Singapore

01/19/1996

This week Prime Minister Paul Keating chose the richest country in S-E Asia to map his vision for Australia's role in the region. But Singapore's success, now being mimicked by others, has not come without a price. ERIC ELLIS reports.

DISNEYLAND with the Death Penalty, the only shopping centre with a seat in the United Nations, the Country with a Personality By-pass, Kleenexville - the one-liners come easily about Singapore, Australia's best friend in Asia.

The gratuitous remarks come easily because they might just have more than a ring of truth about them. Singapore is a land that to outsiders, the hated Western liberals that replaced communists, seems to have lost its sense of humour, a finely tweaked vision of the future run by a technocratic government of hyper-sensitive control junkies on computers.

But the cheap shots belie the fact that Singapore - the richest country in Asia outside Japan, but with a far superior standard of living - is doing something right. Strictly controlled it is, but a police state on the verge of revolt it seems not.

If Chinese communism means a guaranteed "iron rice bowl" for its 1.2 billion people, democracy Singaporean-style has buffed it into platinum, with an Armani wardrobe and a Lamborghini thrown in for good measure.

It's a squeaky-clean place where the standard of living is enviously high, where crime is low, where people are well-nourished, well-dressed, well-educated. A place where governnment knows best.

Singapore values, the Singapore socialeconomic model and Singapore social engineering are going through a purple patch at the moment.

Their patron, Singapore's founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who stepped down in 1990 but still wields considerable influence, has become a virtual God of Asian Values, a Philosopher-King for Developing Countries.

The way it is told by The Straits Times - a newspaper which sometimes makes the Soviet-era Pravda seem almost samizdat - the whole world is falling at the feet of Lee Kuan Yew and his acolytes, asking their advice about how they get it so right.

In recent months there have been learning delegations from China, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, even Eritrea.

Britain's new-look Labour leader Tony Blair dropped by at New Year for an audience with Lee, effusive in his praise of the compulsory national savings system, the Central Provident Fund, that anchors national prosperity.

Given that Singapore is perhaps the world's most complete corporate state, a place where senior leaders discourage creative and artistic thinking because it could interfere with business, it is appropriate that it is cloning itself.

Call it Singapore as a franchise opportunity, the McDonald's of the international community. New Singapores are popping up in various places in China and Vietnam, Burma and Cambodia, most notably in Suzhou, outside Shanghai, where China and Singapore are working closely together to create a $US100 billion metropolis for the 21st Century.

And who can argue with a per capita income higher than Australia and most Western European countries and with a national growth rate of at least 7-8 per cent that is expected to continue well into the next century. Paul Keating is certainly taken by it.

There's a national refrain in Singapore and it's not always about values - family, Asian or otherwise. The refrain is "Don't Quote Me".

It comes from what critics call a climate of fear, that the state can watch or control almost everything one does, that to step out of line, to do something unSingaporean, even as innocent as more cheaply filling your car's tank in neighbouring Malaysia, is to invite societal opprobrium, to lose your seat on the national gravy train.

Witness the remarks of Derek Da Cunha, director of the Institute of South-East Asian Studies at the prestigious National University of Singapore.

It is da Cunha's ISEAS that sponsors the famous Singapore Lecture, the republic's equivalent of speaking to Congress. It was here on Wednesday where Paul Keating mapped out his vision of Australia's role in Asia, the one that also fits Singapore's.

ISEAS is a well-respected institution in Singapore but the way the academic Mr da Cunha tells it he is something of an enfant terrible. His views on Singaporean foreign policy and regional politics are often out of synch with government. "The Government doesn't always like what I have to say but I find I can express my views very freely in this environment," he says.

But at the end of a discussion with the AFR, the engaging Da Cunha screens his remarks and modifies those he thinks may be over-contentious. But he feels liberated enough to remark that analytical minds like his are few and far between in Singapore - and that that situation could pose a threat to Singapore's economic prosperity.

"The typical Singaporean is good at memorising facts, but not much good at thinking ... creatively," he says.

"I don't we are developing creative minds here, we are putting together technocratic minds."

It plays out in other ways. According to research analysts and bankers, stockbroking research on companies prepared here will rarely carry a direct "sell" recommendation - particularly if the company is associated with the Government. Instead, firms either apply the euphemism "hold" or get outsiders to do the study. "There's no law about it. It's just a feeling," said one analyst.

It happens that the stockmarket has tended to be stable and buoyant and Singaporeans are one of the world's most active share purchasers. The Government sees investment almost as a patriotic duty, to buy a stake in the nation.

A similar premise applies to buying a flat from the state-owned Housing Development Board.

