes of government in the past eight years, said Mr Lee, but it was not a political system that worked properly. It was 'malfunctioning'.

'I don't think you want that kind of political system in Singapore,' he said.

So just how well is his PAP team doing under the one-party rule system? Official statistics released show that the budget deficit for 2008 is negative $2.4 billion, revised from the earlier projected $0.8 billion.  In 2007 the government had a budget surplus of $6.5 billion. 

Also, it was reported that the Town Councils run by PAP members of parliament invested $16 million in failed Lehman Brothers-linked structured products. Statutory boards - Civil Service College, Singapore Land Authority, Infocomm Development Authority - incurred a 14 percent loss on investments in credit-linked notes.

The last word from his father is also worth noting: Lee Kuan Yew once told the media that if the PAP fails to deliver, he expects the military will step in.