As election fever heats up let’s all remember why Reform Party is here.
We are here to stand up for Singaporeans and give you a voice. That includes those who have become victims of our heartless system.
Here you can see Madam L with our Sec Gen looking like a million dollars compared to when she first approached KJ – as we had been successful in getting her some maintenance allowance and then we got it renewed for another six months.
Source: Kenneth Jeyaretnam
In my last article (Has Lee Hsien Loong Forgotten Who Pays His Salary?) I wrote about the way that Lee Hsien Loong and the PAP Government treat expats as more valuable than the Singaporeans who voted them in in the first place.
There can be no better illustration of this than the way our Government subsidises foreign students to come here and take our jobs. Yet the PAP have been evasive on the numbers and cost of the foreign scholarships it awards.
At the last sitting of Parliament on 13 July 2015, the Education Minister Heng Swee Keat, in response to a question from NCMP Yee Jenn Jong, revealed that about 900 foreign students were given scholarships each year and the total cost of each scholarship was about $25,000 p.a. including school fees, accommodation and allowances. If there were 900 foreign scholarship holders in each year that would make the total number of scholarship holders in Singapore around 3,600. The total cost would then be around $90 million p.a.
This is of course not a huge sum of money given the size of Singapore’s economy and reserves. However when Heng was asked another question, this time by Lina Chiam, as to how many foreign students in Singapore benefited from the tuition grant, Heng revealed just how many foreign students there are and how much taxpayers here are subsidising them:
In 2014, around 3,650 international students in the 2014 matriculation cohort in the polytechnics and autonomous universities received the tuition grant.
As this is just the 2014 cohort, the total number of international students is likely to be four times as large. This would make the number of international students receiving tuition grants at any one time about 14,600. Assuming very roughly an average tuition grant of around $18,000 p.a. (the poly and ITE tuition grant is around $16,000 while the university grant is over $22,000) the total cost is then around $262 million p.a.
The $90 million annual cost of the international scholarships should then be added to the tuition grant subsidy since the $25,000 scholarship comes on top of the tuition grant which all foreign students receive. So the total cost of the PAP’s subsidy to foreign students is about $350 million a year. To put this in context that is close to the estimated $400 million annual cost of the entire Pioneer Generation Package for our seniors. It is also at least 50% of the subsidy that the Government claims to provide for pre-school education.
However the real shock was the Minister’s revelation as to how low the bar is set for these so-called “scholars”. To keep their scholarship they only had to maintain a Grade Point Average (GPA) of 3.5 out of a possible 5. This is consistent with achieving a Lower Second Class Honours degree. Heng revealed in his Parliamentary answer that 68% of international scholarship holders achieve at least an Upper Second Class Honours degree. This compares with almost all Singapore students holding PSC scholarships. Compared to the average Singapore student, 38% of whom get Upper Seconds, the foreign scholars are not much better.
Why then are we giving our money away to these distinctively average students? And worse than that why are we offering them the chance to live and work in Singapore after graduation? In fact the scholarship is conditional on the foreign student working at least six years in Singapore. Even the other foreign students have to work here for three years after graduation. If they are unable to find jobs they are given one year Long Term Visit Passes to allow them to remain in Singapore and look for work.
Requiring these foreign students to work in Singapore after graduation is actually deeply discriminatory against Singaporean males who have to do National Service. They thus have to compete with this influx of foreign graduates, both male and female, who do not have any NS obligations and have a two year head start over our men. During this two year period NS men are paid well below what they could earn in the market.
This forced labour at slave rates is a form of taxation that foreign workers, like these international students, who come here to work do not have to pay. Every time expats rave about Singapore’s low tax regime and how grateful they are to the PAP for allowing them to accumulate wealth, remember that you are directly paying for it through your forced labour!
In effect Singaporean men are directly paying the cost of subsidising foreign graduates to compete with them. Because of their lower costs and the fact that they cannot seek employment elsewhere these foreign graduates then are prepared to accept jobs at lower wages and this reduces the earnings and job prospects of Singaporeans who, if they can find work, are often forced to take jobs for which they are massively overqualified.
This is an absurd state of affairs. We have ended up with a system that looks rational from a corporate viewpoint but does not benefit and is no way to run a country. Because the PAP Government is the major employer it has a vested interest in cheap labour and it sees that this is the easiest way to achieve its goal. This bonded scholarship cynically arbitrages the fact that foreigners have a choice over where to work whereas Singaporean men are legally required to do NS and cannot pursue higher education till they complete it at which point they are less competitive in the labour market and it is more difficult for them to leave and seek better employment opportunities elsewhere. Of course many still do. However the PAP is happy for them to go while it feels it can replace them with cheaper graduate labour from abroad, even if the quality of that labour is mediocre.
