a super long entry containing all the main things i've thought about over the last 10 or so days!! i don't think anyone's gonna read, but i'm posting it here so that i can just take a snapshot of what went through my mind this elections:)

honestly, i'm not too concerned about the policies that people are arguing about. i do worry a little about how housing and immigration will affect me, but i've made my plans for the future and feel reasonably confident that i will be able to cope come what may. in any case, i don't plan to depend on the government for any handouts, or blame my inadequacies on them.

however, i'd like to know my future taxes are being paid for a good cause. how do you define good government? yes, according to our social studies textbooks, they have brought us from third world to first. they are incorruptible. they are legends.

i believe that all that is indoctrination. the winners write history. it's a fact. how would the world have been different had japan won wwii? likely, we would look to them as our heroes. we would believe that they liberated us from the british. possibly even built our country. who knows?

how about all this "opposition supporters are ungrateful" rubbish? acknowledging the role of the PAP in bringing us to where we are today does not mean that we owe them for the last 40 years. we vote them in to do a job. if they fail, we vote them out. that's democracy. we judge them on the last 5 years, not the last 40 years. if we must be grateful to them forever, then why even bother having elections?

the education and information given to us just complicates the matter. when i was in secondary school, i supported the pap. thanks to our state-controlled media and social studies education, we don't hear of chia thye poh or lim chin siong or operation coldstore as the atrocities that they are. all of pap's political opponents are communists. chee soon juan? dismissed as a nutcase. "confrontational politics", by the way, is a term you'd rarely see in western democracies.

for me, i think the crux of the issue was the idea of fear. in which other democracy do we have to keep reassuring our voters that the vote is secret? where people think that civil servants cannot vote against the pap? that we are threatened with our homes losing their value, a gridlocked parliament, living in a slum? i refuse to be blackmailed. blackmail is not good governance.

perhaps, i'm speaking from the point of view of the privileged. i've lived in private property all my life. i feel capable of competing with foreigners in the workplace, primarily because my strength is in english and that's probably where the FT that can undercut me can't compete with me. so i'm actually really blessed.

but i feel for those who are not, and the unfairness of it all. take the singaporean worker who wants to raise a family and take care of his parents amidst the high cost of living in singapore. he could be undercut by an FT with the same skills, simply because the FT is happy to accept lower pay. of course, the FT is working to support his family in a country with a lower cost of living, so this is enough for him. this is an uneven playing ground, biased against singaporeans. i understand that the government cannot succumb to protectionism, but at the very least they need to level the playing ground.

the state of housing, as i understand it, is a consequence of poor planning. in 2000-2003, there were tons of empty flats in singapore and residents living in jurong west grumbled about how unsafe they felt living in a ghost town--the issue is not scarce land, but planning. then came the influx of foreigners and yet, supply was not ramped up correspondingly. as a consequence, housing across all markets became considerably more expensive. i don't believe that hdb should fix prices, but their job of balancing demand and supply is far more delicate, and in that they have failed. now they're rolling out BTOs galore, and possibly slowing down immigration as a result of the public outcry. how this will impact housing prices leaves to be seen, but i wonder how they can fulfil their promise to not let them drop. the ultimate losers are those who have bought flats in the last couple of years and are now paying it off.

finally, ministeral salaries. to me it's a symptom of the lack of accountability that the pap government have. if there were two parties in parliament tussling for power, this could never happen because both parties would be scrambling to exploit the situation for political gains--which would likely mean opposing the move to increase salaries to score points with the electorate. my mom parroted the govt's rationale that it's to avoid corruption, but seriously, that sum of money is nothing more than legalised bribery. as for attracting top talent to parliament--i don't see why we need that much money if other countries don't. if people need that much pay to be attracted to public service, then there is something wrong with how they perceive the govt, not the pay scheme. people whose goal is to be multi-millionaires can stay in the private sector.

ultimately, i don't feel that these policy issues affect me overmuch, though i do have my own opinion of them. in the end, when i cast my vote yesterday, the foremost thought on my mind was that i wanted a singapore where people are not afraid to speak out against injustice, to follow their consciences, where the govt treats the people as an intelligent electorate and not naughty, rebellious children.

i can only hope that now that the opposition has achieved a small victory, people will not expect sweeping reforms in the next 5 years. it's a firm and definite step towards the singapore that i hope to see, but nevertheless a small one. still, the main achievement this GE will be that we forced the pap to relook itself. hopefully their future strategy is not merely to package themselves better, but to look into genuine grievances. that is certainly a good first step to building a better country, and was achieved through the pressure that only an opposition can give. one might argue that it's the electorate and not the opposition that have achieved this. this may be true, but when the heat and fervour over the GE subsides, it's still our opposition politicians doing the dirty work in parliament--both to improve their own standing for future elections, and to consistently speak up for the people whose interests have not been looked after. now that's a win-win situation for singapore.