On political pressure
This is going to be a personal reflection on what a more multi-party political environment in Singapore could look like.
Most importantly, the art of consensus building and placing political pressure, which is especially more important when it comes to transportation and infrastructure projects, which we involve ourselves in here.
At the end of the day, politics is politics, and there is frankly not much of a difference between how things are done in Singapore and how things are done elsewhere. Don’t listen to the PAP’s own propaganda that they are more upright and just than political parties elsewhere. I don’t think they are, personally.
Up and down the long hill
With the election out of the way, let’s take a look at the soon to be former Transport Minister’s comments:
The Bukit Panjang LRT (BPLRT), which opened in 1999, was an “after-thought” to a built-up town, and constructed because of “political pressure”, Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan said on Tuesday (Sept 12).
“No LRT is designed that way, in such a masochistic manner, when you force yourself up and down (with) twists and turns,” Mr Khaw said, alluding to the alignment of the BPLRT, which has several sharp bends over undulating terrain.
What is “political pressure” here? We’ll define the topic here once and then revisit it throughout the rest of this writeup.
Recall that the initial announcement of the BPLRT was done in late 1994, nearer towards the end of a term of government with a general election on the horizon. Bukit Panjang residents had gone on the record with why they weren’t connected to the MRT system — even Woodlands would get MRT service soon enough — and the government had already gotten quite a scare in the 1991 election with two additional seats falling to the SDP, including the nearby seat of Bukit Gombak, in addition to the WP winning Hougang and Chiam See Tong retaining his Potong Pasir seat.
In fact, Bukit Panjang wasn’t even the first place to be assessed for the feasibility of the LRT system — but in fact, the downtown area around Nicoll Highway and Beach Road (you may recall this becoming the Marina Line, or CCL Stage 1). But yet, why was Bukit Panjang LRT built first instead of the parallel system at Buona Vista? One of the answers to that question, I feel, may be the “political pressure” that Minister Khaw was hinting at.
Heck, the “Buona Vista LRT” still doesn’t exist 25 years after it was first proposed. The Jurong Region line would have served the NUS area, but we’ve heard nothing of it so far, maybe the LTA could have decided to can the project.
Priorities, priorities
Back when Chiam See Tong ran Potong Pasir, the ruling party was often accused of neglecting Potong Pasir with no funds for estate upgrading and such. LKY himself even went as far as to say that “opposition wards were at the back of the queue”. Yes, the optics are bad, but I don’t think the PAP was outright doing any evil here, but it was just a matter of a simple factor of political influence and Chiam not having much of it as an opposition MP.
The same could be said of Pritam Singh and the famous Block 108 ramp. I agree with Pritam in that it is not right in a moral sense to have the losing PAP candidates be placed in charge of grassroots organizations responsible for disbursing government funds for community improvement projects. However, even if the WP had been given control of their CIP money, I still do not think they would have made a difference in nationwide infrastructure projects. Yeah, the ramp wouldn’t have taken seven years if AHTC could build it themselves, but that’s about it.
My reasoning is that the influence a member of the ruling party can exercise is more easily able to scare the bureaucrat at the receiving end of a letter compared to one with a hammer on top of it. The ruling party member can more easily go to the minister or something and demand his projects be put forward — although, of course, the sort of influence that a “suicide squad” like that in Aljunied would have would not significantly move the needle, at best.
Let’s talk about Sengkang LRT expansion, to illustrate a point. It is perhaps a coincidence that compared to the Punggol LRT, there would be more work involved in preparing the Sengkang LRT for increased capacity or 3-car operation, such as relocating plant rooms at Farmway and Kangkar station. That would thus need more money and construction work than in Punggol. Of course, such a project timeline and budget should already have been planned without political interference, but it would be terrible if something happened given the density of Sengkang town.
Should push come to shove and the LTA ever finds itself in a position where it has to take resources away from one project and give it to another, I am of the opinion that the WP MPs would not be in a better position to push for their local projects to be spared compared to PAP MPs. They would need to have friends in the ruling party — but then, what would be the point of being an opposition?
This may be a comparatively uncharitable take, but it’s the reality of not having your MPs be in line with the national government. I’m not saying that any of that could happen — it may not. But the fact is that even in a more multi-party system, as the winds of politics shift, we could well be looking at priorities switching back and forth depending on which party happens to be in power. Infrastructure projects, which tend to extend longer than a government’s five-year term of office, do not tend to take kindly to constant regime change.
Not that Prince Andrew
It would be a mistake to think of the above as Uniquely Singaporean. In fact, I would go as far as to say things are actually comparatively more moderate here than in some other countries.
