littleworkpage

PAP, The Opposition & the Resilience of Singapore MM Lee’s latest warning about Singapore without the PAP is nothing new. It has always been the election scare tactic. Don’t vote for the opposition because you are bored, because you simply want to rebel, because you just want to voice your discontent over particular issues. You just might vote the PAP out of power and Singapore’s success is wholly attributable to the PAP and without them Singapore will be in ruins. Firstly, this is intended to be a statement about the calibre of the current opposition. Singaporeans are not unintelligent. We know that the current opposition leaders and their party members do not have the same kind of political experience as the senior members of the PAP. But, a long time ago when the PAP was itself an opposition party, its leaders did not have the political experience of people like the late David Marshall. The point is that given Singapore’s political climate of single party dominance, I wou...

A couple of months ago I was returning from a trip to Hong Kong. I enjoy the convenience of going through the automated lane at the airport. Place your passport on the reader; make your way through; place your thumb on the second reader; you are cleared. Very efficient. Very fast. And foolproof. On that occasion, there was a queue at the automated lane. But, I figured it would move fast and definitely faster than the manual lanes and besides that day there were long queues in all the lanes. So, I joined the automated lane. It was taking a while for each person to get through. A chap standing in front of me remarked to the officer who was trying to assist something along the following lines.... Wah! Nowadays the security is so tight ah? Singapore passport also the machine is taking so long to check. Obviously it was a snide remark about the glitches in the device that did the scanning. It drew chuckles and smiles from the rest of us in the queue. The officer obviously tre...

I'm sure the Home Minister did not mean it when he said, 'Any lapse by any department in the Home Team is a failure which all in the Home Team family must bear'. If he did mean it and if this was not a rapidly and loosely drafted statement, then the following meanings are possible: a) The 61 year old gentleman slipping through immigration (of all the places I would have thought this would be the most secure and in all honesty I have been complacent about the level of security there) using his son's passport was not a lapse; or b) The incident was a lapse but not a lapse by the ICA; or c) It was a lapse by the ICA but the department is not part of the Home Team or d) The ICA is part of the Home Team but the Home Minister is not as his is a political office and he is himself not a member of the civil service or e) The Home Minister is acknowledging that as a member of the Home Team family he is going to bear the responsibility for the lapse of a 'famil...

I found this great quote about the real work that the UN does... This couldn't be further from the truth... The UN is unfortunately a toothless organisation held hostage by the power of the veto at the Security Council and the behind-the-scenes dealings of powerful nations. Carlos Romulo (former president of the General Assembly of the UN): "If there is a problem between a weak nation and another weak nation and the UN takes action, the problem disappears. If there is a problem between a strong nation and a weak nation and the UN takes action, the weak nation disappears. If there is a problem between a strong nation and a strong nation and the UN takes action, the UN disappears."

Chee Soon Juan's strenuous and persistent questioning of witnesses whilst the court had disallowed those questions gave rise to a contempt conviction. Gopalan Nair's vitriolic verbal assualt making reference to the judge who presided over the case has resulted in a charge under the Penal Code of insulting a public officer. Both of these cases give rise to the fact that there is an interest in protecting the integrity of the judicial system and an opposing public interest in being able to engage in free criticism of the judiciary and to subject them to scrutiny. Here are some interesting quotes about insults leveled against the judiciary or contempt of court generally. It is quite a task to balance the need for an unimpugned judicial system as a cornerstone of constitutional governance and the need for free expression and free speech so that a little boy can still cry out that the emperor wears no clothes. In Re S.Mulgaokar(1978) 3 SCC 339. “The contempt power, though jurisdic...

Reporters Without Borders – they have again got their facts wrong. In an article entitled “US blogger Gopalan Nair still waiting the outcome of trial” dated 17th June 2008, Reporters Without Borders (RWB) makes the following assertions at two different parts of the article: Firstly, “This trial is a farce. Gopalan Nair appeared today before one of the plaintiffs herself”, the worldwide press freedom organisation said. (that’s a reference to RWB) Secondly, The case of “insulting” Belinda Ang Saw was heard today with the judge herself presiding over the hearing. The second sentence is hyperlinked to an AFP article. The AFP article does not state that the matter was heard before Justice Belinda Ang. I believe that the writer of the RWB article must have misunderstood the AFP article. The following is the relevant extract from the AFP article: In the blog, Gopalan Nair criticised a recent legal hearing at which Singapore founding father Lee Kuan Yew and his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsie...

Judging from an AFP report on the net which is about 4 hours old, Gopalan Nair’s original charge of insulting a public officer via sending her an email has not been substituted. The new charge is apparently one of insulting via the blog contents and it is now under the Penal Code as opposed to the Miscellaneous Offences (Public Order and Nuisance) Act. In my earlier blog entry, ‘From Folly to Freedom’ dated 5th June, I had said the following: I’m a little curious as to the precise wording of the charge against him. If the charge was worded in exactly the same manner as indicated in parenthesis above in the AFP report, then there is a serious slip in the charge. If the charge is eventually amended to one involving the contents in the blog and not the alleged email, then there is likely to be an interesting jurisdiction issue. My reason for stating the above was that from multiple reports both on the net as well as in the papers, I got the impression that the charge probably stated the ...