Are Fake News laws inevitable in Singapore?

Civil society activists in Singapore will no doubt claim that legislation against fake news is inevitable and imminent, that it is part of the authoritarian government's general clampdown on the online media.

In terms of Westminster procedure, Singapore's inevitable march towards fake news laws is in its infancy. Cabinet signals interest and concern on an issue in a Green Paper, a Select Committee is convened. That's where we are at now. Public hearings need to be convened, a committee report drafted and presented in parliament, the cabinet's response to its recommendations and findings presented in another parliament session, a White Paper drafted by the cabinet, potentially more public hearings convened for feedback, the White Paper debated in parliament, a Bill drafted and read twice before passing into law. That is how much more needs to be done.

Yet given how Singapore puts its own spin on Westminster procedure, our hysterical activists might well be right.

Everything you know about Fake News is wrong

Aside from Singapore, other far more democratic countries are considering or have already passed laws against fake news. When the inevitable accusations of authoritarianism and censorship are made by the usual quarters, all Singapore's minister for communications and information (or his permanent secretary needs to do is to point at France and Germany, which have just recently enacted them, and Canada, which has had them for decades. Even the UK has begun the process of studying whether it needs a fake news law.

If the minister and his permanent secretary are competent, they will point out that these laws have been passed in the "liberal West" even in the face of criticisms about the chilling effects on free speech, and promise to be responsible and circumspect with their new powers.

But that will still not detract from the elephant in the room: Fake news is fake.

Keppel and Lava Jato corruption: Is there a cover-up in Singapore?

News of Keppel Offshore & Marine's (Keppel O&M) decade-long bribery in Brazil has filtered slowly into Singapore. The initial announcements in 2014 happened in a country far away. The denials by Keppel's chairman, a former cabinet minister, were robust enough. What really did happen? Investigations were taking place and Singaporeans were willing to give the benefit of the doubt, hoping that all would be revealed in due course.

It is only after investigations have been complete, record regulatory fines paid to anti-corruption agencies in Brazil and the United States that Singaporeans are beginning to realise the enormity of the situation (the enormity being Keppel's fine ranks number 7 in FCPA penalties, historically!)

Lava Jato involved international companies paying bribes to Petrobas,
kickbacks moved down the economic chain, and to also the ruling party and its coalition

But the response from Singapore's government has been most disappointing and a cause for concern.

Is Singapore's leadership succession planning a myth?

The People's Action Party (PAP) has been Singapore's sole ruling party for more than half a century. The PAP ruled Singapore since self-governance in 1959, its federation with Malaysia in 1963, and independence in 1965. It is accepted wisdom that Singapore's leadership transitions are carefully managed: a prime minister is 'chosen' by peers of their cohort, serves for more than a decade, and stays on to guide the next prime minister and their cabinet as a "senior minister".

The managed succession of Singapore's political leadership is a fairy tale and urban legend eagerly consumed by the gullible and the politically illiterate.

Is corruption part of Singapore's foreign policy?

Singapore tolerates no corruption internally, especially within the ranks of its public service. Officials who are accused face thorough investigations by the Corruption Practices Investigation Bureau. Officials who are caught face fierce prosecution and lengthy jail sentences. Even the prime minister himself had to be exonerated by his fellow parliamentarians last year when his relations alleged he misused his power and state agencies to settle a personal dispute.

It is a fine set of principles to live by, garnering accolades for the tiny, resourceless island nation. Transparency International ranks Singapore 7th least corrupt in the world. Its intolerance of corruption makes it one of the most friendly places to do business as well.

Yet the recent corruption scandal involving Keppel Offshore & Marine in Brazil (a subsidiary of Keppel Corporation) raises questions about whether Singapore's intolerance of corruption overseas, despite the declarations by its prime minister that "the actions of Singaporean citizens overseas are treated the same as actions committed in Singapore, regardless of whether such corrupt acts have consequences for Singapore", and despite signing and ratifying a global anti-corruption agreement.

The corruption monster!

