1 May 2006

Libel action puts a dampener on Singapore's election

Although opposition politicians have little hope of winning, lawsuits are a risk for those who try, writes Eric Ellis

SINGAPORE'S libel lawyers are sharpening their pencils, so that can only mean one thing - it's election time in the island republic.

Yes, there's a poll on Saturday, and yes, Singapore's enfeebled opposition is again being sued by ruling politicians.

The dissident Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) has been sued for claiming Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his 82-year-old father, Lee Kuan Yew, knew about corruption at Singapore's kidney charity but covered it up.

"Elections or no elections, if you see this, you have to act swiftly," said an aggrieved Lee Hsien Loong.

Singaporeans who'd hoped their country was lightening up disappointedly wonder why the overkill for what, in most places, would be the unremarkable cut and thrust of everyday politics. Even if Singapore were a genuine democracy, the Lees' People's Action Party (PAP) would likely stroll it in.

For all the PAP's heavy-handedness, it has largely delivered. Secure, sanitary, successful and stultifyingly sterile, Singapore works. It might be the "only shopping centre with a seat in the United Nations" but it's also regarded as Asia's least corrupt country.

And the seatless SDP poses no threat to the Lees. The PAP controls 82 of 84 seats in Singapore's parliament, the other two held by ineffectual non-SDP nobodies.

"Libel's become a reflex action for them now," said Professor Garry Rodan, director of Murdoch University's Asia Research Centre in Perth. "The PAP doesn'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. Only North Korea, mainland China and Cuba have been run by a single party longer than Singapore has been run by the PAP, since 1959.

Although libel as a political weapon is familiar if tedious ground in the Lees' "guided" democracy, this election differs a little from others. It will be the first poll as prime minister for Mr Lee the younger, who took over from the avuncular Goh Chok Tong in 2004 in a managed succession long-expected and long-decided.

Mr Goh's PAP got 75 per cent of the compulsory vote in the last poll in 2001. A win for Mr Lee with 65-70 per cent - a landslide in most other places - would be an embarrassment for him.

This poll also comes after his wife, Ho Ching, has made a succession of dubious investments as CEO at the secretive state-owned Temasek Holdings, angering many Singaporeans.

One deal, buying Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra out of his family company in a tax-free sale, precipitated his retreat from power in Bangkok, and a US$500 million paper loss for Temasek that will be hard to win back.

This poll will be the first in 18 years that the opposition can, on paper at least, win. Singapore elections tend to be pyrrhic contests, every poll since 1988 won by the PAP on nomination day because they were contested in fewer than half the seats.

And it's a contest for Mr Lee too. A parliamentarian since 1984, for all his pedigree the 53-year-old prime minister is no electorate brawler. He's been opposed just three times, the last time in 1988.

While the Lees are taking no chances, the libel-happy leadership may be doing greater damage to Singapore's image abroad than to their electoral fortunes at home. The US embassy in Singapore has warned about "the ruling party's use of the court system to intimidate political opponents". No libel judgment has ever been awarded to a Singaporean politician in a foreign court.

The cases are heard - and won - in Singapore's courts, but don't dare suggest the courts are anything but independent. To do so hazards, well, legal action. Professor Rodan wondered whether it was "possible to even point out that it's impossible to debate whether or not the judiciary is independent".

Singapore's libel settlements are good earners for the Lees, and political suicide for those who challenge them. They usually pay about S$400,000 ($1.96 million) and have been as high as S$8 million, way beyond the defendant's wallet. Duly bankrupted, they can't run for elected office. Foreign journalists writing about Singapore hazard libel every time they put pen to paper, such are the broad interpretations of the libel laws. Local journalists self-censor, while the active online bloggers have been cowed by a state ruling that blogs carrying "political content" are banned - this in a country that prides itself on its technological edge.

Apart from the libel actions, the only thing that's generated kopitiam (coffee shop) buzz in this election has been a chat show on the normally excruciating state TV, where the senior Mr Lee faced two hours of questions from a panel of net-savvy twentysomething Singaporeans, some foreign educated.

By local standards it was bold, the type of exchange Singapore's politicians don't have with their critics. And it seemed to backfire. The warhorse came across as doddery and out of touch - as did his son when he told reporters the Singapore electoral system was "as fair as anywhere" - and often patronising; his interlocutors fresh and rational, if frustrated at Singapore's effective lack of franchise.

But it didn't take long for the establishment to bite back. The panellists were subsequently derided in the follow-up press as rude, impudent and disrespectful. Mr Lee senior reckoned they didn't represent young Singaporeans.

The PAP's problem for future polls is that they probably do. Young Singaporeans are increasingly fed up at being lectured and controlled by a nanny regime.

They've seen the life struggle of their middle- and lower-class parents, where much of their income is devoured in state-sanctioned nation-building schemes - such as their pension-linked mortgage - and don't much want that for their own future.

A telling feature of the panellists is that many of them will vote for the first time, with Singapore's notorious numbered ballots. The government says it doesn't trace votes to act against those who don't vote PAP, insisting such measures are to counter voter fraud. But many voters don't take chances. They don't want a tax audit, or their children denied school places, retribution the government insists it doesn't take.

It's hard to say how much of the PAP vote is genuine, because independent opinion polling is banned. So with little choice for voters, and what choice there is too often libelled out of existence, Southeast Asia's democratic revolution will again pass by Singapore - increasingly the region's odd man out - on Saturday.