How can we end this? We can stop offering generous scholarships to mediocre foreign students and make any successor scheme much more selective. I would also want to see free university or poly education offered to all those who complete NS or serve in the armed forces similar to the GI Bill in the US. And NS should be drastically reduced from the current twenty-one months to under a year at most.
But we are unlikely to get any changes while the PAP Government sees Singaporeans as lacking in options and possessing no bargaining power, like the workforce of one of the global MNCs whose CEOs Lee Hsien Loong so loves to socialise with and benchmark his compensation against.
As I wrote in my last blog, you have only yourself to blame for this state of affairs by not standing up for your rights. The foreign scholarship programme is a perfect example of the way you are discriminated against and treated as second class by the PAP Government. The question is, are you prepared to do anything about it or will behave like turkeys voting for Christmas once again?
Source: http://sonofadud.com
Reform Party is concerned that the Prime Minister in his personal capacity as Mr Lee Hsien Loong is currently engaged in a defamation suit against the blogger Roy Ngerng. When any Minister, let alone the Prime Minister, is involved in legal proceedings in a personal capacity there may be implications for them in their official position.
By his own admission, the PM’s lawsuit, where he is seeking a significant sum in excess of S$400,000 against the unemployed former health worker blogger is a private matter and has nothing to do with the official duties of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Can the PM assure the citizens that he can carry out his duties as a public servant funded by the taxpayer and simultaneously be engaged in a legal wrangle which has now reached the high court, without significant impact on those official duties? If so, we ask for those assurances to be made public.
Because of the potential implications for conflict we believe the PM must give a clear and detailed accounting of all or any taxpayer funded state resources, official resources, official machinery and official personnel used in the period starting with the monitoring of bloggers, research and information gathering through to the issuing of legal letters, the follow-up, the subsequent legal action and the current hearings to assess damages and the media and PR management throughout. We believe we should also be informed as to how much time and what resources were expended by state legal officers and civil servants in advising the PM on the implications of legal proceedings in his personal capacity.
We respectfully request answers to the following questions:
Reputational Damage
We are further concerned that the Prime Minister’s responses in Court to questions set to him by the unemployed former health care worker and blogger Roy Ngerng show him in a poor light. Even though he is suing the blogger in his personal capacity he cannot escape the fact that he is Prime Minister of Singapore and as such his snide and sarcastic ripostes in a Court of Law may be deemed by many to be unseemly for a man in that position. Particularly given the huge disparity in income, status, power, influence and wealth between the Prime Minister and the blogger he is suing. Has the Prime Minister not considered that he risks bringing the office of Prime Minster into disrepute with such actions?
For example, his admission that he monitors bloggers watching for them to step over a line and be clearly defamatory. Does he not consider that this will appear unseemly for a man in his position? Additionally his response to Mr Ngerng’s analogy about a knife and a cut finger “knowing you it may be” reveals a personal animosity unbecoming of the leader of a developed nation.
We do not challenge the judgement that has already been made in his favour but we would like to know whether with all the legal and media handling advice at his disposal, the Prime Minister was not warned of the dangers of the Streisand Effect.
We trust that the Prime Minister is not too busy monitoring the worldwide web to respond and look forward to a clarification that no official resources have in fact been expended or if that is not the case to a full and frank accounting.
Kenneth Jeyaretnam
Secretary-General
Source: Reform Party
Lee Hsien Loong and his lawyers were in court today at the beginning of the hearing to determine what damages Roy Ngerng had to pay him (see the report from the State media here).
The lawyers said that:
“It is therefore an extremely serious matter for the defendant to accuse the plaintiff of criminally misappropriating the monies paid by Singaporeans to the CPF.”
“Such an allegation undermines the plaintiff’s ability to lead the country, sustain the confidence of the electorate and to discharge his functions as Prime Minister and chairman of GIC.”
They concluded:
“The case for a very high award of damages, including aggravated damages, is compelling”
However, is it?
It is a well-established principle in English defamation law that in order to win substantial damages you have to show that you suffered financial loss from the defamation. Thus if you were a politician and you lost an election or had to resign as a minister because of defamatory statements made about you then you would be entitled to the loss of earnings from losing your seat or your position in the Cabinet. If you lost your job then you would be entitled to damages representing your lost earnings and your reduced earning capacity as a result of the libel.
