Dear True Blue Singaporeans,
With the announcement of a supposedly people-centric budget and the on-going attempt to label the Worker’s Party as incompetent and unable to manage town councils, the exists the real possibility that an election will be called either in late 2014 or 2015 after the “50th Birthday” propaganda extravaganza called the National Day Parade. With this in mind, it is important that you ask yourselves whether the PAP really deserves your vote! If your answer is yes and you intend to support the PAP then I sincerely beg for 10 minutes of your precious time to read this commentary and evaluate it with an open mind.
The social compact or deal between the PAP government and Singapore citizens since independence is simple. In return for improving the material welfare and securing comfortable retirements for the people, the people would give their vote to the PAP and turn a blind eye to the Government’s dirty politics including blatant gerrymandering, vindictive lawsuits and the use of the GRC system to unfairly enforce a PAP super-majority in parliament. If this deal still served our interests and Singaporeans clearly enjoyed the fruits of Singapore’s progress as first class citizens, I have no doubt that the PAP would still reap overwhelming political support. However, as has been repeatedly discussed on-line and in numerous kopi-tiams, we the people of Singapore have been relegated to second class or even third class status in our own motherland. Hence, the social compact of yesteryear has been smashed to pieces and I will proceed to discuss the practical effects of this on our lives but first, please allow me to explain a psychological theory called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I assure you that it is relevant.
In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow came up with a framework of human needs in order to study what motivated people and led to their fulfilment. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs thus lays out human needs from the most basic like food to higher order requirements like self-respect. This framework has been extensively used in human resource management in order to better motivate employees and since Singaporeans are the only true assets of our nation while the Government is ultimately the top human resource manager, examining the Hierarchy of Needs should explain whether the PAP has failed in its job and whether it deserves our votes.
With reference to the Hierarchy of Needs, the needs and wants of most Singaporeans can easily be described as a combination of basic physical, safety/security and love/belonging requirements while incorporating higher order needs such as lack of prejudice, self-esteem and being respected by others. With this in mind, I will argue that the PAP, via its destructive anti-Singaporean polices has resulted in us true blue citizens being deprived of our essential needs and aspirations.
Specifically, much if not most of our problems can be traced back to the PAP’s idiotic and reckless importation of foreigners along with the wholesale issuing of work passes, permanent residency and citizenship as if work passes were advertising leaflets and the blue and pink IC are name cards distributed by eager insurance salesmen. Such a high concentration of loathed foreigners in Singapore who nonetheless receive favoured status from the PAP, have lead these pests to believe that Singapore is not a sovereign nation belonging to native born citizens but is instead a “global city” belonging to EVERYONE. Therefore, these foreigners and newly converted citizens feel empowered to look down on true blue Singaporeans, discriminate against us in the workplace, deny us jobs in favour of their fellow foreigners and even believe that Singaporeans should seek employment overseas as only they are good enough for this “global city”. If you are local born and raised, this should be enough to convince you that the PAP must go since these alien outsiders are ultimately here as GUESTS and the last thing that the PAP should condone is local Singaporeans facing prejudice from foreigners IN SINGAPORE.
While I have made clear that foreigners do not respect us as sons and daughters of this land, what is even worse is that the PAP, through the Straits Times and mainstream media have in recent years, started attacking our self-esteem and confidence. No government except the PAP would, in its right mind, label their local professionals as pampered, mediocre and timid amongst other spirit destroying criticism while Lim Swee Say deserves to be booted out of office by cajoling local workers to be better, faster and cheaper even as he does next to nothing to justify his exorbitant paycheque. More can be said but frankly, expecting the PAP to be stridently pro-Singaporean is about as realistic as expecting pigs to fly.
Moving down the line, we can clearly see that the government’s foreigner loving “growth at all costs” policy has deprived many of us of a decent family life (if we are fortunate enough to be able to find local spouses) and made it difficult for us to even start families (if we are single). Truth be told, the “men in white” do not care one bit about maintaining the social fabric of Singapore, preferring to regard us as pure economic inputs. While we could grudgingly accept the fact that we had to work harder than the rest of the ASEAN countries in the 1980s and 1990s in order to stay competitive, the influx of parasitic foreigners has meant that true blue Singaporeans wind up routinely working 10 or even 11 hour days in order to lessen our risk of being retrenched in favour of lunch stealing foreigners prepared to accept lower salaries. A balanced and healthy family life now seem part of the bygone 1970s and yet the PAP still exhorts us to have more children! As for those of us without a spouse, the endless struggle to make ends meet and the inability to build a workable nest egg in the face of stagnant salaries, coupled with steadily rising inflation, makes marriage difficult to consider.
Concerning more basic requirements, we envy our parents era when one could be assured of personal safety, employment security, access to reliable transport, uncrowded healthcare and affordable housing. All of these now seem readily available ONLY to rich elites and well-heeled foreigners even as these basic needs should be guaranteed to us as citizens of Singapore. Once again, the PAP’s only aims appear to be the artificial boosting of the Singapore economy via foreign PMETs and labour and the shoring up of their decaying political support with lots of questionable new citizens from China, India and the Philippines. This leaves us native borns with serious problems such as rising crime (daring burglaries by South American house breaking gangs, recent molestation cases by mainland Indians and violence from PRCs and Ang Mos), serious retrenchment risks from greedy employers and foreign HR managers, sardine packed and failing public transport along with sky high foreigner fuelled COEs, impossibly crowded hospitals and polyclinics, and shoe box apartments carrying 30 year mortgages.
My dear friends, it is glaringly obvious that the PAP has failed to holistically deliver on its duty to fulfil not only our higher aspirations and hopes, but has left us without much prospect of satisfying even our essential needs. As I’ve said at the beginning, the social compact between the PAP and the people is smashed to pieces and there is no need for us to reward the PAP’s arrogance and greed with our votes. Folks, its time that we change our government to one that will TRULY love and cherish Singaporeans above foreigners. As Mr Low Thia Khiang of the Worker’s Party once said, “The PAP of yesteryear is not the PAP of today.” His implication is that the old guards who brought genuine egalitarian progress to our parents and grandparents have been replaced by those who’s sole aim is to exploit us for their benefit. When the next general election arrives, I urge you all to cast a protest vote against the “Men in White” and select the opposition. The prospect of another PAP government after the next GE is too horrible to bear for it guarantees that true blue Singaporeans will become a permanent social minority, lose political influence and become an entrenched underclass. I don’t know about you but I refuse to condemn my daughter, my unborn son and my young nephews to such a fate.
Yours Sincerely,
Sovereign Singaporean