Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

154 CHUA BENG HUAT AND TAN JOO EAN
In social services, the government has also become more generous in its grantsin-aid
to voluntary welfare agencies with specific client groups (Straits Times, 20
March 1996). However, direct relief to the poor remains meagre and stringently
means-tested. This is reflected in the low cost of state welfare, which was just
above 2 per cent of the annual total government expenditure in 1993, but has been
almost doubled in the 1995 budget.
The additional provisions in housing and social services are implemented within
the vehement anti-welfare ideology of the PAP government. They are distributed in
the following manner: first, all subsidies are effectively transfers between
government departments, no direct funds are given to recipients. The latter have
no discretion of speeding grants in ways other than for specifically stated
purposes. Second, to deflect welfare entitlement claims on the state, grants to
voluntary welfare agencies are given to community groups that are committed to
providing and operating the agencies. Detached from direct government
involvement, public assistance is not deemed as an entitlement of citizens of a
welfare state, but as benefits of the generosities of the public channelled through
voluntary agencies. According to the government, this eliminates the development
of a ‘mentality of dependency’ (Straits Times, 20 March 1996) among the citizens,
particularly the poor.
Because the subsidies are obliquely distributed, it is unclear whether the
additional expenditures will satisfy the lower-income electorate’s complaints against
rising costs of living, which the government apparently believes is more perceptual
than ‘real’. For example, a 1995 survey quoted by the deputy prime minister, Lee
Hsien Loong, found that more than 50 per cent of Singaporeans said that their
circumstances had not improved for the past five years. Yet in politics, perception
is almost everything–of this the PAP government is well aware. Consequently, it
uses every opportunity to exhort Singaporeans to lower expectations because,
having already achieved a very high level of material life, from here on every little
gain can be achieved only with greater difficulty, relative to the past. 15
Meanwhile, the poor appear to have discovered their own voice, without
conscious or formal organisation, in the ballot box. Indeed, as noted above, it was
this voice in 1991 that initiated an expansion of subsidies. Furthermore, it is a voice
that appears to be multiracial and national in character because ethnicity is no
longer a discriminating variable for poverty. Following the apparent success of the
1991 general election, it is a voice that will likely continue to extract concessions
from the government with varying measures of success.
Increased subsidies to the poor are potentially a source of class antagonism
between the middle class and the lower-income groups. This is because the
general tendency in developed capitalist nations is that the taxes raised to finance
such subsidies are extracted from the wage-earning middle class rather than from
the capitalist class (Offe 1984:154). 16 Indeed, in Singapore, there have been some
complaints from a segment of the new middle class who are living in private
housing against the apparent endless public expenditures, presumably using
taxpayers’ money, in upgrading public-housing estates (Straits Times, 25 August