Fury over 6.9 million population target for Singapore

[AniThyng]

Singapore's path is clear: [channels Carinthium] Initiate the conquest and subjugation of the Malay Peninsula! You need only appeal to the race-based kinship of the local Chinese population to be the new overlords of Singapore's hinterland, and move the Capital to Kuala Lumpur, though the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers will be rather unsightly for some time.

[PainRack]

Singapore's path is clear: [channels Carinthium] Initiate the conquest and subjugation of the Malay Peninsula! You need only appeal to the race-based kinship of the local Chinese population to be the new overlords of Singapore's hinterland, and move the Capital to Kuala Lumpur, though the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers will be rather unsightly for some time.

If we do that, where else are we going to dump our elderly? Indonesia?
http://www.asiaone.com/Health/News/Stor ... 21541.html


The problems with winning too many elections, most of them literally unopposed is that our politicians are idiotic politicians.

[ray245]

The problems with winning too many elections, most of them literally unopposed is that our politicians are idiotic politicians.

But...but...they are all elites of our society! Look at how qualified they all are!

[PainRack]

Oh yes. I mean, it takes political genius to make a computer IT company with capital of 2 dollars work for a town council, burn the contracts and bridges and have that shenanigan be portrayed as bad corporate management by the opposition party.

[PainRack]

So, I decided to take an internet trawl to see the foreign press reporting of this issue.
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/201 ... dle-class/

So much so that on Saturday, about 3,000 people turned out for what some commentators said was one of the biggest demonstrations in the nation’s history. (If the number seems small, it reflects the tight political control exerted over Singapore life by the People’s Action Party, which has run the country for about half a century and discourages public protest.)

What are the contours of the debate in Singapore?

Concern over booming immigration, often focused on new arrivals from increasingly rich China, has been simmering in the nation, with many feeling that the immigrants do not play by the same rules, that their manners are poor and that they are pushing up prices. That feeling crystallized last year when a wealthy Chinese man driving a Ferrari at high speed killed three people (including himself) in a nighttime accident.

(Similar sentiments are found in Hong Kong, as my colleagues Bettina Wassener and Gerry Mullany wrote.)

Vividly illustrating the resentment, Singaporeans sometimes call the wealthy immigrants “rich Chinese locusts,” according to an article in the Economic Observer’s Worldcrunch.

So the Singapore government’s Population White Paper that passed in Parliament earlier this month, just before Chinese New Year, was bound to stir things up.

The government is presenting the rise in immigration as a target that is needed if Singapore, where immigrants already make up about 40 percent of the population, and which has the highest concentration of millionaires in the world, is to continue to flourish, reports said. Singaporeans just are not having enough children, said the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong.

“In my view, in 2030, I think six million will not be enough to meet Singaporeans’ needs as our population ages because of this problem of the baby boomers and bulge of aging people,” Mr. Lee said in Parliament, adding that 6.9 million was not a target but a number to be used to help plan for infrastructure.

“Do we really need to increase our population by that much?” wrote a person called Chang Wei Meng in a letter to The Straits Times, according to Reuters. “What happened to achieving the Swiss standard of living?”

Gilbert Goh, a main organizer of the rally Saturday at Singapore’s Speaker’s Corner in a public park, said the protesters had a message: “They want to tell the government, please reconsider this policy. The turnout is a testimony that this policy is flawed and unpopular on the ground,” The Associated Press quoted Mr. Goh as saying.

Yet amid the familiar rhetoric about immigrants, heard around the world – they don’t fit in, they’re rude, they’re different – might something more important be going on here?

In a blog post on Singapore News Alternative, Nicole Seah, a politician who has run for Parliament and comments on social issues, wrote: “Along with many other Singaporeans, I oppose the White Paper.”

Why? She is looking for “a society that lives in harmony, rather than tense and overcrowded conditions,” she writes.

“Not the Singapore Inc. that has been aggressively forced down our throats the past few years – a Singapore which is in danger of becoming a transient state where people from all over, come, make their fortunes, and leave.”

Not “a Singapore that has become a playground for the rich and the people who can afford it. A Singapore where the middle class is increasingly drowned out because they do not have the social clout or sufficient representatives in Parliament to voice their concerns.”

Ms. Seah’s statements raise an interesting question: Is this part of a phenomenon that the columnist Chrystia Freeland has written about so ably for this newspaper, the ascendancy of a wealthy, “plutocrat” class and the slipping status of the middle class?