More than 80 per cent of Singaporeans live and now mostly own accommodation built by the Housing Development Board, one of the highest home-ownership ratios in the world.

There is no denying this is a successful system and even the Opposition says the Government has delivered on prosperity, relative to its neighbours, Indonesia and Malaysia.

The estates are clean and green, well-serviced, communitarian and largely crime free, the flats relatively spacious. With the Government's dual credo of family values and nation-building very much in mind, the HDB applies several criteria to applicants, in particular that they must apply as a family or show proof of marriage or impending marriage.

Once approved, the HDB provides a finance package where interest rates are as much as half that of the prevailing interbank rates, making it very difficult to seek finance outside. Private housing is by its high cost only for the elite.

The way Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong sees it, Singaporeans are buying a stake in the country and their own prosperity.

The way Opposition politicians see it, Singaporeans have no choice but to be mortgaged to their eyeballs and too scared to rock the boat lest their estate not receive government patronage and their assets falter.

On the other hand, diplomats and independent observers are quick to point out that Singapore is squeaky clean - and they mean it.

There is precious little corruption in the republic, not just by Asian standards but by world standards. Singapore may well have the world's most honest citizenry and expatriate life abounds with stories about returned lost purses and the like.

But there is much of what those hated Western liberals might regard as patronage.

Lee Kuan Yew's first son, Lee Hsien Loong, is deputy Prime Minister and may well have been Prime Minister were it not for serious illness. His next son is president of recently privatised Singapore Telecom, appointed with no significant experience in telecoms (Singaporeans, the ones uninvested in Singapore Telecom, charitably say of the younger Lee that "he is young, he will learn").

The Lee family legal firm, Lee and Lee, whose founding partners are Lee Kuan Yew's wife and brother, is one of the republic's most prestigious firms and the two Lees remain consultants. The Government's Housing Development Board confirms that Lee and Lee is on on the panel of firms doing work for them, although a Lee and Lee managing partner Ms Qua Kimli plays down the connection.

"We don't boast of the connection (to the Lee family). We don't want to blow our trumpet," she says.

While there is no suggestion that the Lee family has acted with anything but the utmost propriety, they have been quick to sue anyone who suggests patronage or dynastic succession based on anything other than merit. This was where the International Herald Tribune newspaper foundered in Singapore's courts last year.

The PAP Government is a master at preventative politics. The PAP Government is quick to use the libel courts when its authority is challenged. It makes any opposition virtually impossible by regularly slapping libel writs on anyone who criticises it, or makes personal attacks which elsewhere might be considered the cut and thrust of political life.

It makes people very careful about what they say. The result is that people talk in codes, like Chee Soon Juan of the Singapore Democratic Party, the country's unofficial opposition. He says he wants to focus on the issues of share ownership in any upcoming political campaign.

That seems benign enough, but Singaporeans - that is the few who get to hear what he says - know he is articulating investor rancour at the performance of recently privatised companies, a very touchy subject here partly because it pertains to Singapore Telecom.

Chee Soon Juan is the closest thing Singapore has to an opposition leader resident in Singapore, albeit one without a parliamentary seat (only four out of 81 seats are considered Opposition). Such is the PAP grip on power that no Singaporean landlord is willing to rent office space to the SDP, according to Chee. Indeed, the SDP is neither listed in the Singapore phone book nor has a listing with Singapore Telecom. No publisher would touch his manifesto, the content of which would likely be mainstream centre-left.

Chee has been a victim of the libel courts. In 1993, he was sued by a PAP MP, who also happened to be the head of his department at the National University of Singapore, when, as Chee tells it, he was defending himself against claims made by the MP, that centre on Chee's allegedly dishonest use of the department's mailing system.

From what started with an internal mailing "irregularity", Chee ended up being sued, lost and was forced to sell his house to pay the $S500,000 in damages and costs. Now 32 and "very much the wiser", he now conducts his political activities from rented accommodation and with the good grace of his few supporters.

Government law is such that anyone who has been fined $S2000, a small infraction here, cannot run for political office. "I could be disqualified from running for littering," says Chee.

In Singapore symbolism is everything and the heavily pregnant woman who ushers visitors into the Social Development Unit symbolises more than simply hope for unmarrieds. With 2.8 million people, many of whom are tertiary-educated, Singapore has a problem finding partners for them.

But Singapore came up with a typically Singaporean solution. Let the government help do it for them.

Conceived in the paternalistic mind of Lee Kuan Yew, the SDU is a government matchmaker. Its 17,000 members, 53 per cent women, 90 per cent Chinese, come to the SDU (also known as Sad, Desperate or Ugly) to find partners.

It's all part of the Government's continual tweaking and fine-tuning of Singaporean society, en route to the holy grail of OECD status.