COMMENT: Municipal arguments shouldn't come at expense of bigger discussions
Kirsten Han is a Singaporean blogger, journalist and filmmaker. She is also involved in the We Believe in Second Chances campaign for the abolishment of the death penalty. A social media junkie, she tweets at @kixes. The views expressed are her own.
I wasn’t intending to follow the parliamentary goings-on, but they found me anyway, poking into my daily routine on Twitter and Facebook. People’s Action Party (PAP) Members of Parliament (MPs), one after another, struck by the urge to express the depth of disappointment, anger and betrayal they felt over the Workers’ Party’s management of the Aljunied-Hougang-Punggol East Town Council (AHPETC).
It was two days of back-and-forth. Judging by my social media feeds, I wasn’t the only person getting tired of all the accusations and – as Heng Swee Keat put it – wayang.
There is plenty that WP should be open about. But so should all the other town councils. And who – apart from the mainstream media – has really forgotten about the whole Action Information Management Pte Ltd (AIM) saga? Singaporeans have yet to get satisfactory answers out of that episode.
Of course, there is a very simple way for us to deal with all this pained hand-wringing: depoliticise the town councils!
It doesn’t make sense for MPs to have to grapple with all the mundane nitty-gritty of town council management. Nor does it make sense for the management of town councils to undergo such an upheaval when a new party takes over. It’s a waste of time, energy and resources to find new managing agents, and to build new software and administrative infrastructure. All this should already be in place, and remain in place despite local shifts in power.
The recent AHPETC saga is not the only time national politics has been sacrificed for municipal matters. It happens all the time. Discussions of big ideals, principles and values have been lost to petty little quarrels over details and decimal points. Elections – the best time for a country to come together for a conversation on big issues – often become about HDB lift upgrades, the colour of HDB blocks and community centre trips to Universal Studios (and this was an actual election promise I’d heard at a rally in 2011).
There is no doubt that municipal issues are important, and that town councils need to be transparent and open about where public funds are going. But these shouldn’t come at the expense of discussion of important national policies that need a better airing in Parliament. Singaporeans deserve to have the big issues – such as human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of information, and if we’re feeling brave and progressive, LGBT rights – receive a real, substantial debate, just as much as we need to argue over town council fees in Parliament.