As Ms. Freeland wrote last week: “The most important fact about the United States in this century is that middle-class incomes are stagnating. The financial crisis has revealed an equally stark structural problem in much of Europe.” Is it hitting Asia, too, and does Singapore’s protest speak, at least in part, to this? Hong Kong’s dissatisfaction too?

Interestingly, this article hit it RIGHT on the spot.
Ignore the xenophobic and nationalist sentiments. They are mere emotional expressions.
We didn't have any real qualms about immigration 70s and the gradual rise of foreign workers until the first Americian recession in 2001. Partially that was because the influx of temporary migrant workers were on the bottom and top ends of the scale. Any gripe was towards the tendency of corporations to hire foreigners for high end management.

Now, even as Singaporean households increasingly become richer by standard metrics, the problem is addressed towards competition and stagnating incomes, generally life becoming harder.

There are problems with this viewpoint of course. Again, by the standard metrics, Singaporean households are growing richer and are growing richer faster than inflation. The feeling is more in well, achieving the Singapore dream. Allowing yourself and your children to live in a better station than what you grew up in. The status of having make it is increasingly more difficult, as housing prices and even basic societal needs, such as forming a family becomes more and more difficult and stressful. The challenges of having a two working adults household.

This is why the Singaporean government has missed the boat. Because again, by all the standard matrices, Singaporeans are getting better and better. But they AREN"T feeling better off.

So, while the report is factually wrong, it actually hit on what drove the emotional response and protest against increased immigration.

[PainRack]

Not really news, but something I posted on the online section of a newspaper commentary today.

has you considered that the policy is extremely unrealistic?

It takes existing trends that more singaporeans are going into white collar jobs, PMET and extrapolate that to suggest that with the existing training schemes, 2/3 of Singaporeans will be able to transit there, with the moot assumption that PMETs offer a higher salary range and standard of living.
Unfortunately, the trend as it is shows that our older PMETs Singaporeans are facing structural unemployment in larger numbers. With the existing trend now, is there reason to believe that this will transit into the future?

Similarly, the paper itself actually doesn't address the ability of infrastructure to meet demand. There are spurious comparisons to New York rail density and Singapore, however, the common metric is passenger passenger rides, not line density per population. Granted, its impossible to predict future utilisation of the new track, but that's THE point. You can't say that the building of the new lines will reduce congestion. THIS is New York city during rush hour.
http://thehecklist.files.wordpress.com/ ... =584&h=389

Their passenger rides is twice ours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_syst ... nger_rides

Do you see ANY difference in the congestion? Hell, given that they have more people utilising their system, may I suggest that this means that our system is actually inferior?

Healthcare is even more deceiving. First of all, our health minister has already noted that even with the new capacity in the last few years, there is a tightening of capacity across the hospitals.
http://www.moh.gov.sg/content/moh_web/h ... ssibi.html

Unlike transport, which they can demonstrate has increasing capacity, our hospital bed situation is actually shrinking. In the nineties, the common tool of hospital bed per 1,000 population was 3.3-3.6, its now at 2.3 per 1,000. Add on the mere 2 thousand beds and it will climb to the same, 2.3 HOWEVER, if the population climbs to 6.9 million, this drops to 1.7. This means that Malaysia now has a better hospital bed capacity than we will have in the future, under this plan.
(the tool doesn't measure community hospital beds, however, including that number does not change the picture significantly.)

No other 1st world country has bed capacity close to our current ranking. When it drops to 1.7, we will have dropped to 55th, in a list that measures 72 nations with regards to hospital bed capacity.

With regards to housing, again, the numbers stretch the increase in capacity. Assuming that the trend hold true, the typical household has 3.53 members. For simplicity sake, we stretch it to 4. That will mean that the increase of 600,000 new residents will result in approximately 150 thousand new households. This means that out of the new units being built, only an additional 50 thousand new units will be added on to the market. Granted, the figures are only until 2016, but there is limited land space to add new housing in Singapore, without drastic urban renewal something which will require engineers to begin planning now. The additional of 50 thousand new units meanwhile assume that the remaining 1.3 million non citizen workers will not take up housing in singapore, a plainly absurd assumption. AGAIN, where is the extra capacity coming from?

I compliment the author on having the intellectual strength to suggest reading the actual source of the White Paper. May I suggest that he take the next step, which would be to apply critical analysis and thinking to it as well?