Why funny things happen in the National Archives

Pay attention to state press releases during the holidays and long weekends. It is an ideal period to release embarrassing or inconvenient news that must be released, in the hopes that it will escape the public eye, if not the eye of journalists. This Christmas, the UK National Archives announced that thousands of declassified government papers had gone missing. To be more precise, "misplaced while being on loan to government department."

Was this incompetence on the part of the archives, or a pattern of mendacity and obfuscation on the part of the government?

What should Singapore do about Operation Spectrum?

We at Illusio disagree with Jolovan Wham's train protest, on the grounds that even activists and protesters in the liberal West know better than to stage a protest inside a train.

Assuming Wham had staged the protest to highlight the issue of Singapore's Internal Security Act and the infamy of 1987's Operation Spectrum, it is disappointing that after getting the book thrown at him, the coordinated response from his circle of activists has been to highlight his "veteran advocacy" for domestic workers and put him up as a poster boy for free speech and assembly.

You know, do everything but highlight the issue of Singapore's Internal Security Act and the infamy of Operation Spectrum? As though it was a useful pretext that once raised, is never mentioned again?

Should Jolovan Wham have held a protest in a train?

On 3 June 2017, Kirsten Han announced that her fellow activist Jolovan Wham had organised a protest in a Singapore Mass Rapid Transit train. Han reposted on her Facebook a series of photographs from Wham's personal page, showing Wham and eight others sitting blindfolded in a train carriage, holding up the recently published 1987: Singapore’s Marxist Conspiracy 30 Years On, with homemade posters stuck on the walls behind them. While Wham was tagged by Han, his collaborators and co-conspirators are instantly recognisable as activists of a certain bent in Singapore. Everyone knows who they are, but their names will not be mentioned here.

On the morning of 3 June 2017 while Kirsten Han was likely involved in the coordination of the dissemination of the news of the protest, if not the protest itself, I was attending in my personal capacity, as I note were some other members of the Community Action Network, the Singapore Heritage Society 30th anniversary lecture by Prof Kwok Kian-woon at the Singapore Management University.

I had no prior knowledge of the protest. I was not involved in its conception, deliberation, or execution. I was not invited to be part of it. If invited, I would have told them it was a stupid idea that would get them thrown in jail, whether they did it in Singapore, New York, or London.

Singapore transport failure clown show: The Parliament edition

Singapore's train system has been suffering from one public embarrassment to another, breaking its own record for breakdowns every year while the Land Transport Authority (LTA) and the Ministry of Transportation double down by releasing questionable statistics to show that in some metrics they cherry-pick, Singapore's train system is doing better than ever.

You would think when senior management staff get caught falsifying systems management records for at least the past year, that the parliament sitting the next week would be a time of reckoning for the ministry, its regulatory body, their too-big-to-fail train operator Singapore Mass Rapid Transit (SMRT), and its line of incompetent bosses.

But then, this is the same august body that harboured the delusion of thinking it could proclaim the prime minister guiltless in open parliament, based solely on his testimony of events and not an independent investigation by a special counsel. Minister Khaw Boon Wan's performance yesterday is par for the course, in other words, for the national transport clown show.

The realities of Singapore's online landscape

Bertha Henson and Daniel Yap have announced the impending closure of The Middle Ground (TMG), revealing that the news website had failed to meet the challenges of sustainability. Earlier last month, the trio of Dr Thum Pin Tjin, Kirsten Han, and Sonny Liew announced the setting up of "New Naratif" and rolled out their vision, accountability, and subscription model.

Bertha Henson has done a great job with TMG and will be back with Bertha Harian

These developments may fit the establishment's Wild West model of Singapore's online news media, where newcomers can rise out of nowhere to carve an empire of their own, then fall just as fast or settle into also-ran status. On a less simplistic level, the online media landscape is dominated and controlled by Singapore's regulatory framework to such an extent that no full-fledged news site can be economically viable. Where the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act empowers the government to shutter presses as it pleases and more insidiously and demand presses award shares to entities it chooses, recent Media Development Authority regulations empower the government to demand any news site it chooses to cough up hefty monetary guarantees, and to demand forfeiture of that guarantee at its discretion.

