Singaporeans Always Come ....... First?

The article below suggests a significant change in policy thinking. I could feel pleased, or I could feel skeptical. On balance, I am more inclined to adopt a "wait-&-see" attitude. I still remember distinctly the last time PM Lee made such grand pronouncements. He had told us that he would make Singapore an "open society". Heheh.

ST Dec 4, 2006
Singaporeans 'always come first'

By Zakir Hussain

THE first responsibility of the Government is to Singaporeans, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said yesterday, when he announced plans to charge non-citizens more for education and health care.

He told some 1,000 People's Action Party cadres at the party's conference that 'while we have non-Singaporeans here, citizens always come first.'

Education and health are two areas in which the Government has not made a clear distinction between citizens, permanent residents and foreigners, Mr Lee added.

This will change, he declared.

In education, non-citizens will be charged higher fees, but the charges would not be set so high as to drive away foreign students.

Tuition fees for foreigners at universities and polytechnics here, for instance, are now 10 per cent above what Singaporeans and PRs pay.

As for health care, PRs will be charged more, while foreign workers are going to pay the full amount and their employers will need to buy medical insurance to protect them.

The Education and Health ministries will make these adjustments in the next few months, Mr Lee said.

'We have to treat visitors well, too, but citizens have to be treated better,' he added.

'Citizens come first in our priorities, in our thinking.'

+++++++++
Technorati: Singapore; politics.

Elections Are Over. Time to Raise Ministers' Salaries!

ST Nov 29, 2006
Ministerial pay 'lags behind benchmark'
But decision on whether to relook salaries rests with PM, says SM Goh

By Sue-Ann Chia

BRATISLAVA (SLOVAKIA) - MINISTERS' salaries are pegged to that of the private sector, but they still lag behind the benchmark.

It is therefore likely that when civil service pay is reviewed, ministers' salaries will also be looked at, said Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong yesterday.

Last week, the Government indicated that salaries of civil servants are likely to go up as it must keep its wages competitive to recruit and retain talent in a tightening labour market.

At an interview yesterday wrapping up his visit to Europe, Mr Goh was asked about the likelihood of the pay increase, including for ministers.

He replied: 'Since the year 2000, six years have gone by with very good growth rates in some of the years, so it's time to have a look at the salary of the civil service as a whole, including the salary of the ministers.'

Right now, he said, ministers' pay packets are at 50 per cent of the benchmark, when they should be at two-thirds level.

According to the formula agreed upon for over a decade now, ministerial pay is benchmarked to the salaries of the top earners in six chosen professions. It is set at two-thirds the median income of the top eight earners in each of these six professions - that is, the pay of the individual at the mid-point of the list.

It must be fun being a minister. Because unlike the rest of Singapore, you'll never have a bad year.

What do I mean? Well, let's say a cardiosurgeon in Singapore does very well in his career this year, makes a lot of money and is the top-earning cardiosurgeon this year.

Next year he may not do so well. Maybe he will have fewer patients. Or perhaps he just won't have so many complicated cases, so he has to charge less for doing simpler surgeries. Consequently, he will earn much less.

That's life. Some years are good, some years are not so good.

Ministers, however, have no such problem. Their salary is pegged to whoever is earning most, in a given year. When our top cardiosurgeon is earning a lot, the ministers will peg their salaries to him. When our top cardiosurgeon has a bad year, the ministers will just drop him out of the list.

They will then peg their salaries to some other doctor for whom 2007 does turn out to be a great year (eg the most successful neurosurgeon or oncologist in Singapore, for example).

Don't you just love the subtle phrasing in the following paragraph:

According to the formula agreed upon for over a decade now, ministerial pay is benchmarked to the salaries of the top earners in six chosen professions.

"According to the formula agreed upon ...".

Heheh. Agreed upon by whom? The people of Singapore? The Opposition MPs? The NMPs? Or just between Lee Kuan Yew and his merry men in white?

+++++++++
Technorati: Singapore; politics.

Mildly Sexist Letter

ST Nov 27, 2006
It's not the money that counts but the parenting

I REFER to YouthInk's discussion on family ties (ST, Nov 13).

I applaud Ng Chuin Song's philosophy that leaving kids in the hands of care-givers is unfair. This shows that she would be a responsible parent.

Hui Min wants to 'provide the best' for her children - she wants the assurance of a good balance between time and money before she 'can be convinced' to start a family.

I want to tell Hui Min that the best person to provide this assurance is herself. She is spot on in pointing out that 'it all boils down to the lifestyle we choose'.

We can spend all our lives chasing material luxuries - pursuing a Dink (double income, no kids) lifestyle in the fast lane - and end up lonely in our old age, regretting bitterly about the decision not to have kids.

Our parents raised large families on small, single incomes - but we turned out pretty okay, didn't we?

I want to assure Hui Min that not being able to afford 'musical or sporting activities' for the children does not make one a bad parent.

Think of parents who are too busy with material pursuits, and have no time for their children. Is that what kids want?

Being constantly chauffeured from school to tuition and enrichment classes?

Wouldn't they prefer to return from school to a home warmed by mum's presence?

Many well-educated women lament that their education is wasted because they have become stay-at-home mums.

But that is shallow thinking: Employment is not the ultimate goal of education.

The most important aspect of education is character building and value inculcation, which is so important for bringing up kids.

We need to be good role models for our children, and we need to impart good values to them.

