The Singapore population white paper clown show

The priestess of Ise has no interest in publishing a review of the Singapore government's white paper on population. There is no proper white paper to speak of, none constructed with care and intellectual honesty to deserve a point by point response.

Just look at this image of an empty train station on page 53, or any of the strangely depopulated urban landscapes, or any of the skylines of Singapore that take up half of every page in the white paper. This is how its authors think they can sell a policy that will change Singapore completely, forever.

We do not exaggerate. Donald Low of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy  has this to say:

There was very little scholarship and academic rigour in the report. There wasn't even a References section to show what research the writers of the paper had done, what social science theories they relied on, what competing theories/frameworks they looked at. There was also a surprising lack of rigorous comparison with other countries that have gone through, or are going through, a similar demographic transition. If this was a term paper, I would have no qualms failing it - whether or not I agree with it.

That's coming from a think-tank insider who would normally be involved in crafting policy and white papers for the powers that be.

To weigh the merits of Low's outburst, which surely breaks an unspoken code of honour between Singapore's government and its local think-tanks useful idiots, we present for comparison:
Singapore's population white paper (PDF link)
Australia's white paper on their response to the Asian Century (PDF link)
UK's white paper on marriage equality (website, multiple PDF links)

The most obvious differences:

1. Singapore's white paper does not have an introductory address.

The politician who is in charge of it has chosen not to take responsibility for what is a very unpopular policy proposal. Can you guess who it might be? It's not the minister for national development, since the national population and talent division is a department under the Prime Minister's Office. Yet according to the division's website, it's not headed by any minister in the PMO but Teo Chee Hean, the minister for home affairs. What an amazing organisational structure NPTD has! Who really answers to whom? Inquiring minds want to know!

2. As Donald Low points out, the discussion in the 87 pages of Singapore's white paper is sorely lacking in rigour, as though its authors really don't want to be taken seriously. There exist references and footnotes; they merely say "DOS", no year, name of publication so it's one big fail. No bibliography. And of course, no cross-country, longitudinal comparisons.

3. The UK's white paper is a series of documents: a green paper soliciting consultation from stakeholders (March 2012), a white paper addressing specifically actual feedback from said consultations (December 2012), and better yet, easy-to-read versions of the white paper and factsheets for those who get a serious case of tl;dr.

Note the timeline between publication of the UK white paper, a period of further public consultation, and its debate and passing in parliament. For comparison, Singapore's population white paper had one week between publication and debate in parliament.

White paper an intellectual paperweight despite an increasingly educated and contentious middle class

So what if Singapore's white paper has no methodology, framework, assumptions, or models shown? So what if its figures and recommendations come out of a black box? The average Singaporean may not understand, may not be interested in the debate beyond their visceral reaction towards the 7 million figure.

This argument is borne of ignorance and the bigotry of low expectations. The Australian and UK white papers accommodate all sorts of readers from expert academics, policymakers, interested citizens to the disengaged reader. Australia's white paper alternates between easy to digest summaries and thick, deep statistical modelling. The UK's controversial and contentious social policy proposal is couched in the simplest, clearest, and most direct language, as though its authors are content to hide nothing from its arsenal of statistical wizardry, and leave everything to critics and supporters alike.

In contrast, Singapore's proposal is a one-note affair, content to chug along for 87 pages in the spirit of an MLM or timeshare brochure where the workings and assumptions are hidden from any reader who may decide to question it.

Third world white paper for a first world nation?

Perhaps the largest problem of a white paper with no methodology, framework, assumptions, models shown is this:

Outside of the Prime Minister's Office, both PAP MPs and opposition MPs have no cognition what lies in the black box of assumptions and models used to generate the seemingly unsubstantiated figures and projections in the white paper. Parliamentarians on either side of the aisle are for all intents and purposes flying blind - making unsubstantiated critiques, counter-proposals, and endorsements of a white paper based on workings and rationales they do not and cannot comprehend.

And yet here we have it: 5 days of passionate debate over the white paper, after which there will be a vote.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Singapore parliament clown show.

The Workers Party, led by Mao Chen Show, have put forward an alternate proposal with an alternate target population figure, and an alternate extrapolated GDP growth figure. These are all based presumably on the same assumptions and statistical modelling of the white paper, that no one knows about aside from its unnamed authors.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the WP clown show.

The People's Action Party has its usual pretense of a reasoned debate to show it's hardly rushing to implement a white paper despite the one week gap between publication and parliamentary debate ("How many foreigners are working in essential services?" Shouldn't this be in a white paper?).

The most embarrassing thing is how one after another, PAP MPs will line up to scrutinise and then endorse a white paper whose assumptions, models, even policy credibility remain unknown to them even at the end of their questioning. In contrast, when faced with activists, tertiary students, and the general public in various dialogue sessions, certain PAP MPs are infamous for demanding to know the exact models, theoretical frameworks, and assumptions - and then dismissing these alternative policy proposals from activists and critiques from the general public out of hand anyway.

While demanding such high standards of Singapore's activists and their critiques and alternate visions, the MPs of the People's Action Party are content to blind themselves when it comes to a proposal that would not pass muster from their exacting standards had it not come from the Prime Minister's Office.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the PAP clown show.

A white paper with no methodology, framework, assumptions, models shown is a paper that shortchanges the legislation, a white paper that reduces the legislature to a bunch of grossly overpaid chattering monkeys, a white paper that brooks no real debate or challenge, that depends on passage by a legislature unable to ascertain its true merits.

Modelling the by-elections: What was the real vote swing against the PAP?

Previously on this blog, I conducted a post mortem of the 2011 general election because Alex Au had made several claims about groundwork and campaigning being essential in determining voting outcome.

I disproved Au's claims through available electoral data and statistical modelling and explained the GE2011 results in several GRC contests to show that the Workers Party had in fact underperformed relative to other opposition parties in contests in wards with highly unpopular ministers, that Aljunied was simply won because of the 6.6% average vote swing against the PAP, and that the average voter in 2011 was simply voting for or against the ruling party.

Although Alex Au has not quite acknowledged our corrections of his thought, his analysis of the Punggol East by-elections attempt to explain the Workers Party win over the People's Action Party, the Reform Party, and the Singapore Democratic Alliance by analysing the swing vote.

His conclusion? There was a 10.83% swing against the PAP since 2011.

A swing to the left, a swing to the right

We argue that Au mistakes the eventual result of the Punggol East by-election to comprise solely of a swing against the PAP. Again assuming the Punggol East voter is simplistically voting for or against the PAP like in 2011, we in addition propose a more sophisticated model of the Punggol by-election vote as an aggregate of two swings.

Aggregate swing = sex scandal + vote against PAP

Given the public uproar in the intervening months against the various sex and sex and corruption scandals, we posit that a sex scandal results in political costs for the incumbent. But how many votes does a sex scandal cost?

We look towards the Hougang by-election, where WP's Yaw Shin Leong resigned from his party and vacated his seat in parliament following a protracted sex scandal.

As it turned out, the WP won Hougang with a marginal change in vote share.

GE May 2011 Hougang SMC: PAP 35.2%%
May 2012 Hougang SMC: PAP 37.92%

For the moment, let's all be naive and simplistic. In an opposition ward of more than 20 years, highly insular and loyal Hougang voters in a by-election one year after a general election are unlikely to change their voting preferences and attitudes towards both the incumbent party and the ruling party. If so, the cost of a sex scandal leading to a by-election is merely 2.7%. This conclusion may be surprising but we note the relative absence of public outrage against the sex scandal in the run-up to the by-election.

Note however the public outrage against the prime minister's initial refusal to call for a by-election, the constitutional challenge that followed, and the positive reaction to Kenneth Jeyaratnam's call for donations online to defray the costs of the case. These factors in addition to the breakdowns in infrastructure since 2011 and the outbreak of the underaged sex scandal would have caused a small swing against the PAP, which would then offset the real cost of a sex which would be at say about 5%, causing an aggregate shift of 2.7%.


Two swings in the same direction

Let's now look at the Punggol East by-election.
Aggregate swing = cost of sex scandal for incumbent + 'national' vote swing against ruling party

GE May 2011 Punggol East SMC: PAP 54.54%
Jan 2013 Punggol East SMC: PAP 43.71%

Here, the incumbent is the ruling party so the final swing of 10.83% is an aggregate of two swings working in the same direction. Taking the projected real cost of a sex scandal as 5%, the actual vote swing against the PAP in Punggol East since 2011 is about 6%. This is our naive estimation.

Now if we take into account local issues that caused unhappiness in the ward - such as unfinished construction projects, inadequate and shoddy infrastructure works that make Sengkang feel more like a slum than Potong Pasir, and the high property prices in the ward - the actual vote swing against the PAP would be far less than 6%.