After the 1997 election Goh Chok Tong sued my father, JBJ, for holding up a police report at an election rally and saying that Tang Liang Hong had just handed it to him. The police report was made against Goh Chok Tong and several other PAP ministers including Lee Kuan Yew and his son, Lee Hsien Loong.
However at the hearing, George Carman, my father’s QC, cross-examined Goh Chok Tong and got him to admit that his earnings had not suffered as a result of the election rally statement. To quote from a report that appeared in the Hong Kong Standard at the time,
Mr Goh testified 1997 had been a good year saying his standing in the world had not been injured. Yet in an affidavit Mr Goh had said his “reputation, moral authority and leadership standing had been gravely damaged both locally and internationally”.
Because Goh Chok Tong could not prove that he had suffered any damage and also because Carman showed that the plaintiffs (Goh Chok Tong and the other ten ministers) had authorised the release of the police reports to the press themselves, the district judge Rajendran only awarded Goh $20,000 in damages initially. Later, as always happens in Singapore, Prime Minister Goh was able to find a more sympathetic ear from the judges in the Court of Appeal, and the damages were raised to $100,000 plus costs.
Similarly in Lee Hsien Loong’s case what damage can he prove he has suffered as a result of Roy’s admitted defamation?
He is still Prime Minister of Singapore praised by international leaders, including President Obama, and likely to continue in office after the next general election. Has his salary of $2.2 million been cut either by reducing his monthly salary or his Individual Performance Bonus of three months pay been cut?
Lee Hsien Loong continues to be an MP so in addition to his Ministerial salary he continues to draw his MP’s salary of $192,500 per annum.
The PM also remains Chairman of GIC which is a serious conflict of interest, and which I have criticised frequently ( most recently in “The Problem with Husbands and Wives in the WP, in the Ruling Family, in Our Reserves”).
Although GIC’s annual report is silent on the subject of remuneration, it seems likely that Lee Hsien Loong would be paid, just as the other directors presumably receive directors’ fees and expenses. The Ministerial Salaries Committee said in its 2011 report that Ministers would continue to only receive one salary per Ministerial appointment held but was silent on the subject of Ministers who serve on the boards of Schedule 5 companies like GIC and Temasek.
Lee Hsien Loong’s wife, Ho Ching, continues as CEO of Temasek, despite the conflict of interest when her husband is the Prime Minister and has the ultimate authority over her appointment. Roy’s comments did not lead to her being sacked and she undoubtedly continues to be paid a multi-million dollar compensation package. Since her subordinates, most notably Ms Chua at SingTel who is earning over $12 million a year (see “Singaporeans Would Be Much Angrier If They Knew How Much SingTel’s CEO Was Really Getting” ), are earning total compensation packages running into many millions of dollars, Ho Ching can hardly be getting less. It is likely her total pay dwarfs that of her husband’s.
Lee Hsien Loong appears not to have suffered any financial loss. Neither has he become a pariah or outcast on the international stage. Despite his lawyers arguing that Roy’s allegations had undermined his ability to lead the country, sustain the confidence of the electorate and to discharge his functions as Prime Minister and Chairman of GIC, there is no evidence of that.
In fact, if there is any damage to the PM’s reputation, that damage is self-inflicted by his absurd decision to sue Roy, an unemployed health service worker from a lower income background, and to press for a ridiculous level of damages that he knows will force Roy into bankruptcy.
At the same time Roy has been dismissed from his job with a Government hospital, suffered a public attack on his integrity by the Ministry of Health which has to all intents and purposes made him unemployable and also been charged with illegal assembly for exercising his rights to free speech in the only area allotted to Singaporeans for this purpose. If this is not a vendetta by the Prime Minister it certainly appears as such.
It is also difficult to argue that Lee Hsien Loong has shown “an unflinching fidelity to integrity” as his lawyers said. If he did would he have permitted a system of governance with such an egregious conflict of interest where he is Chairman of GIC and his wife is CEO of Temasek? Between them they control over $800 billion of the nation’s assets including all the monies invested by the CPF Board in Government securities.
It is a pity that Roy admitted defamation in the crude sense that the PM was directly misappropriating CPF monies, which is how the Prime Minister’s lawyer, Davinder Singh, insisted on interpreting what Roy said.
While there is no evidence of such gross impropriety, if the Prime Minister receives any remuneration as Chairman of GIC that is related to its performance then he indirectly benefits from GIC being able to borrow from the Government as cheaply as possible, which is again dependent on the interest rates paid to CPF holders. The lower those interest rates, the lower GIC’s cost of funds and, presumably, the higher its returns.
