“Someone is very afraid of our campaign in Nee Soon and is trying to pull the wool over the voters eyes,” said Progress Singapore Party’s (PSP) Bradley Bowyer on his Facebook page on Wednesday (1 July) in response to a comment made by People’s Action Party (PAP) candidate K Shanmugan who said that the PSP is “half-hearted” about contesting in Nee Soon GRC.
Mr Shanmugan, who is leading the PAP’s five-member team against PSP in Nee Soon GRC this election said of his opponents on earlier in the day, “I don’t want to speculate why PSP has come, but it seems to have been very half-hearted about it. As you will recall, a week ago it was offering to trade Nee Soon for some other constituency.”
This was reported in Straits Times in an article titled “Singapore GE2020: PSP ‘half-hearted’ about contesting Nee Soon GRC, Say Shanmugam”, which Mr Bowyer described as an “extremely one-sided article and derogatory headline.”
Mr Bowyer—who is contesting in Nee Soon with PSP’s Damien Tay, Taufik Supan, Kala Manickam and S. Nallakaruppan—also noted in his post that an article the day before by a mainstream media outlet which said that the PSP was not contesting in Nee Soon GRC, which was later “reversed”.
He wrote, “A general election is time for a balanced presentation of ideas to the electorate to decided upon… but when yesterday we had Channel News Asia saying we were not contesting (only to have to reverse themselves later); and now we have Straits Times with this extremely one-sided article and derogatory headline… You would almost think the media is trying to wayang the people of Nee Soon not to take PSP seriously.”
Mr Bowyer continued, “Even more so when you see the rumours being spread online we might have been horse traded. This suggests to me that someone is very afraid of our campaign in Nee Soon and is trying to pull the wool over the voters’ eyes.”
The PSP Nee Soon GRC candidate then said it made him wonder “how can a party that is too afraid to press its case on a level playing ground at home can ever effectively represent us in the real world where they can’t load the odds.”
He described the state of events as “sad”, saying, “We deserve much better from out media and government.”
Mr Bower went on to clarify that the PSP had been preparing for its Nee Soon GRC campaign since the electoral boundaries were announced and have been walking the grounds for almost a month, as much as possible under the circuit breaker guidelines.
“Shame nobody thought to talk about that,” he said.