In other words, we're positing that in Punggol East,
aggregate swing = cost of sex scandal for incumbent + cost of local issues + 'national' vote swing against ruling party

And yes, we're saying that if you did the math before the by-election, you would have put good money to bet on a PAP loss.

Now, we're not saying Alex Au is politically illiterate. He's actually more aware and informed than the average Singaporean but it seems that again, the task has fallen to the priestess of Ise to correct Au's political mis-diagnosis!

The roads taken to a by-election

On the eve of cooling off day, I make no prediction on the by-election for the ward of Punggol East but instead offer everyone a platform for reflection for their words and actions, the paths they chose to take to herd public opinion and potential voters for the vote on Saturday.

We don't need opposition unity

Perhaps overcompensating for the loss of the multi-cornered presidential election last year, online commentators, bloggers, and alternate media groups were more than eager to declare the Workers Party the natural candidate to contest the People's Action Party in Punggol East.

Whatever the merits of this argument, which has just about as many holes in it as Singapore's take on the concept of meritocracy, online commentators, bloggers, and alternate media groups saw their role to cajole, intimidate, castigate, ridicule, and in essence bully the Singapore Democratic Party, the Reform Party, the Singapore Democratic Alliance, and their supporters into dropping out of the contest, in the interests of "opposition unity" and the apparent mandate of heaven for the Workers Party.

In the best of worlds, the blogosphere ought to be a vanguard of society. It may not be representative of the public (not to say the voting population of Punggol East), but it can lead public discussion, shape responses and criticisms to policies.

We at Illusio question the mobilisation of online resources to be unleashed as attack dogs on RP, SDP, and SDA. As a vanguard, the power of the blogosphere has been underestimated and misused. Long after the nominations were tendered and the by-election was under way with rallies held, my online colleagues continued to expend much effort attacking the RP and SDA. Now if these two parties are that obviously non-contenders, why did the attacks persist till 22 January?

I do not enjoy calling my fellow Singaporeans political illiterates. Yet many of the loudest voices of this fortnight seem to forget the political narrative: the PAP is on a long downhill slide in popularity and it is far more effective and economical for the political blogosphere to drive up the negatives of the PAP during this by-election instead of driving up the negatives of their non-preferred opposition parties.

They have forgotten their power as the vanguard to set the national issues for this election, their power to force agendas onto the political incumbents. Because of this curious blindness and muteness, the major national level issue of AIM-gate only surfaced, brought up half-heartedly at the WP rally last night - 3 days before the election.

Again, I do not enjoy calling my fellow Singaporeans political illiterates. What appears to be elite strategy to leave major issues of an election unexamined till the eve of the election is pure unadulterated utter stupidity. It is a strategy designed to not make major issues count in an election. Where the blogosphere could have pushed the agenda on both the PAP and WP, to accelerate the timeline so that this major issue has sufficient time to percolate into the considerations of voters, by and large it chose not to.

This particular argument applies to the SDP as well. Whatever merits its decision to pull out of the election, the SDP is not excused from continuing to speak out against the policy failures of the ruling party, and driving up its negatives.

We hope the blogosphere at large will reflect on their mis-steps in this by-election, get themselves a real political education, and do better by 2016.

The PAP clown council political funding reform show

As the author of Illusio, I have only one operating principle:  the priestess of Ise never opines or offers analysis proffered elsewhere. Weeks or months after the eruption of a cause celebre, find much to say that no-one has pointed out, or an angle from which no-one has approached. It is not to keep a dead issue alive but to examine if consensus has been manufactured, a status quo hurriedly agreed upon, a veil and a gag brought down to shutter the eyes, the ears, the mind of a public unaccustomed to inquiry.

Over the last 3 posts, we have offered a thorough (though not exhaustive) analysis of the PAP-AIM town council clown show. No other blogger so far has walked you, dear Reader, step-by-step through this tangled web. It is one thing to say there is a conflict of interests; it is yet another to show you where that conflict lies, which part of it is legally actionable and which part merely unseemly, and at which point in the procurement process that conflict arose.

From a legal and procedural analysis of the PAP clown council-AIM scandal in our previous 2 posts, we ascertain that:
1. It is not in fact illegal for the PAP to own, directly or indirectly, the company AIM. It is also not illegal for AIM to be 'owned' indirectly by a different entity.
2. Both AIM and the PAP are not legally obliged to indicate to the general public the status and details of ownership. (*AIM would have to disclose this to their appointed auditors, nonetheless.)
3. As it stands, the law is silent on whether the conflict of interest between AIM and the town councils should have been reflected.

Nevetheless, Minilee has called for the Ministry of National Development to investigate fully the clown counil-AIM deal to ensure that 'trust in the system' is maintained.

Decoding Minilee, it should be apparent to Singaporean observers that for all the legalistic posturing by Teo Ho-pin, whether the clown council-AIM deal was technically legal (arguably true) or whether international standards of corporate governance had been adhered to (arguably false, see our immediate previous post), the mere fact that the clown councils engaged AIM to be a middleman to deal with the previous contractor NCS is enough to compromise trust in the system.

Perhaps people will eventually find the eloquence for their supposed disquiet and ask: Why do our laws permit a political party to financially back companies so that these companies accrue political advantage in financial dealings?

Follow the money trail

Last post, we left off with the question: What happens to the money AIM earns from its contracts with the town councils? Will the Ministry of National Development even investigate that?

In a procurement audit involving potential conflict of interests, it is a general rule to ask where the money goes. While Teo Ho-Pin is not a shareholder or director of AIM and Chandra Das and his co-owners and directors at AIM are not officials or employees of the town council, it remains that all the parties involved in the procurement deal are members of the PAP.

We have argued that Dr Teo issued a tender for a contract that was financially unfeasible and did not make business sense, and that AIM was awarded the contract on the sole merit that it was a PAP-owned or PAP-backed company. In other words, AIM accrued business advantage from its political affiliation to the extent that it could be the sole bidder, be a dormant company that had no public track record, put in a late bid. Yet it won the contract because Dr Teo, unlike most other Singaporeans, knew the political affiliation of AIM, and said that was sufficient cause to award the contract to AIM.

But what happens to the money AIM earns from its contracts with the town councils? On his part, Das acclaims that he doesn't take a single cent as salary, share dividends, or directorship fees from his position in AIM. That is curious until we read PAP's party constitution, which states in Article X:

No member shall except for professional services rendered at the request of the Central Executive Committee, receive any profit, salary or emolument from the funds or transactions of the Party.

We hypothesise that as party members who are shareholders and directors of a company backed by a letter of guarantee by the PAP, Das and his party colleagues, former and present shareholders and directors likewise, are subject to this stipulation.

But where does the money go to then? Who does it belong to? Does it sit forever in Action Information Management in trust of the People's Action Party? Or does it go eventually to the People's Action Party?

Note that if the earnings of AIM go back to the PAP, then it may be argued that it is Teo who has committed a legally actionable conflict of interest. By awarding the contract to AIM, which he knows to be PAP-backed, he has made it possible for AIM's income deriving from the contract to be transferred to the PAP (of which he, Das, and the AIM shareholders and directors are members), thereby awarding financial advantage from the deal ultimately to the PAP and its members.

Political financing reform drastically needed

A reading of the Political Donations Act affirms the extensive strictures limiting donations to political parties. There are limits to how much money a political party may receive from companies and other organisations, the nature of companies. Parties are required to account to minute detail the donations they receive each year.


Yet as the PAP clown council-AIM affair illustrates, there are sufficient loopholes in the laws of Singapore to allow political parties to 'own' private companies indirectly, and the incomes derived from these are, as a result of lacunae and silences in the law, not subject to scrutiny. Further, we now know that as written, the laws do not require political parties to declare even if they do indeed own indirectly private businesses, much less clarify on the legality of such arrangements.

To regain public trust in the system, a relook at political financing regulations needs to be performed. We believe that the Ministry of National Development does not possess the mandate and has not been tasked to examine this particular issue.

I suggest interested readers do their own research on the international legal norms concerning political ownership of private corporations.

The clown council-AIM affair is not a purely administrative matter; the conflict of interests ultimately rests on whether undue political advantage was accrued by AIM and whether undue financial advantage was accrued by the PAP. If this were illegal in the eyes of the law, it stands that there can be no damage to the people's trust in the system. The damage to the people's trust in the system stems from the possibility that such conflicts of interests are apparently not illegal as the law currently stands.

