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Leon Perera: Shanmugam is presenting a "false choice" on NCMP issue

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Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam (left) and NCMP Leon Perera Photo: Reuters/Leon Perera Facebook page

Non-Constituency Member of Parliament (NCMP) Leon Perera said K Shanmugam is presenting a “false choice” between rejecting an NCMP seat and taking it up with “gratitude and praise”.

He also called on politics in Singapore to move beyond “petty, partisan point-scoring”, and focus on proposals to make Singapore better.

Perera was responding to the Home Affairs and Law Minister, who said that the Workers’ Party lacked the two factors needed for Singapore’s democracy to succeed: honesty in Parliament, and financial integrity.

Speaking on the sidelines of an event on Sunday (31 Jan), the Minister told reporters that the WP was not being honest about its intentions behind taking up the third NCMP post.

“The Workers’ Party should just come out and say: ‘Look, we would prefer a direct choice being given to the voters between the PAP (People’s Action Party) and the Workers’ Party, or some other opposition. But we don’t like the people being given an additional choice, which is you vote for the PAP and you still get an opposition candidate. Nevertheless, we benefit from it and therefore we want to fill the third seat,” said Shanmugam.

He also pointed to the long running Aljunied Hougang Punggol East Town Council (AHPETC) saga, where the Auditor-General had found lapses in its books.

But in a Facebook post on Sunday, Perera said he had accepted the NCMP position despite “the long-term risk to Singapore’s political evolution”, in hopes that he would make a positive contribution to the legislative process and with his party, “show Singapore the value of a more balanced politics”.

He pointed out that he was in a “totally different” situation from former Punggol East MP Lee Li Lian, who was an elected MP before declining the NCMP seat. Perera added, “If I were an elected MP and then lost an election, I would have done the same thing.”

The WP had filed a parliamentary motion to have Lee’s NCMP seat declared vacant and filled by Daniel Goh, a candidate for East Coast GRC. The opposition party has long opposed the NCMP scheme in principle, but says it believes in working within the system.

The party’s Yee Jenn Jong, Gerald Giam and current Aljunied GRC MP Sylvia Lim have all previously served as NCMPs.

But last Friday (29 Jan), a heated two-hour debate in Parliament saw the Workers’ Party’s motion being amended to include the move being called a “political manoeuvre” by the WP.

All eight WP MPs, including Perera, abstained from voting on the motion, which was passed by Parliament.

Perera noted that during last week’s Parliamentary sessions, he had asked questions on issues such as vote secrecy education in the social studies curriculum. While he did not agree with some of the replies from the relevant office-holders, he had not resorted to calling them “ill-intentioned" or attacking them personally.

Citing a Chinese proverb 对事不对人 (focusing on the issue at hand instead of getting personal), Perera concluded, “We can agree to disagree without calling each other names, running each other down and scoring partisan points endlessly. I hope that this will be the spirit that will inform political debates.“