Singapore's regulatory framework is a deterrence against the setting up of online news sites, and indirectly incentivises bloggers to stay small and stay within the government's OB markers.

Endgame for the 2017 presidential election

Who won the 2017 presidential election?

The big winner of the 2017 presidential election is not the PAP nor its proxy candidate, Halimah Yacob. This honour goes to the outgoing president, Dr Tony Tan.

Decoding the social media narratives of the 2017 presidential election

It is significant that during the 2017 presidential campaign, the issues that the social media saw as significant to the election had very little congruence with what the candidates themselves, the People's Action Party government, and even we saw as significant and wanted to talk about. It is significant that instead of lulling the electorate to general apathy, this disconnect has served to galvanise them and stoke up their anger at the PAP.

Were these narratives part of an unofficial, yet highly coordinated campaign? Were these narratives more spin, conspiracy theory, and fake news than a reflection of the legitimate issue, that the PAP had compromised Singapore's national principles of multiracialism and meritocracy? Why does it matter if they were? Did we, the people goof up the presidential election as much as the PAP, the elections department, and the candidates themselves?

Decoding the narratives of the 2017 presidential election campaign

We have established that Singapore's People's Action Party government and its proxy campaign for candidate Halimah failed to craft a winning narrative for the election that was credible. Big picture concepts like meritocracy and multiracialism were thrown up in order to manufacture a consensus around Halimah, yet the effect was to convince the populace that the PAP had become deluded, self-serving, or completely Orwellian.

But what about the semi-campaigns of the three candidates?

Breaking the presidency and Singapore, straw by straw

The radical changes to the presidency that the People's Action Party mooted and enacted in 2016 have angered a public originally resigned to seeing the office incrementally remade at the whims of the PAP, for the convenience of the PAP. The old changes fooled no one into thinking they were designed to fix the problems of the presidency; the new changes fool very few as well.

In 2016 when the changes were mooted, it was expected that candidate Halimah, whose hat was thrown into the ring by class clown Chan Chun Seng, would have an easy walkover in the reserved election for a Malay president.

But it was the PAP's proxy campaign for candidate Halimah and its off-kilter messaging that convinced a large section of Singaporeans that the ruling party was intent on endangering the social fabric of Singapore itself, just to ensure a win for its candidate.

The PAP succeeded in wrecking the presidency far better than Wreck-it Ralph

Before the reservation: The internal contradictions of Singapore's elected presidency

Lee Hsien Loong's People's Action Party (PAP) government began in 2016 its radical reforms to the elected presidency, a rush job of the highest order.

A case was made out for the necessity of the changes at the beginning of the year, a thoroughly respectable constitutional commission was convened, public and expert feedback was canvassed through the commission, the commission's report and recommendations pored through and discussed in cabinet, the cabinet's proposed Bill drafted as a response and debated, the Bill read twice and passed in parliament, the expected constitutional challenges and their respective appeals heard and fended off—all in an attempt to ensure the 2017 election would be run under new order rules. (Note: the exercise still ended missing a crucial deadline: Dr Tony Tan's presidency lapsed before his successor was elected.)

In justifying its shifting of the goalposts to engineer its win, Lee has forgotten what was really wrong with the office of the elected presidency to begin with, and has failed to fix it.

Bob the Builder would've done a better job fixing the elected presidency

Understanding Singapore's 2017 reserved presidential election: an introduction

We extend our thanks to Dr Tony Tan for his service to the nation, and to Mdm Halimah Yacob for making history as the first female president of Singapore.

Mdm Halimah is a legitimate president, however compromised her mandate may be, however her office has been tainted by the PAP's management of the presidency and the election.

More than a week after her inauguration, the Minilee government continues to fight a PR battle to claw back the trust and public goodwill it squandered and to salvage the credibility of the presidency, while public anger at the PAP and incredulity at its error of judgement remain unabated.

