Sunday, 6 January 2013

My wish for Singapore politics

A very intersting article was posted on Yahoo Singapore today discussing author's wish for PAP. Here is the link to the second part of the article.

That got me thinking as to what I want from Singapore in terms of politics.  Here are 4 things I came up with.

1) A seperation from the law-making and the running the estate elements of Government. I would wish that the people making the laws and the people running our estates be different. In my opinion, there is a different skill involved in running an estate locally as compared to making laws for a country to run nationally. I also do not intend it to be a upper house, lower house kind of governance like other countries, but 2 bodies with different duties. One deals with local issues with regards to the estate, and the other deals with how this country is run.

2) Lets elect our and empower our Mayors. Many Singaporeans do not even know that we have 5 Mayors in Singapore and less of us even know what in the world do they do. I propose that Mayors be empowered, like in many other countries, to run the CDCs. Let them face all the problems on the ground like upgrading and cleaning carparks and so on. Let people choose who they want for these roles.

3) Empower our President. I believe that we should empower our President for there to be more check and balances of power. I think that the President, who is paid a lot, should be the person who actively chooses which elected MP belongs to which ministry and that which Ministry should be there in the first place. This would expand the role of the President who currently appoints the Prime Minister.


4) Greater representative democracy. Another condition that needs to be added in is that if a party wins x percentage of seats, then that party should, have to the best of abilities, have x% of seats in the cabinet. That would improve Singapore's Standing as a representative democracy. So if party X wins 5% of the vote and there are 21 cabinet positions, then at least 1 seat needs to go to party X. This would make situations more fair and gives public a chance to see what the opposition parties are made of.

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