It is a sensible move. Your legal practice and your role as MP are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are complementary. Your MP role is to bridge the gap between the people and government and make representations on their behalf by ensuring that their concerns are heard in Parliament. Your legal practice will enable you to keep abreast of the evolving legal system, making you even more effective in representing your constituents in Parliament.
Without taking away the credit of our first generation leaders in transforming Singapore into a modern city, the fact is the people of Singapore today are faced with serious livelihood problems. Many of these problems are the result of misguided and unsound policies carried through by succeeding leaders lacking the kind of vision and wisdom that the earlier leaders had. The long years of dominant rule by the PAP government have numbed its sensitivity to the plight and needs of the people. The top-down authoritarian and dictatorial style of government continued unabated.
While the people today are living on hand-to-mouth and struggling to find jobs to put a roof over their head, jobs which were once the domain of Singaporeans are now being snatched away by an avalanche of foreign workers, allowed into the country liberally under the guise of ‘Foreign Talents’. Singaporeans living in the heartland are starting to feel uprooted by this massive influx of so called ‘FTs’ whose social and cultural demeanors are adding a further dimension to the spate of social problems. If left unchecked, Singapore will degenerate into a situation where it is no longer be as safe as it once was.
The government has been slow to react to these problems. While the citizenry is living a languishing lifestyle, ministers and those who have the rare honor of being put in charge are paying themselves indiscriminately. The amount of remunerations that they receive are too mind boggling for the average Singaporean to comprehend. It defies all logics to pay ministers millions when their counterparts in major developed countries only receive less than 1/5 of what they get. If we include pensions, director fees and fees for the many other positions that they hold, what government leaders and public servants pocketed yearly is scandalous.
How could any government with any moral value justify such an elaborate web of ‘self enrichment scheme’ when many of its people are still struggling with such basic need as having a roof over their head? The elected president is given an outrageous salary of $4.2 million a year for a purported role it doesn’t really play or need to play. And this is fixed not based on any prudent measurement of value versus function, but purely as a kind of preceding protocol payment to justify and regulate its own ministerial payments.
The fact is, as a result of a series of amendments to the Constitution, ministers are today drawing millions in salaries over and above the millions they stand to receive in pensions, not unlike a windfall. Take for example George Yeo who has lost his seat in Parliament. He now gets over $2 million a year in pension tax free for sitting at home and doing nothing. Is this how Singapore should reward people at the top while people at the bottom have to struggle just to meet ends’ meet and scrap by?
The people in power may not be corrupt in the legal sense but when a system fails to deliver to its people their basic needs while those in charge are benefiting millions from the back of the very people they are supposed to help, it is simply corruption of another kind.
Ms Sylvia Lim, we do not want to live in a country where the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer. As things stand, we are heading that direction. You have the mandate to bring the plight of the people to Parliament. We trust you will do the needful as the people of Singapore are behind you. Thank you.
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