The issue will not go away, nor will the public anger be truly abated or assuaged. The appropriation of #notmypresident and continued attacks on Halimah's Yishtana House are just the beginning, and not the fading scream of some sore losers. This PR battle will last beyond the tenure of Mdm Halimah, or indeed that of prime minister Lee Hsien Loong.

Because you see, the problems with the post of the elected president are written in its DNA and made worse by the PAP's continued tinkering with the office.

No kiss and make-up: Sonny Liew and Singapore's National Arts Council

After Sonny Liew won several Eisner awards for the graphic novel which the National Arts Council (NAC) of Singapore has previously denounced as "potentially undermines the authority and legitimacy of the Government and its public institutions", the government agency (despite its reluctance to spell out its direct affiliation to the ministry of culture on its own website) and self-declared champion of the arts in Singapore released a congratulatory statement whose mixture of embarrassment and halfhearted conciliation did not escape notice.

It appears that this would not be the end of the matter, and it was wrong to expect a kiss and make-up between award-winning artist and the nation's arts administrators.

So we decided to interview Sonny Liew ourselves.

Au revoir, Auf wiedersehen, Goodbye Huang Jing

Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) recently accused Prof. Huang Jing, an American IR academic and lobbyist at its Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, of conniving with foreign intelligence, on behalf of foreign powers, to subvert the state and interfere with domestic politics, with the help of prominent and influential Singaporeans he enlisted.

To be fair, the MHA gave the good doctor a chance to appeal, and that appeal was eventually rejected.

Huang Jing must leave on a jet plane and never return... after an undefined grace period

But that doesn't mean that the expulsion of the professor, the accusations against him, and the prosecution of his case are credible. We've previously explained why the accusations against him are pure nonsense; we now explain how the MHA's prosecution of Huang's case completely undermines its own security narrative.

Sonny Liew's Eisner win and the future of arts censorship in Singapore

When we wrote a mini-review of Sonny Liew's presentation of The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye almost 2 years ago, we remarked that the graphic novel telling an alternate history of Singapore appeared to be "a pastiche of various periods and styles of comic art that were popular during the 1940s to 1970s".

In the intervening year, we bought a copy of the graphic novel and were amazed at how vastly Liew had undersold himself. Sure, Liew didn't research actually existing comics made by artists in pre-independence Singapore. The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye isn't just a pastiche of various periods and styles of comic art; it is a love letter to giants such as Osamu Tezuka, Steve Ditko, Walt Kelly, and Jack Kirby, who have influenced Liew as an artist.

But his book isn't at all an alternate or secret history of Singapore; it is a self-critiquing narrative informed by a historian's understanding that official history is enhanced when it is tempered and even interrogated by the inclusion of multiple viewpoints and the appreciation of paths not taken. It is a masterful love letter to Singapore, warts and all, and a tribute to Singapore's big men and smallfolk alike, and all their dreams.

A post shared by Red Dot Diva (@reddotdiva) on Aug 4, 2017 at 11:34pm PDT

Photograph of Sonny Liew, reproduced with kind permission from Red Dot Diva

But let's talk about how the clown show at the National Arts Council has to deal with Liew's multiple Eisner wins.

Is Track II Diplomacy Dead in Singapore?

According to industry analysts, Singapore is the worst place to be a property developer, the worst place to be a tech start-up, and the worst place to be a software programmer. Add to that growing list, the worst place to be a Track II diplomat or lobbyist.

Singapore has proscribed Dr Huang Jing, a US citizen and top professor at its Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP). He will be summarily expelled, his permanent resident status torn up, and his directorships in several state-linked companies dissolved if he doesn't resign from them voluntarily. The communique from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) adopts a security narrative: the professor was "an agent of influence of a foreign country", engaged in subversion and interference in Singapore's domestic politics.

Now let us tell you why this narrative is a giant fail and colossal joke, and what could be actually happening.