By Neo Renjie
Many die-hard supporters of the People’s Action Party (PAP) have pointed out that the PAP has done pretty well this term, tackling many problems robustly such as housing, transport and healthcare. While it’s true, let’s not jump to conclusion yet.
Many of these problems were a result of the PAP’s failure to plan ahead of time. PAP was too focused on Gross Domestic Production (GDP) growth that they overlooked our well-being. They didn’t listen because they were complacent, they didn’t bother because they don’t live the average Singaporean life.
Only until General Election 2011 when oppositions were allowed to talk about politics publicly, PAP suddenly realized the mess they had created. During this term they worked really hard, fire-fighting problems that they allowed to build up over the years. However, they still fail to tackle the root cause of all these problems. Most, if not all, of these major problems are caused by overpopulation from the sudden influx of foreigners. Expensive housing, unaffordable cars, inadequate health care, insufficient to retire, loss of national identity etc.
Instead of solving the root of the problem by reducing or slowing the influx of foreigners, as brought up by the Workers’ Party (WP) in parliament, Lee Hsien Loong and gang shot them down mercilessly and promised to make matter worse by pledging even more foreigners with that population white paper. So essentially the PAP is promising to make our lives worse.
Their justification of increasing the workforce is to support the ageing population. Well, if we allow more foreign working adults in, they can support the current old folks, but they are eventually going to grow old and we are going to have even more old folks in the next decades. If cost of living remains absurdly high, you can bet your whole fortune that even these foreigners are not going to have more kids. So we’re eventually going to have the same problem all over again, more old folks than working adults.
So are we going to bring in even more people to support these old folks? And with more people, prices are only going to go higher. It’s a really lazy and naive solution, it goes to show how little thought our government has put into solving this problem and how incompetent they are.
A better solution in my opinion would be to reallocate our resources to address the more pressing issues first, at the same time reduce the population to a comfortable size so as to not strain our resources and drive up prices. Then we look into policies to help increase birth rates. Let’s face it, the cost of everything is tied to the cost of acquiring land and property, and prices are high because demand of land exceed supply.
Our country is rich and we’re blatantly open about it. But instead of spending on essentials like healthcare and making houses and transportation affordable, we splurge them on defence. It doesn’t take a genius to know which is more urgent. The government doesn’t know their priorities and it’s worrying.
For those who follow the parliamentary debates you would realize that the WP has brought up many concerns from the ground for discussion, but instead of addressing these concerns, the PAP always seems more interested to defame WP, make them look incompetent and dismissing the points that they have brought up as rubbish. The way the PAP MPs collectively laugh at WP during their speech and their trademark childish snides shows how apathetic and disrespectful they are to Singaporeans’ opinions. It also shows how snobbish and self-righteous they are. I’m so turned off by their distasteful behavior, I can’t believe these people self-proclaim that they are best suited to run the government.
If we make the same mistake by allowing PAP to run the government again, I’m afraid we are not just going to repent for 5 years. We will probably take 2 to 3 generations to fix the mess that the population white paper creates if we don’t put a stop to it now.