Hence, I call upon the president of Singapore to convene an independent board of inquiry chaired by the Auditor-general of Singapore and the Registrar of Societies to investigate the issue, and not the MND. Only these two regulators may request for a full and public account from the PAP of all private enterprises it directly owns or indirectly backs and the incomes derived thereof, and to ensure that these incomes are indeed reflected in the accounts of the PAP, and do comply with the Political Donations Act, (I)(3).

With the surprise revelation of AIM's ties to the PAP, the PAP's refusal to disclose whether it owns other companies, and AIM's refusal to disclose the details of other financial dealings it may have had in the past, it appears there is a legal loophole for a political party to own, however indirectly, private enterprises without traditional transparency and accountability mandated elsewhere in the law. Several lacunae in the law have coalesced such that these standards of transparency appear suspended when it comes to the very special case of political financing, where a party owns private enterprises.

Singapore's elected parliamentarians and other politicians must take this issue seriously and urge for a new Political Financing Bill that will clarify these blind spots currently existing in the law, and to harmonise Singapore's political financing regulations to internationally-accepted norms.

The PAP Clown Council procedural show

Like experts on corporate governance who weighed in officially on the issue after Minilee's decree for an investigation into the clown council by the Ministry of National Development gave them the much-needed spine, we at Illusio are convinced that there is a pressing and obvious question of conflict of interests, non-transparency, and inappropriate procedures surrounding Teo Ho Pin's sale, as 'coordinating chairman', of municipal-level management software of 14 town councils to Action Information Management Pte Ltd.

In our last post, we established that very strictly speaking, the questions of conflict of interests, non-transparency, and inappropriate procedures do not lie on Chandra Das and the other directors of AIM. In addition, we proposed that the conflict of interests involved in this case are not legally actionable but fall under the wider issue of the ethics of corporate governance and also, appropriate procedures and full disclosure.

From the point of view of process auditing, at the very minimum, these two questions should be asked in any subsequent investigation by any appointed authorities and regulators as an automatic trigger for the conflict of interests issues surrounding the town council sale.

1. Was the conflict of interest disclosed by AIM to the town council during the bidding process? Note this is despite the fact that legally speaking, AIM Is not legally bound to disclose its PAP-ownership to the public via its accounts or company statements. Legal requirements are not the same as auditing or corporate governance requirements.

2. Was the conflict of interest disclosed by the town councils in their annual reports submitted to the Ministry of National Development and the Auditor-General of Singapore?

In many cases of conflicts of interest that are non-actionable by law, the issue is of an issuer and issuee who are affiliated entering a contract. That is to say, the issuer or issuer are not shareholders, directors, or employees of each other but possess other corporate, social, political, or personal affiliations. For example, both parties could be separate subsidiaries of the same conglomerate, or have known each other for 20 years as members of the local Toastmasters, or are related by marriage or blood.

Yes, it's not legally actionable. But no, that doesn't mean the conflict of interest doesn't exist. What it means is you're supposed to, for the sake of your auditors and the regulatory body, declare this conflict of interests during the process as well as the audit, to say, "Yes, we are both affiliated but the contract was awarded due to the bidder's superior offer, track record, etc." Failure to do so? Not illegal per se but just plain ugly.

Unlike certain conspiracy theories, we therefore do not predict that the MND investigation will lay the blame on the auditors; they simply didn't know and wouldn't know there's a conflict of interest since AIM's political ownership structure is still legally non-transparent and an object of speculation, even ours.


Next, the regulators or investigators will need to consider the following:


3. Was the contract one which was economically, financially, operationally justifiable? Was AIM's PAP affiliation a necessary and sufficient factor for its winning the contract?

It stands that if there are no takers for the contract Teo Ho Pin offered, then from the market point of view, the work entailed in the contract for the sum offered did not make financial, operational, or economic sense. Note that The New Paper has canvassed procurement and software experts who have said just as much.

Now, we consider Teo Ho Pin's statement on 2 January 2013. We note his statement that having considered AIM's sole bid to indicate that the town council offer was reasonable and made market sense, "...we were confident that AIM, backed by the PAP, would honour its commitments."

We suggest that if procurement and software experts may still be found to testify to the Ministry of National Development's investigation (and that the MND would field the question in the first place) that the town councils' contract was not one that any profit-making software company would enter into, then it might follow that AIM was mistakenly awarded the contract by Teo Ho Pin purely out of the fact that he knew it was PAP-backed. If the contract is not economically or financially justifiable, then it is impossible to win it on any merits.

Next. Depending on the investigator, a case might even be made that AIM accrued political benefits from its affiliation in this contract.

4. When and how did Teo Ho Pin know about the PAP affiliation of AIM?

As noted by too many other commentators, there is no publicly available information to corroborate Teo's assertion that AIM is "PAP-backed" or Chandra Das's claim that AIM is PAP-owned.

We at Illusio look forward to the Ministry of National Development to investigate just when and how Dr Teo knew about AIM's nature. It could very well turn out that not only did Teo mistakenly award the town council contract to AIM solely because of its PAP affiliation but also that he made the decision while being privy to its secret ownership. This would be properly speaking, a prime example of improper procedure in corporate governance where the issuee awards the contract for reasons only available to the issuee and not the general public, not even the regulatory body.

Now if our previously-mentioned investigator has taken to inquire if AIM had accrued political benefits from its affiliation, backing, or ownership by the PAP, this investigator may well be swayed by the fact that Dr Teo, being a PAP member having very specialised and restricted knowledge of AIM's affiliation with the PAP, did not in fact declare this to the town council and excuse himself from the awarding of the contract - but instead used it as a prime reason for awarding the contract when the tender should have been called off.

5. So will the investigation by the Ministry of National Development investigate where the money AIM earns from these town council contracts end up? Is this line of inquiry mandated by Minilee's assumption of the investigation committee?

The PAP Clown Council conflict of interests show

In my previous analysis of the PAP town council affair, we established that the real issues surrounding Teo Ho Pin's awarding, as "coordinating chairman of 14 PAP town councils", of a contract to Action Information Management Pte Ltd (AIM), were conflict of interests, non-transparency, and inappropriate procedures. All questions and analyses of municipal management issues of a similar nature will eventually ask a final question - was there sufficient evidence of procurement corruption, whether intentional or non-intentional?

I never quite answered that question, much less broached it last week. Instead, I ended with a series of questions that weren't even directed at Chandra Das, Teo Ho Pin, or even the PAP. Those questions, dear readers, were for you to mull over, to appreciate the wider implications (beyond conflict of interests, etc) raised by this issue, and to prepare yourselves to handle the response by Minilee as well as Aljunied-Hougang Town Council (AHTC). And hopefully you have thought over them and are ready for me today.

There is conflict of interests, and then there is conflict of interests

Here were my first 3 questions from Sunday, which we will now take on together.

1. How does a company registered under the names of 3 former PAP MPs become a PAP-backed company (according to MP Dr Teo), a PAP-OWNED company (according to former MP Chandra Das)?

2. Is there any reflection in ACRA records that AIM is a PAP-owned company?

3. Do Chandra Das and his other 2 directors have a legal duty to declare that AIM is a PAP-owned company in its official records?

You will note in The Straits Times report on Minilee's call for an investigation into the town council matter, that it is not even a matter of debate whether there is a conflict of interests or not. The overwhelming consensus of corporate governance experts, as reported by ST, is there were obvious conflict of interests, non-transparency, and procedural issues with Teo Ho Pin's sale of software rights and award of contract to AIM.

But on a finer scale, there are conflict of interests that are legally actionable and conflict of interests that are merely questionable in a corporate governance framework. Our conjecture is Teo Ho Pin's defense of his decision as fully legal and within the boundaries of corporate governance frameworks comes from a narrow, legalist interpretation of what constitutes conflict of interests.

What type of conflict of interests are legally actionable? It turns out in this case, only when Teo Ho Pin is also a director, shareholder, or employee of AIM, or when Chandra Das or his fellow shareholders and directors are also directors, employees, or shareholders of any of the 14 PAP town councils of which Teo was a "coordinating chairman".

Now, we will turn to our trio. It is quite possible for the PAP to "own" AIM via several legal instruments with ACRA still reflecting correctly that the firm belongs to Das et al. We suggest a letter of guarantee where the PAP underwrites AIM and its operations to the tune of say, $1 million. Or say, a sum of $999,998. We offer these two figures due to the fact that AIM was supposed to have a paid up capitalisation of $1 million in its incorporation, and the $2 eventually capital that the company was set up with. In other words, PAP "owns" AIM via holding its "debt".

As a private limited company, AIM is indeed not required to open its books to the public or divulge its true ownership. Auditing and accounting-wise, there is nothing illegal about this arrangement.

From the point of view of the companies act and modern auditing and accounting standards, the questions of (legal) conflict of interests and (legal) non-transparency are not for AIM or Chandra Das to answer, but for Dr Teo Ho Pin and the People's action party to clarify.