New York transportation activists absolutely loathe their state governor Andrew Cuomo. Why? To cut a long story short, Governor Cuomo has only invested in public transportation when it has suited him — like when the opening of the Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 or the replanning of the Canarsie tunnel shutdown gave him an opportunity to plaster his face all over the press, while in all other times the MTA has been allowed to rot, literally and metaphorically. Political pressure forced Cuomo to sit up and take notice of the subway issues, but once that was sort of done, he walks away and the MTA continues to fester in its own poo.
The same can be said, if you ask me, about British PM Boris and his about-turn on High Speed 2 since becoming PM and unexpectedly winning the support of the typical Labour wall in the north of the UK. The idea behind HS2 was that it would more easily connect the northern cities to each other and to London — ostensibly a project with a very high price tag that would have benefited Labour and not the Conservatives until last year’s election. If the Tories carry HS2 forward, it would be an obvious advantage for them at the ballot box compared to Labour.
If you think the US and UK are bad examples then, we can look at Japan, my favourite yardstick to compare our political scene against. By the time the government even tables any potential legislation, it has already largely been agreed upon by the LDP-Komeito coalition, and the opposition just stage dog and pony shows. There’s also a certain amount of pork-barrel politics such as local governments backed by powerful LDP interests demanding shinkansen stations (even if they’re willing to pay), ridership at such stations ends up in the toilet and they get crappy service anyway…
A particularly extreme case to illustrate the effects of political pressure would be the Chuo Shinkansen, initially planned for 2027 but now guaranteed to see delays after the Shizuoka prefectural government refused to allow JR Central to begin preparatory construction work citing “environmental issues”. At the same time, the same prefectural government has been requesting that JR Central also build them a new shinkansen station beneath the airport, so make of that what you will.
Think what you like to think
At the end of the day, my firebrand liberal (maybe even proto-socialist) days have been over for a while now. I’m not here to convince you, the internet loathes the PAP anyway, but just to personally reflect on what things have looked like to me so far.
Infrastructure investment requires a sense of political consensus. Perhaps a more formal WP presence in Parliament may help them with the consensus-building style that Mr Low Thia Khiang has long espoused — giving the WP more formal access to the government bureaucracy, which in Singapore is responsible for implementing such infrastructure projects — but I feel that even that may have its limits.
Whatever it is, just remember that at the end of the day, the bureaucracy exists to carry out the policies of the elected national government first and foremost. He who pays the piper calls the tune. The playing field is fundamentally tilted in favour of the ruling party because of this, and realistically, the only way for any minor opposition politicians to make headway in terms of local infrastructure would be to collect their own taxes. Under Article 143 of the Constitution, this would require legislative authority… given by the PAP-controlled national Parliament.
Point is, with an increased multi-party representation in Parliament, I would not be surprised that you start hearing more of how the politics have affected infrastructure projects, compared to if the bureaucracy (and by extension, the ruling party) got their way.
What you make of it, I leave it up to you.
Reports upon reports
I think that while we’re on the topic, it might also be worth taking a side look at the Cross Island Line EIA process as an example of consensus building and political pressure. The EIA process is evidently new to LTA and quite sparse on details compared to other EIA processes — even in Malaysia.
The issue here is that the Nature Society got blindsided by the release of various planning documents in 2013 which showed the CRL running through the nature reserves and had to quickly reverse-engineer their own counter-argument. LTA did contact them, at the end of the day, and it appears that an outcome satisfactory to all parties was obtained. This is an example of successful consensus-building, but in this case it was just a singular NGO with deep domain expertise in the topic at hand (natural conservation) and no bellyaching about civil rights or something more political.
The Maplewoods saga, on the other hand, ended as well as it could have, if you ask me. From my own experience seeing how the LTA interacts with local political interests and residents, I don’t think it entirely out of line to say that because of a lack of appreciation of the delivery process of the railway, people don’t know what they want, who they should be asking, and what they should be asking for. Maybe it’s just my inner Sir Humphrey bias speaking. Or perhaps, a public environmental review would allow for such local concerns to be dealt with before the construction process begins.
It makes me wonder how the bureaucracy would take to having regular parliamentary oversight committees to answer to, as we begin to embrace more adversarial policymaking. We may also see an increase in politicians — from both sides of the aisle — trying to score cheap points with their constituents by demanding all sorts of weird crap (like priority cars) that we can ill afford from an engineering or practicality perspective.
It would be interesting to observe the effects of such political scrutiny over how our infrastructure projects are delivered. What sort of compromises will need to be made in order to accommodate political pressures and achieve consensus and compromise?
For what it’s worth, even the Hong Kong Legco has such measures. This weekend’s results may be a development for democracy, but I’m not sure whether it’s something I’d want to see more of.
