SINGAPORE — Whether a policy will be popular at the ballot box is not a factor that the Government takes into account before implementing it, Foreign Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam said yesterday.
Instead, the Government’s focus has always been about getting policies right, he said, using the recently-announced Pioneer Generation Package as an example.
The Government would not have fully funded the S$8 billion package from its current account surplus this year if it were “thinking purely in terms of electoral calculations”, said Mr Shanmugam.
The minister was responding to a question from an Asahi Shimbun journalist during a luncheon organised by Singapore’s Foreign Correspondents Association on whether he sensed that the next General Election — due in 2016 — would see the People’s Action Party claw back the votes it lost in the 2011 polls.
Saying he does not want to “get into the numbers game”, Mr Shanmugam added that the Government would do what was right, not what was popular, in crafting policies.
“Is this going to increase in support (for the Government), decrease in support — I don’t spend a lot of time trying to assess that. Our own view has always been ‘do the right thing, be honest and upfront, explain the costs, explain the trade-offs’,” he said.
He added that once policies are crafted with the purpose of getting votes, “the country will go down”.
During the two-hour session at the Shangri-La Hotel, questions ranging from Singapore’s position on the Ukraine crisis to the Republic’s relations with its neighbours and the Association of South-east Asian Nations’ cooperation on search efforts for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 were asked by about 30 journalists from various organisations such as Bloomberg, AFP and Nikkei.
Asked if Singapore’s position on not having a minimum wage would remain unchanged, Mr Shanmugam said the Government has always looked at facts and adopted approaches that work. While some research has shown that a minimum wage has worked in some contexts, he noted it “doesn’t make sense” in many contexts, as weaker employees end up being unemployed.
Instead, the Government’s approach of having unions help workers bargain collectively and implementing the progressive wage model is more effective in driving wages up.
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