Lawrence Wong’s leads PAP into its very demure, very mindful era

I have soooooooooo much writing to do this weekend so of course I’ve been fixated on logging receipts and tidying folders and doing literally everything else that isn’t as urgent as all the words I have to write.

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It was Lawrence Wong’s first National Day Rally this past week. The speech was light on foreign policy—friends on my Facebook feed pointed to this glaring hole, but it doesn’t seem as if many others have noticed?—but heavy on things that Wong framed as a “reset” for a “refreshed Singapore Dream”.

In the near future, there’ll be more shared parental leave, and shifts towards bigger housing grants for lower-income Singaporeans. Single 35+ Singaporeans will also be eligible for priority access to BTO flats if it’s near their parents. The Kallang Alive Masterplan is going to revive a part of Singapore that I hadn’t realised was dead, with a new indoor arena to replace Singapore Indoor Stadium (the announcement of which, if you recall, was met with some consternation earlier this year, but I guess we’re just gonna go ahead). There’ll also be a new unemployment support scheme, where “involuntarily unemployed” workers can get up to $6,000, over a period of up to six months, as temporary financial support. And we’re finally waving goodbye to the Gifted Education Programme… in its current form, anyway. All primary schools will be allowed to have programmes to identify “high-ability learners” and cater to their needs, instead of requiring ‘gifted’ kiddos to transfer to the nine schools in the country that offer GEP. This will allow children to stay with friends and teachers they’re already familiar with and hopefully create a programme that's available to a wider range of students from different backgrounds, rather than the elite, exclusive cohort that GEP often ends up being. Thank fuck for that, a parent writes for CNA… okay, that’s not exactly what they said, but I read the article and that was the vibe.

My impression is that the rally was very in line with how Wong has been since he assumed the premiership: trying to present PAP as being in its very demure, very mindful era. He’s so far come across as an inoffensive, nice guy who went to a neighbourhood school, juuuuust about saved from complete blandness by his guitar, who promises to gently lead Singapore Forward to a future where we’ll go to bed with assurances of dreaming a new and improved Singapore Dream. (But what's he going to do about the side of PAP that still likes to clamp down on civil liberties and harass critics?)

We’re going to have to wait for more details before coming to any serious conclusions, but, on the face of it, there’s little to dislike about the key policy changes Wong outlined in his speech. Describing Wong’s approach and announcements as “radical” and “groundbreaking”, though, just shows how low the bar is in Singapore.

What might these shifts made by the PAP mean for Singapore’s opposition parties? “At the next GE, due by November 2025, will opposition parties actually propose more radical manifestos, in the hope that the electorate is ready for a bigger shift? Or will they again compete not on how different they are to the PAP, but on how similar they can be?” Jom asks.

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K Shanmugam, the minister for home affairs and law, has pointed to the riots in the UK to justify Singapore’s restrictions on freedom of assembly. Singapore’s Public Order Act is the way it is, he says, because even if protests start off well-intentioned, they could be hijacked by bad actors and then the poor police might end up looking like the bad guys:

If you have 2000 people coming together, 50 in there will want to create violence… and from the police’s perspective, you don't know who is the good guy and who is doing the violence. The police shoot. Immediately, the police are then put in an impossible position and targeted as the aggressors.

This is, in my opinion, lazy simplification. There’s a biiiiiig gap between a protest escalating and the police shooting people. Possibly as big a gap as the one that separates bar-top dancing from murder.

Police forces should be trained in de-escalation, crowd control, public safety and other measures that protect people without having to resort to lethal force (although we see many police forces around the world fail spectacularly in this). What happened in the UK is also much more complex (and yes, fucked up) than being too lax with public assemblies. Singapore’s system, revolving around the Public Order Act, is authoritarian rule by law, controlling people’s ability to mobilise and gather. The government is holding up the bogeyman of potential (not even guaranteed) violence to justify clamping down on even the most innocuous, peaceful and brief action by people in Singapore, like posing for a photo or delivering letters. The petty control goes to ludicrous levels. Even if you succeed in getting a permit, ridiculous conditions might be imposed. Look at this one that Rocky Howe, a fellow TJC member, received in 2022 (which I wrote about in the opening to a book review for Mekong Review):

…the protest location had been shifted to a road behind the prison complex, on a patch of grass next to a specific lamppost—a map was attached to the police’s letter, a bright yellow rectangular box marking out the designated area. Only four participants would be permitted, but the organiser was still expected to “deploy a cordon to demarcate the designated area for the assembly” and hire a licensed security officer to maintain order. Participants would be allowed to hold handheld lights and a portrait of the death row prisoner Nagaenthran K Dharmalingam (even though, by the time these instructions were conveyed, Nagaenthran had already been executed). There had to be a sign at the edge of the designated area saying “Only Pre-approved Participants Allowed”—specifications were provided for the size of the paper (A4), the font (Arial) and the size of the text (size 48). This “assembly” could only be held on the specified date at the specified time of “2349hrs to 2359hrs”—a grand total of ten minutes. “Pre-event publicity” would not be allowed, nor could journalists be invited to cover this ten-minute four-person demonstration. Any deviation from these conditions would turn the protest into an illegal assembly.

Text > Email?

Throwback time

🤡 Elon Musk—billionaire, transphobe, ruiner of Twitter—gave Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong a boost this week by tweeting a clip from an interview he did before stepping down, in which he went on about the problems of “Wokeness”.

Musk has his own reasons for being “anti-woke”, just like Lee has his own reasons to make it seem as if “wokeness” is the threat to social cohesion and expression in Singapore. Layered on top of each other, we end up with a kueh lapis of bad faith that makes me feel like it’s time to share a couple of old pieces I wrote about Singapore and “wokeness”.

Between the PAP and the ‘woke online mob’

I recently received an extremely heartfelt email, asking for my views on online discourse, self-censorship, and ‘cancel culture’. I replied to the email directly, but since there was also a request for me to publish at least some of my response for a wider audience, I thought I’d make this subject the focus of this week’s special issue.

We, The CitizensKirsten Han

What “prevailing woke movement”?

Last year, shortly after the general election in July, I began to notice people talking about “cancel culture” in Singapore. There were moderates who felt trapped between two opposing sides: the ruling People’s Action Party, and opposition-supporting “Internet lynch mob” that might just “cancel” you for expressing political opinions they disagree with. I wrote

We, The CitizensKirsten Han

😡 It’s horrifically common to see news articles about sexual harassment, sexual assault, voyeurism and more these days. So I’m re-surfacing this piece that I wrote about consent, what it is and how it works.

We need to talk about consent.

Given that there have been so many cases of sexual assault, harassment, and molest reported in Singapore recently, I decided to do a special issue on the issue of consent.

We, The CitizensKirsten Han

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