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Cover Story Ge 2011 tHe GrC SySteM “To abolish it outright may not serve the original purposes of ensuring a minority race representative in the group. Maybe what is needed is to have smaller GRCs with one minority candidate and two or three others.” Mr Harminder Pal Singh Singapore Democratic Alliance “Redrawing is very worrying. I’ve done my walkabout in Serangoon where I tell the residents that they are now in Marine parade GRC.” Ms nicole Seah National Solidarity party 6 THE GRADUATE Jul-Sep 2011 Crowds at a political rally: Dr Koh said it is hard to quantify the effect the key issues had on a voters as a significant proportion of young adults were voting for the first time. people who find that they suddenly get to vote after years, if not decades of not having to do so. Would it affect what really sticks in their political consciousness? Would it affect how they view different parties and politicians?” asks Dr Koh. Wither the GrC system? With the fall of Aljunied, there has been many calls online and among the opposition parties to do away with the GRC system. “We should revert back to all single member constituencies (SMC),” says Mr Gerald Giam from The Workers’ Party. “It is fundamentally opposed to the concept of democracy. I do not know whom I’m voting for. I do not know how many votes they got and whether or not each individual prospective MP won. It has to go,” says Dr Vincent Wijeysingha from the Singapore Democratic Party. “Redrawing is very worrying. I’ve done my walkabout in Serangoon where I tell the residents that they are now in Marine Parade GRC,” says Ms Seah. However, others disagree. “What weakness? I thought that Aljunied proves that you quite simply have to mount a good team. Each man or woman counts,” says Dr Koh. “To abolish it outright may not serve the original purposes of ensuring a minority race representative in the group. Maybe what is needed is to have smaller GRCs with one minority candidate and two or three others. This will be more representative of the general population too. Having larger groups may not be necessary,” says Mr Harminder Pal Singh from the Singapore Democratic Alliance. Others have also accused the PAP of redrawing the GRC boundaries as a form of gerrymandering. However, Mr Alex Yam from the PAP says redrawing is necessary so that MPs can do their job more effectively. “Redrawing electoral boundaries have a lot to do with population size. With more and more people, will an MP still be able to do his job?” he questions. One thing, however, remains certain – the public’s desire for changes in policies. “The desire is there. The challenge is to take it the desire to the next level. It has to go right down in the civil service to the policy level,” says Mr Benjamin Pwee from the Singapore People’s Party. Note: The political candidates were expressing their views on their own personal capacity.
SInGAPore’S 2011 eleCtIonS Political Implications for A Globalising City Singapore faces a delicate balancing act in ensuring local issues are tackled head on while striving for economic growth in its bit to be a global city. By victor r Savage The 2011 Singapore elections results was a sobering experience for the ruling people Action party (pAp), the only party in power since 1959 and one that Singapore’s populace have grown to equate with government, nationalism and Singapore. This reflection however is not concerned with a critical analysis of why the pAp lost its Group Constituency Representative (GRC) five seats, the ‘mistakes’ it made or why the Singapore electorate lost faith with their leaders. It is a broader conceptual contextualization of what the elections results represent in a globalising city. Given that the city-state has just gone through its best economic performance in 2010 (14.5 percent growth) and still economically sizzling in the first quarter of 2011 (8.3 percent growth rate), the pAp’s elections results have called for political recalibration. There are several ways of interpreting what global cities like Singapore have to handle with regard to domestic politics. Firstly, one has to accept that most cities are spatial and social traps. Citizens in cities develop often long residential comfort zones and networks, job security and social ties which embed them in residential areas and their urban settings. Singapore more than other cities is perhaps the penultimate spatial and social trap because as a city-state its citizens have less spatial mobility in the country – Singaporeans cannot pack up and move to other cities when the going gets difficult as Americans or Australians can do. This is compounded further when one realises that nearly all of Singapore’s food, natural resources and energy are imported which makes its citizens vulnerable to changing global market forces. Singaporeans are more territorially embedded since 90 percent of them own their homes. This immobility magnifies local political issues if the government chooses to neglect or ignore them. The opposition hammered home the realities of the high costs of living, unaffordable housing, transport problems, social injustice, the growing inequality of wealth and relative poverty that clearly resonated with Singapore’s middle income workers, aged residents and poorer citizens. In the latest 2011 global competitive rankings, Singapore has fallen into third place behind the united States and Hong Kong principally because of its high inflation and costs of living. Younger Singaporeans, however, with greater academic qualifications and technical competence or talent, have the best mobility – the world is their oyster! When they are disgruntled and dissatisfied, they emigrate elsewhere. Secondly, the tragedy of all global cities is that globalisation and urbanisation unfortunately can increase inequalities which in turn create pools of relative poverty. No city, no matter how wealthy can claim it does not have poor residents. The noted geographer, Doreen Massey, shows even a World City like london has poor people. This widening of the income gap is a political issue in many World Cities (such as Tokyo, New York and paris). poverty and poor people are relative issues and while Singaporeans on average are richer than most Southeast Asians, it does have poor citizens in comparison to its rich residents. For the ruling leadership this relatively poor group was belatedly acknowledged in the elections as those people falling between the cracks. However, compounding this relative poverty issue is the fact that Singapore’s leadership has created a political system of elitism – the top echelons of government and private sector corporations remain highly paid and carry all the exclusive trappings of a highly stratified society. The widening income gap and relative poverty has become politicised because the government has allowed knowledge-based foreign workers to fill the ranks of the thousands of multinational and transnational corporations operating in Singapore. equally, talented and educated Singaporeans have also risen in the income ladder but they Cover Story have become a minority in the maze of foreign commercial corporations. Singaporeans that do not make the global city grade in professional expertise are thus seen to be left behind. Thirdly, global cities are also cosmopolitan, with accepted pools of foreigners defining their global identity. No global and World City is culturally monolithic. In a way, being a global city means benchmarking with the best in order to complete. Singapore alone has 2, 880 financial institutions which in 2010 managed assets of over uS$1.1 trillion. Singapore, with 5.1 million people, in 710 sq km, tapping into 2 percent of total global trade, needs to adapt and upgrade its labour force in order to sustain itself. The nature of all global cities is to compete by keeping options open, attracting talent and knowledge-based workers, and expanding the pool of local educated people. Singaporeans want a Singaporean Singapore which requires political deft handling by any government sourcing for foreign expertise. Fourthly, as a global city, the elections threw up stark contrasts about the global-local nexus. unfortunately global cities need to wade into international flows to maintain spatial networks and the heightened importance of ‘relational’ spaces and social systems. Yet, on the other hand, the government needs to monitor the local pulse to ensure it does not ignore grounded issues. The art of politics is the ability for government to fine tune a balance between global economic capture and domestic citizenry concerns. In short, there needs to be a morphing of cosmopolitan mindsets within embedded heartland aspirations. If global cities are shibboleths for neo-liberalism and cosmopolitan values, then the Singaporean domestic politics of tomorrow must ensure the local politics of the ‘little people’ must remain in sync with Singapore’s wider international status as a place of quality living. Victor R Savage is an Associate Professor in Geography at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and NUSS member. These are his personal views. Jul-Sep 2011 THE GRADUATE 7
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