While Temasek may not be directly dependent on CPF for funding, it receives subventions from the surpluses the Government generates. If cheap CPF funding enables GIC to make a higher rate of return and thus higher contributions to the Budget, the higher surplus may enable the Government to provide more money to Temasek for investment. According to Temasek’s annual report the bonuses of senior management are linked to the excess returns over a hurdle rate. If the hurdle rate is tied to the rates paid to CPF holders then Ho Ching’s compensation would be higher the lower the rates paid to CPF holders.
Roy would have been on safer ground if he had been clear that that is all he meant and that the PM should clarify whether he received any compensation from GIC and how Ho Ching’s compensation was determined.
Going back further into the past, there is the HPL saga in the 1990s to remind us that Lee Hsien Loong has not always shown an unflinching fidelity to integrity. He, together with his father and siblings, received large discounts for the purchase of properties from a developer over whom his government held the power to withhold planning permission or to compulsorily acquire its land. That is the only instance that we know about but the fact that Lee father and son paid back the discounts they received is an acknowledgement that they had done wrong.
In the UK ministers initiating defamation actions are normally required to resign from their posts for the duration of the case to avoid any conflict of interest that could arise. This is doubly the case with the all-powerful Prime Minister’s ridiculous action against a humble blogger who has admitted defamation. Instead of resigning for the duration of the case, LHL has gone the other way and even used the services of his Press Secretary in his private action, in a flagrant misuse of taxpayer resources that breaches the Ministerial Code of Conduct.
Combined with the cruel and inhumane treatment meted out to sixteen-year old Amos Yee for criticising LHL’s dead father, it appears that the Lee family want to silence any criticism of their godlike status. What will be next, I wonder, a six-year old expelled from kindergarten for saying bad things about Lee senior?
It is clear that any reasonable judge or jury would either dismiss LHL’s suit, on the grounds that he had suffered no damage, or else award him derisory damages of, say, $1,000-$5,000. It used to be the case in the UK that juries would award damages of just a penny if they decided that the plaintiff had been technically defamed, but had not suffered any financial loss or else was guilty of similar transgressions just not the exact one of which he was accused by the offending publication. If we had a jury in Singapore that would be likely to be the outcome here.
Source: http://sonofadud.com
Yesterday I attended Amos Yee’s sentencing hearing at the State Courts at 9.30am. As you may be aware, Amos has refused to accept probation. The AG had asked for probation, presumably to save the PAP the international opprobrium for jailing a child who had spoken the truth about the late Lee Kuan Yew.
Instead Amos requested that he serve a jail term instead. After all he had already served a longer period in remand than the man who assaulted him received after automatic good behaviour. However the AG objected and asked the judge to sentence Amos to reformative training instead on the grounds that he was unrepentant.
For those of you who are not familiar with what “reformative training” is in the Singapore context, let me enlighten you. The regulations governing it can be found in the Criminal Procedure Code (Reformative Training) Regulations 2010. A person sentenced to reformative training must serve at least eighteen months but no longer than three years. However after release they will be under the supervision of a probation officer and must comply with any conditions imposed. Any breach of those conditions will result in six months additional sentence. This supervision lapses four years after the date of the original sentence so in the case of someone sentenced to three years reformative training the supervision period is one year but if the sentence is only eighteen months the supervision period is three years.
This is what an AsiaOne article had to say about reformative training:
Reformative training is a strict prison regime for young offenders. It consists of foot drills, counselling and education. Offenders spend at least 11/2 years behind bars. Upon release, they are placed under supervision, which includes wearing ankle tags that track their movements electronically.
The article was about how the courts deemed reformative training as a suitable punishment for young loan shark runners who would not be allowed the “soft” option of probation even for a first offence. However the runner in this case was 20 years old and in NS.
It revulses me that the court and the AG could somehow think that the punishment option for someone defacing and vandalising the flats of those owing money to loan sharks, presumably with threats of violence intended to intimidate the unfortunate debtors, and other violent young criminals is appropriate for a child like Amos.
I say “child” advisedly even though our law treats him as an adult when he reaches 16 despite not being allowed to vote till you are 21. Yet another inconsistency in Justice Kaur’s judgement was that she claimed to be protecting the youth of Singapore from being corrupted and depraved by Amos’s supposedly obscene image while she was treating Amos as an adult for the purpose of sentencing. Amos’s blog and video were clearly aimed at adults and viewed mostly by adults and not children.