And now for something completely different: AHTC Clown Show
We turn now to the Aljunied Hougang Town Council Clown Show. Again, we will use the legal definition of conflict of interests vs corporate governance definition.

If you need a refresher of the AHTC Clown Show, please read here. We'd like to point your attention to the fact that of the 4 new directors found their way into FMSS, a certain How Weng Fan also happens to be a former secretary of HTC, the direct precursor of AHTC.

Recall our earlier statement on legally actionable conflict of interests: it is when the town council has awarded a contract to a company whose shareholders are its former employees and managers.

But when did How Weng Fan stop being a secretary of HTC? Was that before or after the formation of FMSS? How many other directors of FMSS have rendered services for HTC in the past? How many of them have rendered exclusive services for HTC?

It is sad to see that unlike Teo Ho Pin, Chandra Das, and the PAP, it is the Workers Party, AHTC, and FMSS that have far less wriggle room.

The PAP clown show continues! (Town council edition)

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
-- Marx's introduction in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Almost two years ago, half-hearted reports in the mainstream media hemmed and hawed over Aljunied-Hougang Town Council (AHTC) and its award of a contract to a firm which was registered barely on the eve of the elections.

Thanks to my sources, I sought to provide a fuller picture of just what was unsettling about the AHTC case, namely non-transparency, less than proper procedures in the tender process, a clear conflict of interests in the firm that won the contract. Whether or not there was any intention or whether this was simply a matter of non-standard or even slipshod management, it did lead my source and others familiar with town council procurement procedures to question if there was any procurement corruption - intentional or accidental.

Almost two years later, Marx's quip about history repeating itself holds true. We wouldn't say there has been a scandal but at the very least, there has been widespread concern over the blogosphere and media, again composed of half-hearted hemming and hawing, over how 14 PAP-run town councils outsourced their management software solution to a company called AIM.

Like before, as the priestess of Ise, I am bound by duty and obligation to point out the farce that lies before us - even though I fully expect the mainstream media now, as it did before two years ago, to leave the matter hanging while the balls are up in the air, out of sheer cowardice and fear of inquiring after what people need to know and want to know.

The real issue, as before, is conflict of interest

To a process auditor, the fact that (Action Information Management Pte Ltd) AIM is a company with $2 paid-up capital is immaterial.

The real cause for concern is the fact that a firm registered to former PAP MPs was awarded a contract for 14 PAP-held town councils by Teo Ho Pin, who was a sitting MP at that time and now names himself the "coordinating chairman" of these town councils, after being the sole bidder for the tender, and submitting the tender way past the deadline.

The fact of the case is there has been a conflict of interest, just as there was a clear conflict of interest in the AHTC case 2 years ago. AHTC awarded a contract to a firm set up by its former employees and managers. Now, it is revealed that Teo Ho Pin awarded a contract to a firm set up by his former parliamentary colleagues.

But a conflict of interest or a preferential awarding of contracts doesn't necessarily imply that there is any criminal or otherwise illegal behaviour, much less political corruption or procurement corruption.

A hypothetical professional auditor may query MP Dr Teo Ho Pin and former MP Chandra Das thus: Was the conflict of interest disclosed by AIM during the bidding process?

The auditor-general of Singapore, whose purview is checking the books of town councils, may query MP Dr Teo Ho Pin and former MP Chandra Das thus: Was the conflict of interest disclosed by the town councils in their annual reports submitted to him?

If the answer to both questions (both easily verifiable) is no, then according to some process auditors there might be a case for an investigation by the relevant regulatory authority.

Love me tender (as a farce)
We refer to the report in The New Paper, dated 5 January 2013 on page 6. As Lucky Tan points out: "For the tender process to work successfully and fairly, companies have to be provided sufficient information to put in a bid. In this case, the tender involves the purchase a custom software and specifications have to be sufficiently detailed so that companies can value the system and put in a competitive bid."

Instead, Hutcabb Consulting believes that the tender was a non-transparent one, with insufficient information provided about the nature of the work to be contracted. We infer from what the IT procurement experts canvassed by TNP said, that the contract made no business sense, the work had no financial benefit; hence "companies would ordinarily not bid for such contracts." You can find other software experts saying the same thing elsewhere.

And like the AHTC saga from 2 years ago, we come to the same questions of whether the tender process and the terms and scope of the contract was preferential in the sense that no other firm aside from the one awarded would have put in a bid for it. An auditor will ask if the tender process and terms of the contract make no business sense to bid for the contract unless that one firm was connected to the town council or the PAP.

Nothing illegal or corrupt yet but the non-transparency stinks anyway

I admit that even if this were a case of preferential contracts, this is not a smoking gun for political corruption.

What makes this entire affair a clown show and a farce is how Dr Teo Ho Pin and Mr Chandra Das proceed day by day to whittle down their vast reserves of citizen goodwill, reasonable doubt over the rightness of the tender and award process, as well as the general trust in the transparency of Singapore's only ruling party since independence.

We can only say it's nothing short of flabbergasting the elan that possesses Teo when he says that during the time of him awarding the contract to AIM, he already knew that AIM was backed by the PAP. And that's not as farcical as the further admission from Chandra Das himself that AIM is PAP-owned. And perhaps not as mindblowingly hilarious that Das follows that up with a refusal to state how much assets and business his PAP-owned company has.

But let's look at the other real issue of transparency here:

1. How does a company registered under the names of 3 former PAP MPs become a PAP-backed company (according to MP Dr Teo), a PAP-OWNED company (according to former MP Chandra Das)?

2. Is there any reflection in ACRA records that AIM is a PAP-owned company?

3. Do Chandra Das and his other 2 directors have a legal duty to declare that AIM is a PAP-owned company in its official records?

4. Is it legal for the PAP as a political party with donation and funding limitations to 'own' companies registered in the names of private individuals?

5. Does the PAP operate any other businesses that are registered in the names of private individuals, as Das and his other 2 directors were?

6. As a political party, has the PAP furnished the Registrar of Societies, whose purview is in part the management and disciplining of political parties in Singapore, a full list of companies officially PAP-owned and unofficially held in trust for PAP by private individuals, their assets, and their business returns?

As the priestess of Ise retires for the night, we leave these questions hanging in the air for a day or two, or a week or two, as fruit for your thought.

Our thoughts? What a clown show!

Listening in to SMRT's station announcements

Xenophobia, creeping sinicisation, misplaced political correctness, or pure sedition?

The uproar following SMRT's recent move to begin train station announcements in Mandarin seems to be overshadowed by the mishandling by SMRT and NTUC of the recent bus driver strike.

In inimitable Illusio fashion, we of course are more fascinated by last week's news - not just because we have something to say that hasn't already been said by other commentators, but because we believe this issue is more important and urgent to Singapore society than a straightforward industrial action.

Several explanations have been volunteered by commentators to explain how an innocuous decision would lead to widespread condemnation. We examine these explanations in their discursive context of Singapore as an ideological community whose cohesion and coherence can only be maintained through a struggle of positions and positions-taking by different interest groups in a struggle over the right to define what is legitimately Singaporean.

Xenophobia or creeping sinicisation?

The theory goes that the Singapore government under Papalee, Goh Chok Tong, and Minilee have been biased towards encouraging migration of Chinese nationals from the PRC in order to maintain its racial quota for Chinese Singaporeans to form not less than 70% of the total population of the island.

Culturally though, Singaporean Chinese haven't been the ones to demand Singapore be covered in signs and announcements in Mandarin. The popular suspicion is this scheme is an attempt to pander to monolingual migrant workers and immigrants from China.

Since on one hand, they are not eager or willing to participate in public life in any other language than Mandarin (and are perceived to be more exclusive in their interactions with ethnic Chinese than Chinese Singaporeans), and on the other, the Singapore government values their presence, it would rather bend over backwards to accommodate them - whatever other races in Singapore might say about the obvious and indefensible favouritism shown by SMRT.

This line of reasoning ends with the charge of creeping sinicisation, and the corresponding counter-charge of xenophobia. The issue is not about the language used but a resentment against the perceived blatant race-based favouritism of the PAP government's immigration policies from the past decades, and the knee-jerk reaction of some Singaporeans to slander any criticisms of PAP's immigration policies as xenophobia.

We at Illusio believe it would be far more productive to argue the pros and cons of Singapore's immigration policy and its perceived policy failures on their own merit, rather than to pick on any issue as an allegory or proxy for a debate over immigration.

Misplaced political correctness or pure sedition?