Finally, there is nothing wrong with the woman holding the domestic fort while the man concentrates whole-heartedly on his career.

If he is successful, financial stability will be assured and the kids will also be well taken care of with mum around.

And don't wait until the children become older; research shows that a child's intelligence is largely set by the age of five.

Tan Chor Hoong
Mother of three children aged 12, 15 and 18

I've informed my wife that when I've earned enough, I will retire early and be a house husband. She can carry on working. I'll make sure the kids do their homework, do some stock analysis and be a day trader on the Internet. I'll also sell some advertisement space on my blog and earn a couple of thousand dollars a month like Xiaxue.

My wife has agreed, provided that I also learn to cook.

+++++++++
Technorati: Singapore; family.

Something About Drugs

There's a fairly long article in the ST today about drugs, but I just want to focus on one specific part of it. It's highlighted in orange below.

Nov 27, 2006
Not heroin, so not harmful? That's warped logic
By Yusuf Abdol Hamid

DRUG abuse has traditionally been associated with the riff-raff of society.

Their poison of choice was primarily heroin, whose predecessor opium almost
destroyed entire generations in 19th century Asia.

Heroin has a reputation of being a 'hard drug' which ruins lives and earns its abusers long prison terms, and even the death sentence.

With Singapore's focused fight against the malaise, it comes as no surprise that there has been a steady decline in the number of heroin abusers.

Ironically, this has led to the impression among youths that drugs such as Ecstasy, ketamine and Ice are not dangerous. These drugs are not heroin, after all.

As a result, young people who take these 'party' drugs are often in denial of their addictions.

And the ease with which they obtain these substances puts a question mark over our supposedly tight border security.

They claim to smuggle them in from Malaysia, or purchase them in clandestine deals in alleyways and void decks.

So we should not be misled into thinking that the fight against drugs has been won.
A few battles may have gone our way, but the war is still as intense as ever.

Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng hit the nail on the head recently when he expressed his concern over the rise in the use of synthetic drugs.

Last year, 629 arrests were made in relation to synthetic drug use. The figure was almost 10 times the number of heroin abusers caught in the same period.

Some time ago, I was taken aback when a polytechnic classmate asked me over lunch: 'What happened just now during the lecture?'

Having seen her sitting directly in front of me in class, I thought that she was joking.
The sad truth is that she was high on a depressant known as '5', warping her sense of time and giving her no recollection of the entire lecture.

It will take a huge effort, larger in scale than the campaign to counter heroin addiction in the 1970s, to rein in the ever-increasing abuse of synthetic drugs today.

The current anti-drug abuse campaigns are too general in scope and should instead focus more on the danger of synthetic drugs, since they are now much more widely abused than heroin.

Some youths, I am told, are blissfully unaware of the dangers of synthetic drugs - just like marijuana smokers who consistently reject the notion that cannabis contains high levels of cancer-causing carcinogens.

An acquaintance once related to me how he managed to muster the will to quit his dependency on Ice only after attending the funeral of a friend who had died from an overdose.

I hope it will not take more such stories to shake other abusers out of
their habit.

Fact 1 - Cannabis, like nicotine and sunlight, is carcinogenic.

Fact 2 - Alcohol is a much more dangerous drug than cannabis.

Fact 3 - Cigarettes and alcohol are more dangerous than Ecstasy, LSD and cannabis. Click here to see.

Why then is alcohol and cigarettes legal in Singapore, when cannabis and Ecstasy are not?

Aiyah, I'm tired, so I leave it to you guys to discuss. Anyway, I mostly drink plain water and fruit juice, and I hardly ever even take a Panadol. The first and last cigarette I ever smoked was when I was eight (and I'm still angry with my grandmother for making me try that).

+++++++++
Technorati: Singapore; drugs; health.

Singapore is World No. 3! Another Achievement.

From Aftenposten, a Norwegian newspaper:

40 percent feel discrimination

A new survey found that 40 percent of Norwegians feel that they have experienced discrimination when seeking work, one of the best results in the 28 nation study.

The survey by manpower company Kelly Services rated Sweden as the worst in terms of job discrimination, with nearly 100 percent of respondents saying they felt they had been unfairly treated in the past five years because of either race, age, gender or disability.

After Sweden came Thailand, Singapore, Hungary, India and Italy.

The countries where the least job discrimination was felt ranked Luxembourg as best, followed by Denmark, Hong Kong and Great Britain.

Norway did rather well, finishing 24th out of the 28 nations studied, despite having about 40 percent of 1,400 polled saying they had experienced employment discrimination in the past five years.

The most commonly given reason for job discrimination in Norway was age (22 percent), followed by gender (8 percent), race (4 percent) and disability (2 percent). Men felt more victimized than women, by 43 percent to 37 percent.

Well, life is unfair. But try to stay positive. If life is unfair, it means that sometimes very good things might happen in your life that you've done absolutely nothing to deserve.

It's interesting to note that there seems to be no correlation between the level of unfair discrimination in a country, and its level of democracy. The above study shows that where jobs are concerned, Sweden and Singapore are the world's most unfairly discriminatory countries. This other study says that Sweden is the world's most democratic nation, while Singapore is ranked dismally (84th place).

Thus like Sweden, you can be very democratic, yet very discriminatory. Or you can be like Singapore - very undemocratic, and very discriminatory.

+++++++++
Technorati: Singapore; jobs; discrimination.