I'm going to criticise the government.
This whole issue of being so easily swayed by transparent excuses Lee & Offspring (& The Intermediate Family Invention) routinely produce and publish has been stinging at my ego ever since I started taking the demo possi class and realised how ignorant and uncritical I have always been. I cannot believe that when I first heard about the history of LKY reproving Catherine Lim for her critiques ("if you want to talk about politics, join the political parties") I actually agreed with him. I resent that 12 years of education had not taught me how to think, and I resent that the responsibility lies partly with the PAP.
So yesterday or so i saw this article on TODAY, which has a heading as such:
Paying the (super)market rate; Wages of ministers, civil servants to go up as Govt seeks to keep its talent
Lee U-Wenu-wen@mediacorp.com.sg
925 words
23 March 2007
That is a disclaimer, and i will henceforth with protection from Disclaiming quote heavily from the article, which introduces itself like this:
"TO KEEP pace with the growing salaries of the private sector, the Government is revising the pay of its ministers and civil servants...
"The worldwide hunt for talent is intense and to remain an attractive employer, the Public Service, too, had to keep pace with the private market, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said yesterday."
The salaries of civil servants are calculated as such:
Speaking at the annual administrative service dinner and promotion ceremony, Mr Lee, who is also the Finance Minister, cited the Administrative Service as one of the many services that had "fallen behind".
[Calculating salaries for Grade 1 officials] is done by first tracking the top eight earners in each of six professions. Their salaries are arranged from No 1 to 48. The benchmark is pegged at two-thirds the salary of the median - the 24th earner. Using the data from private sector incomes in 2005, Earner No 24 took home $3.29 million, so the 2006 benchmark for minister salaries would be 66.6 per cent of that - or about $2.2 million. Historically, ministers have been paid less than the benchmark.
Today, senior Permanent Secretaries and ministers in this grade are paid $1.2 million a year, or 55 per cent of the benchmark. Back in 2000, they were earning 71 per cent of the benchmark.
Do you see something wrong with this? Let's take this step by step.
Firstly, the top ministers' salaries are about S$2.2m per year. This aggregates out to be about $183000 per month not inclusive of bonuses, private property discounts and first class airline flights. My family probably doesn't earn that much in four years. Well, you might say, those are the prime ministers after all, although this range of benefits does remind one of a certain donation-embezzling rogue. How would it look if the prime ministers were flying economy?Before we start thinking about the rightful material perogatives of servants of ministerial dispositions like the PAP would like us to, we should make a dutiful comparison with government officials of other countries to see if there're any justifications for the immense paychecks ("Look, they're doing it too, why can't we?").
We can refer to this site which compares Singapore with Australia, the USA and the UK. Who knows how reliable those statistics are, but several other (dissidents') site feature similar statistics. According to the above source, George Bush gets about US$400k a year plus US$50k expenses, this will make it about, oh, a third of PM Lee's. Of course, I'm sure as the President he gets just about 20 private jets of his own and whatnot that the webmaster left out to better contrast the difference, but the discrepancy between the absolute amounts is still quite shocking. What more, the USA enjoys free press, and taking into consideration the greater amount of accountability the Bush admin has to present to its media and people, I wouldn't be surprised the difference in salary is even larger.
This is true when you read carefully the report, which clearly states that LHL is also the Finance Minister (Biz students will know about how it is only rational and imperative that there is separation of duties between the executive and the finance officer; another issue is the sheer concentration of power in the hands of a few elites in Singapore - Temasek Holdings anyone? NKF anyone? SPH anyone?). Apparently, according to the same Mr Yeo Cheow Tong's site, the salaries of the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister are apparently counted separately. S$4m a year?
Secondly, "the administrative service has fallen behind"?? The article is actually reporting that they plan to further increase their salaries, because of the need to keep on par with private sector pay, to retain the best people in the government. I hate how things always sound just about right when you don't think about it. What the government need is capable people who are dedicated to running the government, not capable people who are running the government to make money. If talents in the PAP are there by virtue of high salaries, by virtue of their desire for wealth (odd use of virtue here), then their loyalties will not be to the people's welfare, but to money.
Who can offer more money than the private sector? The moment salaries fall, or the moment the economy does well enough to promise a compensation much higher, these capable talents that run the government are going to defect. Then what can the government do to keep them? Naturally, they will look to increasing salaries - is this what is happening here? Greed from the entire cohort of government officials who are sorely tempted by the private sector? They control the money, they control the press, they even control the law (ISA anyone?), I wonder that they even need to come up with platitudes and excuses.
Read this next part of the article and be cynical:
On top of their main jobs, senior civil servants hold concurrent appointments such as chairmen of statutory boards or government-linked companies. "We recognise that the nature of work in the public and private sectors are different and there is some personal sacrifice involved in public service," said the statement.
The job security of ministers was also highlighted by the PSD.
"Ministers are not in guaranteed long-term jobs - they face the General Elections every five years. Similarly, our top civil servants are put on fixed term appointments once they are appointed to a top position," it said.
When was the last time there was a change of minister (that does not result in the original minister being promoted into specially created positions of seniority)? And then they naturally starts to divert attentions...
And hinting that money is not the route to all solutions, he said the civil service leadership must excite and enthuse its staff to see that they are helping to make a difference to Singapore's policy-making.
In the early 1990s, the Administrative Service lost "entire cohorts of good officers", and having taken many years to recover from the loss, the Prime Minister said it "must not happen again" in future.
Singapore has an income gap larger than that of the United States'. Embezzling tax payers' money and embezzling charity's money is not really that different. People donate to charity out of the goodness of their hearts, people pay income tax because the people collecting them make it illegal not to. This income tax comes not only from the rich and successful top 8 professionals that the PAP pegs their salaries against, but also the taxi drivers whose sons do well in school and get scholarships and get their own very columns in Straits Times - stellar examples of how meritocracy benefits everyone: your son can become the Prime Minister one day too! Let's not quibble about the fact that you're earning such pittance now, after all we in the government work so hard and earn peanuts too.
The private sector is only going to get richer and richer, the government salaries are only going to increase, the tax payers are going to pay more, the lower income group who can't afford it are going to get poorer. If Singapore spawns a Bill Gates, the bottom 20% of the population are going to go into immediate poverty (myself included; my salary totals up to $400 a month). So is the economic progress of the nation really at all pertinent to the people who are not getting rich? Should we really believe the government when they say that economic progress is for everybody in Singapore?
If the PAP is really concerned about all its people (and if it wants to be a one-party state we're not just 'the government's people', we're the PAP's people), it will peg its salaries to a multiplier of the bottom 10% income group (multiplier, meaning like, 100 x lowest 10% income or something). My classmate suggested it today and I was rather impressed. Then, at least you'll have people working for the good of all people, if only to maintain their own wealth.
I hope after this I wouldn't get arrested under the ISA and also get locked up in Sentosa for 20 years. They really shouldn't do that, I don't have money to pay my own rent like Francis Seow...