It's no wonder then the eventual responses by Gerard Ee (the LTA chairman) and SMRT's essentially pleaded misplaced political correctness. It's evident from their long silence and eventual choice of defense that the LTA and SMRT were unprepared for the uproar, with the implication that these decisionmakers are out of touch with a significant proportion of Singaporeans.

But let's take a look. Gerard Ee and SMRT claims that the new station announcements were offered in Mandarin in good faith. There was commuter feedback, a desire to offer 'service improvements', and seriously, there are "quite a number of Chinese who do not speak English well and refer to places by their Chinese names." SMRT does not intend in the near future to provide train station announcements in Malay or Tamil - Singapore's other 2 official languages - because "most station names, when pronounced in English, sound similar to that in Malay and Tamil." But hey, they're sorry if their best intentions were seen as racist when all they wanted to do was to be politically correct!

We'd like to pause to point out the ridiculous stupidity or cunning mendaciousness of this defense.

Take for example Lynette Sng, the customer relations officer from SMRT.

In her PR release, she spouts gems like "During our review, it was clear to us that most station names, when pronounced in English, sound similar to that in Malay and Tamil" and "Stations names in Mandarin, however, sound different [like] Somerset, 索美塞 (Suo Mei Sai)"

Pre-existing station names are not in English. They are in a multiplicity of languages - some of which aren't even Singapore's official languages! The reason why "most station names in English sound similar to that in Malay and Tamil" is because we have adopted the Malay and Tamil (and Hindi) names for these stations. Not because they're in English, you know.

I may forgive a bear of little brain for mistaking 'verandah', 'bungalow', 'shampoo', or 'jungle' for English words. I find it beyond belief that the aggregate collective intelligence of an organisation like the SMRT can come to the conclusion that Dhoby Ghaut is an English name that happens to sound like its Tamil name. And by the way, it's HINDI. NOT TAMIL. And just so we know that the collective aggregate of the intelligence of SMRT is a flatlined zero, Lynette Sng and her esteemed colleagues miss the point that "索美塞 (Suo Mei Sai)" is a Mandarin transliteration of Somerset. To Mandarin ears, SUO MEI SAI sounds exactly the same as Somerset. That's why it's called a transliteration.

If you believe Gerard Ee and Lynette Sng, up to this month, for the entire existence of Singapore's MRT system, Singaporeans have been content to think of and refer to places in their original names, whether it be in Hindi (Dhoby Ghaut), Malay (Bedok, Kembangan, Kallang, Aljunied, Eunos, Tampines, Pasir Ris, Potong Pasir, Serangoon, Tanah Merah, Rochor, Bukit Batok, Kranji, Marsiling, Paya Lebar, Bugis), Teochew and Hokkien (Hougang which everyone pronounces as "Aw Gang" anyway, Lim Chu Kang, Toa Payoh, Choa Chu Kang, Yew Tee, Boon Keng, Joo Koon, Sengkang), Cantonese (Bishan), Mandarin (Simei) or a happy, neutral compromise of English (Redhill, City Hall, Raffles Place, Marina Bay), or an even happier compromise of a foreign language (French for Esplanade, Arabic for Khatib, Kurdish for Kovan, Spanish for Buona Vista). And now, they've made up their minds and want to hear EVERYTHING in Mandarin.

If you believe Gerard Ee and Lynette Sng, it would seem that Singaporeans who have been content to live with a geography that's multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual, who have no problems referring to and thinking of places in languages other than their own, who celebrate Singapore's diversity in the most everyday act of their lives, have suddenly decided not to do so. And that SMRT and LTA are either fine with that or want to encourage this further.

In a wider context, it has taken decades for a Singapore prone to deadly racial riots to develop a sizable proportion of citizens who are multicultural enough to accept, respect, and use place names in their original languages instead of insisting that every place be imposed a name in their own preferred language, who refer to places in their original names even talking with people of their own race.

To this evidently uninfluential group of happy, multicultural Singaporeans, the LTA and SMRT's decision to force station announcements in Mandarin doesn't come across as an honest mistake erring on the side of political correctness. On the contrary, it sounds like an attempt to harm the racial harmony of the Singapore they imagine themselves living in -- pure sedition, in other words.

To an even smaller group, it might even sound like a regression to the bad old days of the early 1980s, where Singapore chafed under a resurgent tide of Chinese chauvinism. Those days, zealots went around insisting that if you're Chinese, any word coming out of your mouth had better be Mandarin unless you're speaking to a Malay or Indian. There's a reason they were dealt with. That may well be the reason for the seething rage of many young Singaporeans in response to SMRT's ill-advised stunt.

LTA and SMRT had better rethink their train station announcement policy. It's not only misguided and wrong; it may well destroy the harmony between the races in Singapore.

Minilee's keyboard kommandos - exposed!

In 2007, ministers in the PAP government were tasked to set up a 'counter-insurgency' against their online critics. No one paid them attention. No one bothered to read them. If anyone knew which websites they were operating, no one bothered to publicise their writings.

An Aside: What we've learnt from our 2 years on Facebook

That's all changed in the past few years thanks to a more social media and in particular, the rise of Facebook. I'll admit here that like a few other, better-known bloggers, I made the decision to move my commentary online.

Over the months, I discovered that there is a price for giving up anonymity, of having your multiple online personalities and networks all collapse into one. But more importantly, I discovered that Facebook just isn't a natural space for writing long analyses and getting a true public to read them and participate in commentary.

You could write a long, thoughtful post exposing a policy failure. But for reasons of privacy, you're not going to place your profile on public mode. Yet you wrote this precisely so the public could read it, right? You could count on your friends to share your note, so slowly it goes out into the Facebook public. Great. Now there will be some discussion. Most of which will be one-liner comments thanks to Facebook's social engineering constraints. How many of your friends shared that post? There will be that many fragmented discussions to your piece. And how many of their friends in turn bother to share it? Well.

When it comes down to the line, we're not exactly sure if we have that much of a wider reach by moving to Facebook. We're not even sure if moving to Facebook actually promotes greater discussion than posting direct to blogs. We certainly don't believe that Facebook is a medium that encourages deep and sustained discussion in one consolidated place that blogging does. So we're back.

PAP's Facebook Counter-insurgency

What we did notice straight away was how the counter-insurgency on Facebook as its battlefield of choice. As identified by Singapore Hall of Shame, groups like Fabrications Against the PAP are prominent in disseminating their propaganda against public accusations of the PAP's policy failures.

As much as I'd like to protect their rights to free speech, I am not impressed by how often they would resort to going on the offensive against opposition politicians using the odious tools of misinformation, misdirection, and non sequitur. And since this was a feature of Facebook that when you 'subscribe' to your favourite politicians' pages, you can see every post where they're tagged, you could see how often FAAP tagged Chee Soon Juan, Kenneth Jeyaratnam, Low Thia Kiang, Tan Jee Say, and others in posts that had nothing to do with them, just so FAPP could spam your Facebook feed. It's frankly obnoxious and borderline passive-aggressive.

They seem to be doing very well. In 2007, the Straits Times reported that this online counter-insurgency numbered around 20. Reports by Singapore Hall of Shame and Littlespeck put the current count in October 2012 at over 260.

I suppose we should expect that kind of low-down behaviour from a PAP counter-insurgency. But did any of us predict that these Keyboard Kommandos would be so brazen as to offer to buy Internet user IDs from account holders?

Questions for PAP's counter-insurgency ministers and MPs

TO: Messrs. Dr Ng Eng Hen (Minister for Defence, MP-Bishan Toa Payoh), Lui Tuck Yew (Minister for Transport, MP-Jalan Besar), Zaqy Mohamad (PAP-Choa Chu Kang), Baey Yam Kam (MP-Tampines), and Ms Josephine Teo (MP-Bishan Toa Payoh).

1. Please clarify if you are still chairing the PAP New Media committee, and its media strategies and new media capabilities subgroups.

2. Please clarify if your New Media committee has had any hand in organising, funding, briefing, training, advising, or otherwise providing material support to the groups on Facebook identified as New Compass and Fabrications Against the PAP or persons who are its members.

3. In light of their clearly partisan, well-organised activities and a burgeoning membership that suggests strong funding and professional organisation, would you recommend to Minilee to gazette these groups as political associations?

4. In light of their scheme to solicit Facebook accounts for the purpose of identity impersonation, we appreciate if you offer to condemn this scheme as criminal and unethical in light of your own party's sincere efforts to engage in a real Singapore Conversation with all citizens.

5. In light of an actually existing Singapore Conversation as started by your own government, we appreciate if you additionally disband your "quiet online counterinsurgency". Its raison d'etre and modus operandi are incompatible with the goals of your Singapore Conversation.

