Political Competition

A lot of Singaporeans have the impression that what the SDP is doing is damaging to the country. They cannot see what goodness can come out of breaking the laws in a deliberate manner time and again.

They are misguided. The single biggest problem Singapore is facing now is not ERP, high petrol prices nor any other issues of the day. The single biggest problem Singapore is the absence of political competition.

Many of us know that in economics a monopoly is considered problematic because the lack of competition will enable the monopoly to maximize its profit at the expense of the consumer of that service. Monopolistic behavior in politics exhibits similar damaging outcome.

I will cite just one example to illustrate the impact of politics on your financial well being: Land supply. In Singapore only the Government of Singapore has the ability to inject new supply of land. All other so called major players such as CDL, Capital Land etc buy land from the Government and then resell the land in turn. So the Government effectively controls the overall land supply and hence the land prices over the long term. By applying a long term policy of suppressing land supply, the Government is able to reap enormous profit at the expense of its people. This is a major factor why many of us may not have enough for retirement despite a CPF contribution rate that is probably the highest in the world.

The current Government is able to get away with that precisely because of the lack of political competition. It knows it can get away with it because there is no credible challenge to its power. And that is precisely why the PAP has done what it did since coming onto power some 50 years ago: To eliminate political competition.

Which is what the SDP is countering: To attack the components within the system that is used to suppress political competition. For without political competition, issues such as your CPF money, housing prices, non-transparency of how our nation’s reserve is being managed, ERP, COE, GST, ministerial pay, wealth gap etc will never be resolved.

So support efforts such as what the SDP is doing. It may seem a waste of taxpayer money but compared to the payoff of multi-billions of dollars benefit from a healthy political competition environment, the cost is worth it.