Was looking through some of the old news on the Internet and came across this ST interview with Minister Vivian Balakrishnan over fish head curry held in early Aug last month [Link].
Looks like he got what he wished for with the recent AYE flood last week… LOL!
It has been a fairly busy year for you so far, with your ministry having to deal with one crisis after another – dengue, haze and hawker centre cleaning. Some would call this a perfect storm.
Vivan: “Flooding hasn’t occurred yet. Then we would have a perfect storm!”
And guess what, he still cannot get over the cleaning incident in WP Aljunied GRC. Despite what most people see it as a miscommunication and a non-event, he still goes around jabbing at WP:
What does it feel like to be under pressure like this?
Vivian: “I must confess to being quite energised by crises. I enjoy the challenge of being under pressure. Maybe to some extent, it is due to my medical and surgical experience. There’s no such thing as a routine operation. Every single operation, even if you have done it thousands of times, has a risk of failure. Every surgeon, mentally before he starts, has already considered all the complications.
So, to be honest with you even if I look at this year’s events, dengue – we are overdue for an epidemic. Our last epidemic was in 2005 and 2007, and if you check my comments, over the last two years I’ve been saying, it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. In fact, every year that we don’t have a dengue epidemic, we are storing up the pressure for an epidemic the following year, especially if there is a switch of viral stereotype. So did dengue surprise me? No.
Haze has been around for at least two decades. I knew full well that this was not an environmental problem, it was an economic problem. Because the economic incentives skew people’s behaviour in the wrong direction. Of course, I cannot predict the wind. So did I expect it to be so bad? No I did not. But did I anticipate that haze will hit us? Yes.
Hawker centres – well, I did not expect the Workers’ Party to treat the hawkers so shabbily. That one I admit I did not anticipate. But I guess what I’m trying to say is that, from a surgical perspective, you always mentally prepare, and when things go wrong, that is the difference.
I put things in perspective because this is not the worst that I have faced or the worst that I will face. The most harrowing period in my last 12 years in politics is not this year. It was those two months in 2003 when (as part of the Ministerial Sars Combat Unit) I was tasked to go to SGH (Singapore General Hospital), put on a mask and help restore confidence and resolve the problems there.
I spent two months at the hospital, attending Cabinet meetings through video conference, and having a colleague – Dr Alex Chao – die. Can you imagine every day we met in the morning, sitting around the table wearing masks, and if one of us has a fever, he was whisked off to Tan Tock Seng hospital? So you’re wondering, when’s your turn? And during those two months, I slept in a separate room because I didn’t want to risk infecting my wife or my children.
I say let’s give him an even worse situation to face from his worst by kicking him out in 2016!
What say you?
Edmund