I love quoting myself from 2007

"But there's only one meaning of insurgent that is implied when you use "counter-insurgent", really. The member of an irregular armed force one... And how one takes action against insurgents (i.e. guerrillas) is simple: you dispense with all rules of war and adopt a black ops manual. Adopting unconventional warfare is a must. Against the Vietcong, napalm their forests. Execute them. Against local bloggers, take on anonymous identities and destroy the blogosphere through disinformation and ghostwritten propaganda."

Book Review: Freedom From the Press by Cherian George II

(Read Part I here)

The curious rhetorical device of Cherian George

Some time back, Cherian George published a book called "Freedom From the Press", where a cursory reading reveals that the good professor doesn't want you to take him seriously as an academic. In fact, we argue that he doesn't even take himself seriously as an academic.

We've made hay of a few instances where he resorts to misrepresentation and strawman arguments by summoning faceless, nameless critics out of thin air. But why is this important to us as an indicator of how Cherian George is unfit to be a respected academic, or even an academic at all?

Citations are important. When we read a non-fiction book by an author or academic who wants to be taken seriously, we want to know WHO said WHAT exactly WHERE and WHEN. That's so that we know the author didn't just make things up, or invent people out of thin air and put into their anonymous mouths lame arguments in order to discredit or divert attention from actually existing, stronger arguments.

Now, here's an experiment: try writing an assignment in first year university without proper citations. I'll bet every single dollar I have the professors will fail your assignment. But if you're "Professor" Cherian George, you'd get the entire embarrassment of a book published by the National University Press. And no, you wouldn't be stripped of your teaching post for doing shit like this - which amounts to technical plagiarism.

No comments necessary

And now for your entertainment and enlightenment, here are all the instances where Cherian George does his thing in FOTP. 

I will keep the commentary to a minimum because these excerpts speak very well for themselves the kind of academic Cherian George is. Take your time to read through these gems, then decide if Cherian George didn't just make things up, or invent people out of thin air and put into their anonymous mouths lame arguments in order to caricature actual critics and misrepresent their sensible and strong criticisms - none of which you will read about in his "book".

Your moments of Zen, or Cherian George forgets to cite actual (and respectable) people, actual publications!

For example, otherwise authoritative sources refer to the news publishing behemoth Singapore Press Holdings as "government-owned" when it is not. (p. 2)

(Interestingly on p. 10, Cherian George admits that yeah if you want to look at it critically, SPH is government-controlled.)

Most critics assume that SIngapore's system is unsustainable because it is undemocratic. (p. 7)

Equally dogmatic are those at the opposite end of the political spectrum, in whose eyes the PAP and its instruments are corrupt usurpers of the people's freedom and dignity. This group includes foreign critics with a barely concealed contempt for Singapore and its people... In their eyes, any attempt to analyse the press system in anything longer than a single, colourful, expleteive-deleted (or not) sentence is at best a waste of time... (p. 18)

By misidentifying the ways in which the government controls media and politics, analysts have arrived at erroneous conclusions. According to some, Singapore's unfree media system was supposedly incompatible with an open economy and First World standards of living; it would soon crumble beneath the weight of its own contradictions. Most of these predictions have been based on crude misconceptions about how the press is kept in check... (p. 25)

(There's an entire page's worth of this spiel -- all without citations, presumably because if you were serious to read actual critics and academics take apart Singapore's press system, those won't be the arguments they'd use. Search for Michael Barr's writings, for instance.)

Take any random group of Singaporeans and you will find among them those who appreciate life in PAP-run Singapore and who support strong, decisive government as an integral part of the formula that has provided security and high standards of living. (p. 25)

(Fascinating strawmen you have there, "Professor"!)

Unlike those who see Singapore's media system as a giant contradiction, I would go so far as to say that the PAP has been on the right side of history. (p. 26)

Critics of the PAP had predicted that Singapore's ambitions to be a media hub would be thwarted by its lack of respect for press freedom. (p. 42)

Yet, contrary to the cynics' view that the Singapore press is content with reproducing government handouts, Newscom citations encourage journalists to dig for exclusives and overcome barriers, including obstructive government officials. (p. 54)

Conventional wisdom holds that the PAP -- a regime armed to the teeth with the powers of coercion --- completely overwhelms any professional norms and ideals that the Singapore press may once have possessed. Critics view journalists in a state of unconditional surrender to the government. "They are running dogs of the PAP and poor prostitutes," said David Marshall in 1994. (p. 69)

(This one is interesting. "Conventional wisdom" as a strawman, followed by our usual nameless critics with extreme views, then backed up inexplicably by the late David Marshall, obviously taken out of context. The real-world criticism of SPH that Cherian George is caricaturing and hiding: the press may be 'professional' but is ideologically enslaved, that its reporters are consciously, willingly making up excuses to toe the PAP line. Like say, making up shit about OB markers in the press.

Or as Cherian George himself puts it in p. 48: Professional journalist's' love affair with 'objectivity' and their rejection of journalism's more activist past has made it easier for them to be turned into scribes for the status quo.)


Indeed, Gary Rodan observes that Singapore's media policy may have been partly influenced by a conscious desire to avoid Malaysia's mistakes. Admittedly, this is the kind of observation that enrages critical Singaporeans who would never concede that their press has any credibility. (p. 113)

Singaporean critics of the PAP want to believe that this backwardness is due to government repression. Such a claim would be an insult to media activists elsewhere. (p. 172)
(Here, we have not one but TWO groups of strawmen! Bravo, "Professor"!)

Most believers in democracy want and need to believe that Singapore is closer to the unstable end of the spectrum. They find it too disconcerting the idea that a modern state may have found a way to consolidate authoritarianism... (p. 201)

Opposition politicians and their followers are counting on the PAP's inertia to be its undoing, causing Singapore to succumb eventually to the tide of freedom. (p. 225)

Book Review: Freedom from the Press by Cherian George

Part I: Cherian George doesn't want you to take him seriously as an academic

If you have a good impression so far of the career of Dr Cherian George as a serious political commentator on Singapore politics or as an academic, don't read his reply to Vernon Chan's review of Cherian's book, "Freedom From The Press" on The Online Citizen.

What are we to make of an academic who reacts in this fashion to an unknown complaining that his book isn't rigorous enough, doesn't follow normal academic writing and research standards? It's one thing to perhaps claim that Chan is a nobody making a mountain of a molehill, or that Chan is wrong about the standards required of academic publications. But it's a very different thing to say: "Fortunately for me, NUS Press – one of Asia’s top academic publishers – applied less lofty standards than Chan." or admit that most of the book is "the result of painstaking original research by my assistant."

We have read Cherian George's book following Chan's review in TOC and Cherian George's curious hissy fit, which is remarkably curious and unprofessional since it amounts to an academic telling a non-academic why he didn't have to declare his theoretical framework, and telling the non-academic why he's pretentious in trying to hold the academic to academic standards in his review.

Now we at Illusio have never shied away from being polysyllabic, hurling theoretical frameworks at readers as a preface before answering any question, or even teaching you all about the media theory of Roland Barthes. We can afford to be pretentious while taking down Dr Cherian George.

Pseudo-Intellectual Waffling

But let's give credit where credit is due. Where it comes to pretentiousness and putting on pretensions, no one outshines Cherian George. Let's take a look at the first two chapters of Freedom From the Press.

Geroge presents no theoretical framework, no consistent strategy of presenting an analysis of "journalism" and its relation to "state power in Singapore". What about the concept of "freedom" then? For some mystifying reason, George spends two entire chapters feeding us red herrings. In the bizarro universe of Cherian George the academic from NTU, there is a huge controversy over the concept of press freedom. He vacillates between acknowledging its existence, viability, and rightness as a concept and denouncing it, Kishore Mahubhani style, as a convenient western invention that isn't quite practised in the west.

Dispensing with references, sources, and resorting to misrepresentation and strawmen arguments

My issue with these two chapters is not the glibness of Cherian's argument but that it's part of his centrist for the sake of centrist schtick, which I've identified before in this blog. Yet what dismays me (and probably Chan) is Cherian's frequent resort to strawman arguments on both ends of the political divide. Sentences like these are littered throughout FOTP, so much so that Cherian should be hauled up for an Intellectual Public Work Order to clean up his tome.

"One favourite retort of defenders of authoritarian press systems is that there is, after all, no country with absolute freedom."

"Those at the opposition end of the political spectrum includes foreign critics with a barely concealed contempt for Singapore and its people..."

In FOTP, which Cherian George crows that NUS Press saw fit to publish, arguments (mostly against the Singapore press system) are attributed to faceless, nameless critics. And foreign academics, who are almost always faceless and nameless unless they happen to be Mary Turnbull, who wrote a coffee table book (commemorating 100 years of The Straits Times, no less!) commissioned by Cherian's former employer, SPH.