I will get back to yesterday’s hearing. The queue for the public gallery was quite short, perhaps because the hearing was originally scheduled for 2pm but was then moved to 9.30am. Singaporeans do not like to get up so early. The atmosphere among the crowd was slightly flippant considering that it was a child’s future we were talking about. When I said that the Government was out to break Amos, some people said jocularly that he would be more likely to break the AG and the judicial system by his refusal to bend. A young man in a suit made some comment to the effect that unlike the “soft” West we treated criminals like Amos as adults from the age of 16 and that the “shackles” which presumably soft-hearted liberals like myself objected to were just cuffs.
After a delay while the prosecution and defence lawyers met outside the courtroom, Justice Kaur entered at about 9.50am. I expected someone older and tougher looking. Instead she looked quite slight and undoubtedly younger than me. She was extremely soft-spoken so it was very difficult to hear what she was saying. It was difficult to fit her image to her reactionary and inconsistent judgement.
The DPP argued that as Amos had not “learnt his lesson” and refused to agree to probation that a reformative training sentence was necessary. He said that Amos’s conduct and his decision to make the image and video public again demonstrated the need for rehabilitation and appropriate counselling. The DPP said a jail term or a fine would have no rehabilitative effect on Yee and would therefore not be “tenable, because we cannot be popping back into court every other day.”
The judge agreed with him and said that “Rehabilitation is the fundamental tenet of our justice system” and ruled that he be remanded for three weeks to assess his mental and physical suitability for reformative training.
Alfred Dodwell, Amos’s lawyer, argued in vain that Amos should be given a fine or a jail term equivalent to the time he has already spent on remand and pointed out quite correctly that Amos was being punished for a second offence for which he had not been tried.
At the end of the hearing Amos was taken into custody again. I saw his mother passing him a plastic bag which made me feel very sad.
There can be no doubt that in this case “rehabilitation” is just a euphemism. The PAP Government mean to break Amos’s spirit through a harsh regime that is worse than prison. They would like to show Singaporeans that anyone here who dares to challenge the official narrative will be harshly dealt with.
In totalitarian regimes like Communist China, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany “rehabilitation” meant years of imprisonment in harsh concentration camps. Everyone remembers the infamous words above Auschwitz which said “Arbeit Macht Frei” which loosely translated meant “Work Makes You Free” which was meant to be a sadistic joke about rehabilitation.
I feel only a slightly milder version of this punishment regime is in store for Amos. He will be forced to work and if he refuses will likely be punished. I am concerned that reformative training may include caning if Amos refuses to obey the orders given to him by his captors. He has years of imprisonment to look forward to and when he is inducted into NS he will probably end up serving his time in a military prison. Meanwhile a father who failed to strap his toddler into a car seat causing her death in an accident was only fined. And Lee Kuan Yew made countless racist remarks designed to wound the feelings of minorities and was commended globally for his wisdom and candour.
Even with his time on remand Amos has served more time than the man who attacked him. The reports said that he would not be with adult inmates. However since Amos is already being treated as an adult that seems just another example of the AG’s disingenuity. He will presumably be placed with the kind of hardened criminals who are normally considered suitable for reformative training. He wlll probably be bullied and may be sexually assaulted. Of course many comments from PAP supporters and LKY worshippers on the internet were that rape was much too good for him.
The PAP Government’s treatment of Amos is an international embarrassment to them and to Singapore. The PAP always justify draconian restrictions on our freedoms by saying we enjoy Swiss standards of living as a result. But I look around and I can see that we have neither, except maybe PAP Ministers and their relatives and wealthy foreigners. Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple with Steve Jobs. said no innovation or creativity would come out of SIngapore. Is it any surprise?
I called Amos Singapore’s youngest political prisoner which led to the usual fierce attacks from people saying that he was tried and convicted. However so was Nelson Mandela who received a sentence of life imprisonment for terrorism. Yet today no one would dream of calling Nelson Mandela a criminal let alone a terrorist.
I will end by letting Amos’s own words speak for him:
“And yes, to the chagrin of numerous people, I have not ‘learnt my lesson’, nor do I see any ‘lesson’ that needs to be learnt.If you are going to try to tower over me and say that you know something important that that I don’t, make sure you have a compelling argument for that. And if your lessons are borne from a corrupt, archaic Government lead by primitive monkeys,…then sorry if I doubt the credibility of your quote unquote ‘lessons’.
Hopefully history eventually vindicates me. But as of now, district judge Jasvender Kaur has deemed me guilty and the Prosecutor does in fact feel, that 30 months of a place worst than Prison (RTC) should be given to a boy who has posted an internet video.
Unless you do in fact relish in my misery, I hope both of you will be able to sleep at night, and live with the fact that right now, as it is written in the annals of history, my blood is on your hands.”
Source: http://sonofadud.com