MAY 9, 2006

Lees’ way or the highway

It’s election time in Singapore and the opposition pollies are silent as lawyers wait to pounce. Victory is a formality for the Lee family, Eric Ellis reports

SINGAPORE’S LIBEL lawyers are sharpening their pencils, which can only mean one thing – it’s election time in the gleaming island republic.

Yes, there’s a poll on May 6, and so, yes, Singapore’s enfeebled opposition is again being assailed by lawsuits. The dissident Singapore Democratic Party has been sued for allegedly claiming Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his 82-year-old father Lee Kuan Yew knew about corruption in a kidney charity – Singapore’s AWB scandal – but covered it up. “Elections or no elections,” an aggrieved Lee fils bleated, “if you see this, you have to act swiftly.”

Disappointed Singaporeans, who’d hoped their country was lightening up, wonder why the overkill. Even if Singapore, Australia’s best friend in the region, were a genuine democracy, the Lees’ People’s Action Party would likely stroll it in. For all the PAP heavy-handedness, it has largely delivered. Secure, sanitary, successful and stultifyingly sterile, Singapore works. And the seatless SDP poses no threat to the Lees. The PAP controls 82 of 84 seats in parliament. “Libel’s become a reflex action for them now,” says Professor Garry Rodan, director of Murdoch University’s Asia Research Centre. “The PAP don’t seem to have much faith in Singaporeans’ ability to sort the political wheat from the chaff.”

So Singapore will remain an effective one-party state, where the Lees’ decisions are final and little debate is entertained, as Australian drug trafficker Nguyen Tuong Van learned on Changi’s gallows last December.

Though libel-as-political-weapon is familiar ground in the Lees’ “guided” democracy, this election differs a little from others. It will be the first as PM for Lee the younger, who took over from John Howard’s avuncular mate Goh Chok Tong in 2004 in a managed succession. The PAP under Goh got 75% of the compulsory vote in the last poll in 2001. A win with less than 70% would embarrass Lee, who admits he’s not overly popular. The poll also comes after problems for his even less-popular wife, CEO of the secretive state-owned Temasek Holdings which had made a succession of dubious investments which angered many Singaporeans.

The election will be the first in 15 years that the opposition can, on paper at least, win. Singapore elections tend to be pyrrhic contests, every poll since 1991 won by the PAP on nomination day because they were contested in less than half the seats. No libel judgment has ever been awarded to a Singaporean politician in a foreign court. The cases are heard – and always won – in Singapore’s courts, but don’t dare suggest those courts are anything but independent. To do so hazards, well, legal action. Rodan wonders whether it’s “possible to even point out that it’s impossible to debate whether or not the judiciary is independent."

Singapore’s libel settlements are good little earners for the Lees, and political suicide for those who challenge them. They usually pay about $400,000 and have been as high as $8m, way beyond the defendant’s wallet. Duly bankrupted, they can’t run for elected office. Foreign correspondents writing of Singapore hazard libel every time they put pen to paper. Local journalists self-censor, while the active online blogging community has been cowed by a state ruling that blogs carrying “political content” are banned.

Sydney barrister Stuart Littlemore, who monitors Singapore’s legal system, notes that when normal Singaporeans sue for libel, the average settlement is about $40,000 with the win-loss split 50-50, in line with international norms. But when a PAP politician or state official sues a critic, the average payout is about $400,000 with a 100% success rate. “There’s nothing wrong with the legal system per se, it’s just some of the people in it,” Littlemore says. “None of those PAP cases would succeed in a Sydney or London court.”

Apart from libel actions, the thing igniting public attention during this election has been a chat show on the normally excruciating state TV, where LKY faced two hours of questions from a panel of smart, net-savvy twenty-something Singaporeans, some with foreign educations. The octogenarian warhorse came across as doddery, outdated and often patronising, his interlocutors fresh and rational. But it didn’t take long for the Lees to bite back. The panellists were derided in the follow-up press as impudent and disrespectful. LKY said they didn’t represent the aspirations of young Singaporeans. The PAP’s problem for future polls is that they probably do.

It’s hard to say how much of the PAP vote is genuine, because independent opinion polling is banned and ballots are numbered and thus traceable.

There’s little credible choice for voters, so South-East Asia’s democratic revolution will again pass Singapore by on May 6.