We kid you not. This is a sample paragraph in Cherian's book.

"By misidentifying the ways in which the government controls media and politics, analysts have arrived at erroenous conclusions. According to some, Singapore's unfree media system was supposedly incompatible with an open economy and First World standards of living... Most of these predictions have been based on crude misconceptions..."

Who are these analysts? What are the conclusions, however erroneous, they have made? What predictions did they make precisely? What misconceptions did they base all these on? Where are the flood of citations and footnotes that would normally accompany a paragraph like this?

Cherian George doesn't seem to want to be taken as an academic as long as there are mysterious, unnamed analysts whose studies and predictions he rubbishes without the courtesy of 1. naming them, 2. and their actual studies or articles. It's as good as misrepresenting his fellow academics in other parts of the world, who thankfully won't hear of his wretched excuse of a book since no serious journal will bother reviewing it.

On one hand, George wants to be taken seriously eventually as an academic who writes on the media and state control of the media; on the other hand, George also wants to be taken seriously as a serious academic who isn't like the "western critics" and "anonymous critics" whose criticisms of the Singapore press system he denounces - probably because they're not Singaporean, they're Singaporean but anonymous, and they're more truthful about the state of Singapore's press than he allows himself, as a serious and credible commentator within the Establishment on Singapore politics.

Now here's your moment of zen

What gets Cherian George's goat apparently are the Reporters San Frontieres's Press Freedom Index, which places Singapore near the bottom. He seems to be mightily offended, dismisses the entire enterprise of press freedom indices with just one line: "RSF's methodology is dubious, resulting in the Republic being grouped with regimes where journalists lose not just their liberty but even their lives." And just to show what a good little academic he is, Cherian George provides a CITATION and reference for this judgement call. Namely, his own blog post.

No, I guess there haven't been any serious academics publishing articles in peer-reviewed international journals where they try to analyse the methodology, consistency, validity, and coherence of the Press Freedom Index and others.

In the bizarro universe of Cherian George, Google Scholar shows Zero Results for this because Harvard's Ronald Inglehart hasn't bothered to test the RFI, and SAGE isn't interested in academics trying to take apart surveys and indicators to see if they're worth anything. In the bizarro universe of Cherian George, the academics Harvard and SAGE, amongst others, can't really find a way to discredit the methodology or theoretical basis or validity of the various press freedom indices they've looked at.

In the universe we live in though, a simple Google Scholar search reveals all the western academics (amongst others) who have audited the RSF and Freedom House indices for decades and given them a clean bill of health, as well as explain what these surveys are really telling us (and consistently) over time.

I mention Ronald Inglehart because he's a big hitter in the world of political science. His World Values Survey finally made its way to Singapore earlier this decade. The NUS researchers co-conducting the Singapore leg of his survey spent about 6 months of preliminary research to critique or validate the concept, methodology, and validity of the WVS and found it acceptable. Now when Ronald Inglehart spends time doing the same to the Press Freedom Index and finds it passes muster and publishes a paper on it, you'd trust him. Not this Cherian George clown with his glib 'refutation' of the PFI on his 'journalism' blog.

Gee, so much fail just in the first 2 chapters of his book already? We advise "Dr" Cherian George to be a better academic or just stop pretending to be one.

And maybe If you have a good impression so far of the career of Dr Cherian George as a serious political commentator on Singapore politics or as an academic, you should skip the introduction and the first 2 chapters of his book, Freedom From the Press.

Book review and Cherian George smackdown to come!

We have never been fans of Cherian George and his attempts to be a political commentator and commentary moderator of the blogosphere.

It has come to our notice that following our criticism of Cherian's writing and our unmasking of his political agenda, the NTU pseudo-academic-on-a-political-sinecure has changed the URL of his online essay twice in the past year and very conveniently made his entire website unavailable for most of this year, until the last fortnight. We have of course updated the broken links once again, and will continue doing so each time Cherian George shifts his URLs around. And if Dr Cherian George takes his site or essays offline ever again, I have screenshots of his essays primed and ready.

Even though we are an old fashioned and unpopular site that no one really reads, Cherian George seems to be taking extraordinary measures to hide his embarrassment from our criticisms. We would like to think that Cherian George is doing this to protect what little academic credibility he has left. Then again, it seems Cherian George has all but given up pretense to academic credibility, at least if you read his startlingly embarrassing reply to a review of his recent book.

Now. We do have a copy of Freedom From the Press, and we are more than happy to review his book right here. After all for an academic, Cherian George must publish or perish - and then he must be reviewed as well, or perish. Illusio is not an international, peer-reviewed political science or media studies journal, but then neither are The Online Citizen or The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Hong Kong - which, 6 months after the book's publication, are the only establishments in the world interested in reviewing his book. Of course, we are honoured to increase the reviews of Cherian's book by 50%.

Look for our review this weekend!

Much ado about an Elected President

We hereby state our disinterest and lack of interest in the current election for the Elected President of Singapore.

We might as well vote for a potted plant or a mascot

As the minister of law Mr K Shanmugam has pointed out, the president can be very easily rendered powerless by the cabinet. If the minister - who speaks presumably for the prime minister on this issue - sees the eventual winner of Saturday's election as unsuitable for the post, all respect can go out of the window. The full letter of the law can be ridiculously and unreasonably applied to ensure the president doesn't even have leave to speak to the public on any issue, thank you very much.

Mr K Shanmugam is either the cleverest man in Singapore or its most stupidest man alive. In one single stroke, the minister of law shows any leaders of a future 'rogue government' how to bypass that famed "guardian of the reserves". Either the president is a superman with the power to clamp down the government or he is a potted plant whose presence and function is tolerated by the government. There are no two ways about it - and the law minister and the Ministry of Law has weighed in his legal interpretation that the president is as good as a potted plant. Or a merlion mascot.

The President is guardian of nothing

Once the elected president was the guardian of the reserves of Singapore. Then the constitution was changed so that the president is the guardian of only the current reserves. In one fell swoop, the government negated the meaning of the presidency - though the citizens of Singapore and even the candidates for its 4th election/selection seem unaware.

As 'defined' by the constitution, the current reserves is whatever the sitting government of the day has put in and the past reserves is whatever the government put in the previous parliamentary sessions. Even though the reserves are in fact the earnings of all Singaporeans, the president is only allowed to safeguard, have power and cognizance over the 'past reserves'.

That is all and well if you assume that 'reserves' are money that are locked up safely in a bank. They are not. A large part of our past reserves are in the form of physical assets (like state land) and investments (like shares bought by GIC). Yet investment income and interest is treated as current income, and so are proceeds from sales of land.

In practice, the distinction between past reserves and current reserves is a weak and manufactured one. Need to sell land to keep up or push down property prices? GIC sells off its stake in a bank? You just helped to convert past reserves to current reserves and now the president is guardian of less before the sale.

What does it matter that a president is not guardian of the current reserves? One can imagine a scenario where a rogue government comes into power tomorrow. Why should it rob the entire reserves, killing the goose that laid the golden egg? Why not use the current reserves to ensure that every 5 years come election time, it'll have a private war chest of pork barrel projects to throw at voters? While in between elections, its MPs vote themselves comfortable a pay raise that it will no doubt find some stupid reason to justify?

Why should we even assume this isn't already done by the ruling PAP?

My friends, the president is either guardian of all the reserves or he is guardian of nothing. I would have endorsed any candidate who would fight for this in his election platform. No candidate has!

Bringing the gavel down on Workers Party I

MSN builds campaign against WP and Sylvia Lim

There is an unfolding situation over at Aljunied-Hougang Town Council. No doubt it's been angled ever so subtly by the government-owned media in Singapore as the B plot and convenient distraction to its presidential election due to take place on 27 August. Like a carefully plotted campaign, Singapore's news media is content to put its citizens on a drip on this story, calibrating the slow release of information that may build up to an implied allegation of mismanagement or corruption in the AHTC as well as the original HTC.

The reporters have the full story but they will not release all of it, not all at once - even though they have the fullest access to the information for a long time. Their cynical exercise may be rightly dismissed as a ploy but what if the story does have legs?

Non-transparency? Improper procedures? Or something far worse?

Consider this: Almost immediately after winning the ward of Aljunied, the Workers Party's town council HATC employed a new managing agent without a tender. The managing agent is FM Solutions (FMSS).

What is even more peculiar is how Ms Sylvia Lim, the incoming MP for Aljunied and concurrently the chairman of AHTC and HTC before that, defends this decision. She alleges "the decision to award FMSS the contract without calling for a tender was due to the deadline set by the Ministry of National Development".

That's bizarre logic there, Sherlock! If there's a deadline that the town council can't meet, the most obvious thing to do is to retain the old managing agent temporarily for a year - not replacing the incumbent with a new managing agent!

We see no logic for WP to claim grounds for its extraordinary measures. During the last election, the Aljunied ward had the least amount of redrawing. We do not hear of other town councils having to enact such measures despite their greater turmoil and reorganisation.

What's even more bizarre is how the managing agent was formed and registered with ACRA only just - on 15 May 2011, to be precise. Yes, AHTC terminated the ongoing incumbent whose contract was still in existence so they could hire a managing agent that is literally brand new. According to ACRA reports, this entity was formed not long before the elections with a paid up capital of $500,000 for the expressed sole purpose of providing town council services.

Let's say anyone with access to competent polling would have known Aljunied would fall to the Workers Party. Let's say someone is enterprising enough to do pre-emptively sink half a million to form a company whose sole business activity is "town councils" to bid for the managing agent position with the new Aljunied Town Council. And hire 77 people on short notice. But that doesn't really make sense unless they're very certain they'd get the contract. And it makes even less sense if FMSS was formed just to contest for the sole tender of AHTC.

None of us would believe that a newly established, costly venture will be content to get a one year contract by the back door. For all intents and purposes, FMSS will be awarded the full contract next year by the AHTC and hence help the press build up its allegations of procurement corruption.

One director, five directors, how many key directors?

Now Sylvia assures us that its managing agent's "key directors have been in the field for an average of 20 years". I don't know what this sentence means. No one can know what it means because it means nothing. It's nonsense, gobbledegook, balderdash. Here, I'll hold your hand in this exercise.

What is an "average" and why is it a meaningful number? An average is the sum total of the attributes of all the units divided by the total number of units there are.

The statement "FMSS's directors have been in the field for an average of 20 years" would make sense in this case. But to say that its key directors (i.e. not all directors) have an average of 20 years tells you exactly nothing. It's an intellectually dishonest and cynical statement. It's intellectually dishonest because an average of a subset of a population says nothing about the population, and cynical because legally speaking, all the directors of a company are jointly accountable - key directors or otherwise.

FMSS has 6 directors in total. Which are its "key directors"? What is the average experience of all the directors in FMSS? These are questions we want answered!

Of course ACRA has all this on record. You'll also notice how FMSS suddenly increased from its original sole director, Mr Danny Loh Chong Meng, registering 4 more directors hurriedly on 16 June just after the press started reporting on WP town councils. Who are these mysterious men? Are they normal directors or key directors? Where did they work previously and how much experience do they have in town council management?

Of interest to us is of the 4 new directors found their way into FMSS, a certain How Weng Fan also happens to be a former secretary of HTC, the direct precursor of AHTC. Is this not already a conflict of interest? When did How Weng Fan stop being a secretary of HTC? Was that before or after the formation of FMSS? How many other directors of FMSS have rendered services for HTC in the past? How many of them have rendered exclusive services for HTC?

Now you see why the news media is preparing the ground with the initial charge of non-transparent procedure in the Workers Party's management of the Aljunied-Hougang town council? It's so it can lead to the eventual allegation of corruption in public procurement.

Love me tender, WP

In fact, Sylvia's logic is even more warped if you take into account the fact that AHTC did have the time anyway to call for a tender for four other contracts on 17 June, barely weeks after winning the ward. And again, it made this decision over the option of holding on to its existing contractors temporarily for a year. Yes, AHTC had so little time that it found the time to call for a tender for everything but a managing agent in this Classifieds ad.

It has so little time that the tender period from announcement to closing date is just 2 weeks - a quickie compared to PAP-held town council project tenders, which are normally 3 weeks to 1 month.

To town council service providers and managers, this should set off alarm bells. Players in the town council services industry need at least 3 weeks to compete competently for a tender because of the time frames involved to get the necessary documentation, certificates, and licenses from the Building and Construction Authority.

In a more bizarre note, the AHTC tender insists on a "pay first" scheme. Ordinarily (i.e. how PAP town councils do things), interested contractors attend the tender briefing to get an idea of the scope of work, the coverage and condition of the town council's area. Then if they feel they are up for it and are still interested, they'll pay the money for the tender documents.

In contrast, AHTC demands that interested contractors pay first to attend the tender briefing. Under what circumstances would any contractor take part in this ridiculous process? Your guess is as good as mine, dear readers.

If we assume procurement corruption, AHTC's shortened and backwards tender process will certainly benefit players who are certain they'll get the awards, i.e. players who have links to the town council. It would be interesting to note which companies won the tenders and who heads them. It would fit in with the same shortened and illogical awarding of the management agent contract to FMSS too.

Paul Krugman repudiates High Broderism

The body of David S Broder lies cold in the ground where he is interred but Paul Krugman sees the need to repudiate the zombie idea of High Broderism, which sometime this decade had infected our very own Cherian George, now known as the apostle of High Broderism in the Archdiocese of Singapore.

Let's review what Cherian George wanted so badly, put in such eloquent words that half the blogosphere with less than half a brain clapped so wildly for:
1. Cherian George wants a fair and balanced blogosphere that he can award give gold stars to
2. In that heavenly blogosphere, the tone will be not too hot and not too cold but just right.
3. In that heavenly blogosphere, there must be a full "spectrum of views": for every anti-ruling party blogger, there should be a pro-ruling party blogger.

Let's review Krugman's own words, the central problem with High Broderism:

This gets at the heart of the current pundit problem. If you say that one of our two major parties has gone completely off the deep end, you’re considered shrill and extreme. But if you don’t say that, if you pretend that someone like Barbour is a reasonable guy with somewhat different views, then you’re fundamentally lying about reality.

Sure, Singapore is a one-party state right now. But we do have ministers like Tharman Shanmugaratnam who insist that the GST flat consumption tax benefits the poor. What do you want us to do to get our gold stars, Cherian George? Have enough bloggers to say that Tharman didn't fail Econs101 but he's merely a reasonable guy with somewhat different views?

And this is precisely what you'll get in the ideal blogosphere of Cherian George and David S Broder: rampant intellectual dishonesty.

Meet Cherian George, Singapore's apostle for High Broderism

We have never been fans of Mr Cherian George. When we have actually deigned to speak about him, we have not been kind. He has never given us reason to be kind even today and we will tell you why. But you'll need to read his latest essay first.

Cherian George is Singapore's pale imitation of David S Broder and the apostle for High Broderism in the archdiocese of Singapore. For those unfamiliar with American political culture the late Broder was an American journalist who, for want of a better word, was an extremist centrist who made a career and pedestal for himself out of denouncing extremists on both ends of the political aisle.

What needs to be pointed out is that the absolute mid point between two extreme political positions is not necessarily the correct position to take, that the truth can lie closer to the left than it is to the right. Sometimes the truth has a liberal bias. And yet the Overton Window of 'acceptable opinion' has easily been gamed by arch-conservatives shifting their positions further right, with useful fools like Broder advocating a shift to the new centre while denouncing... the extremist leftists!

Now read Cherian George's article again, with the recognition of his unstated High Broderist agenda of advocating a centrist position when reality and logic does not warrant it.

Note for example how Cherian Broder complains of the rabidly anti-government to moderately anti-government stance of online chatter and blogs. He forgets that PM Lee's cabinet has committed several public policy failures over the past 5 years. We would question why Cherian expects the "right mood" for the blogosphere to be more centrist. We'd assume that even wonkish bloggers, say Mr Tan Kin Lian at theonlinecitizen, would see no choice but to critique PAP public policy. Reality does have an anti-PAP bias, people.

Note how cleverly he builds up his High Broderism to present us with a false dilemma which is as intellectually dishonest as it is an advertisement for his centrist at all cost ideology: "it is a mistake to put all our eggs in the government basket, it is surely also a mistake to put all eggs in the opposition or non-government basket."

There are so many things wrong with that statement. I'm happy to point out just two.

1. For an academic, George is surprisingly politically illiterate, conflating the PAP with the government and conflating the opposition with non-government. He forgets that the government includes the civil service talent which advised and implemented the public policy failures of the Minilee government over the years, that non-government talent extends far beyond the political opposition to the much wider civil society.

2. He conflates the singular PAP ideology and talent base with the multiplicity of that of the opposition. Putting all your eggs in a singular solution means you lose all your eggs if that solution proves wrong. Putting all your eggs in multiplicity of solutions doesn't mean you lose all your eggs... But clearly, Cherian George would love to mislead us with his imagery. Just saying.

Make no mistake about it: like the late David S Broder, Cherian George is putting himself up as the arbiter of moderate political discourse, a wise man who can put down any idea and position too radical in his eyes; even if reality, truth, and logic have a certain bias.