If you ever wanted to talk about something that never goes out of style, you could do no worse than to approach the topic of ministerial salaries. Tiny Singapore takes pride in the fact that it has the world’s highest paid ministers. The Prime Minister of Singapore, a nation of six million very obedient people and 721 square kilometres) earns more than twice his nearest competitor, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive (1,016 square km and 7 million who like to demonstrate in the streets) and four times more than the US President (world’s largest economy, third or fourth largest country by land area, filled with Covid-19 cases and rioters). A list of the world’s highest paid heads of government and state can be found at:
One of the key things to note about this is list is the fact
that it is talking about “World-Leaders.” Hence, to get onto the list, one has
to be either a head of state or head of government to be on this list. If one
were to open up the list to normal cabinet ministers, the top ten would be from
Singapore (the lowest paid minister in Singapore is paid S$935,000 a year or
681,936 US dollars, which would put them ahead of the next highest paid head of
government, Ms. Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive). The other thing to
note is these figures are after a pay cut, which ministers took in the wake of
the 2011 election, high ministerial salaries were a bone of contention.
There are two reasons for having the world’s most highly
paid ministers. The first rationale for having the world’s most highly paid
ministers was to prevent corruption. The late Mr. Lee Kuan Yew was a fierce
proponent of clean government and while he was famous for using the stick
(including giving one of his ministers the option of suicide or public
humiliation), he also used carrots, which came in the form of very attractive
salaries. The rationale is simple, pay people well enough so that they don’t
have a need to steal from the public coffers.
The second rationale for paying public servants well is
simple, you need to attract talent. While much has been made of how much our
ministers are paid when compared to other world leaders, the government has
argued that it needs to compete with the private sector for talent. Singapore
sees itself as a corporation and when it is stated that the Prime Minister
earns four times when the US President does, the counter is that when compared
to General Electric’s CEO, he is still a pauper.
So, given that we are currently in an economic meltdown, one
of the key questions that we, the tax paying public need to ask is what exactly
are we getting for a million bucks per minister, per year? The late Lee Kuan
Yew argued that $100 million a year was a good price to pay for people to run a
$100 billion economy. Is he right and are we getting the best value for our tax
dollars?
Believe it or not, I do believe that the government has a
point. Why can’t public servants enjoy comparable pay to their private sector
counterparts? One should also accept that while it is wrong to steal, one
should remove all temptation to do so. Having said that, one should ask if the
world’s most expensive government is also the most honest and most competent.
According to Transparency International, Singapore does
relatively well in terms of corruption. Based on their 2019 Corruption
Perception Index, Singapore is the fourth least corrupt nation, behind Denmark,
Finland and New Zealand, countries which are known for having a culture of
honest governance.
One has to look at this ranking with a critical eye. One of
the most detailed analysis of how our ministerial salaries compare can be found
at:
https://international.thenewslens.com/article/102993
Coming in fourth is not a bad position. We are the only
Asian nation in the top ten of the lists of most honest governments and as a
prominent Middle Eastern Businesswoman says, “Singapore washes the face of the
Oriental.”
Having said that, we need to be a little more critical of
our position in order for us to continue and improve. The main point that we
need to hammer home is the fact that given that our ministers are paid
exceedingly well in order to ensure honesty, we should be number one on the
list. Let’s not forget that the Prime Ministers of the Nordic Countries and New
Zealand are paid considerably less and Jacinda Arden has famously refused a pay
raise stating that she’s already at the upper end of the salary scale.
The other point one should note is that there is that
corruption is mainly defined as the “money” variety. Singapore has “no” money
corruption in as much as you’re not going to get very far in bribing government
officials and so on. However, one should note that Singapore has plenty of
people willing to do you favours when it comes to working with government
departments and if you look at the top jobs in Singapore, you’ll notice that
they inevitably go to the same people. This has to lead you to the conclusion
that Singapore’s talent pool is either incredibly small (one of Lee Kuan Yew’s
mistakes. He encouraged the talent pool to bread within itself not realizing
that inbreeding is bad for the gene pool) or Singapore has an abundance of
itchy backs that need to be scratched.
The second point about the high salaries was the fact that
government needs to attract talent. On the surface, this is not an unreasonable
argument. Why should the nation’s best and brightest automatically head for
finance houses to serve the proverbial one percent of the global elite, when
they can just as easily be running a government department and serving a larger
segment of the population. The saying of “You got to pay if you want talent,”
applies to the public sector as much as it applies to the private one.
The Singapore government also seemingly obsessed with
grooming talent, particularly that of the public sector. Our scholarship system
enables the government to pick out the guys who get top notch results and bind
them to the government. It’s a comfortable life with a well-defined career
path. It gives the government bragging rights to say that the best and
brightest are running the show. However, is that really the case.
While Singapore still does measure up pretty well in many
aspects, our well-oiled machinery has been showing signs of serious disrepair.
The most famous incident came in 2007 when a man labeled as “worst terrorist”
managed to walk out of a highly secure facility and he remained hidden for well
over a year until he was caught by the Royal Malaysian Police (Ministry of Home
Affairs would insist that I add the sentence – with assistance from the
Singapore Police Force). The result of a man with a limp walking out of a
highly secured facility was the sacking of two Gurkhas and the demotion of the
man running the facility and the passionate defense of why the head of the
police and the Minister of Home Affairs needed to keep their jobs.
As Covid-19 showed, there were plenty of examples of how our
very well-paid civil servants and ministers who running into blunder and after
blunder.
Let’s use an automobile analogy. The Singapore tax payer is
asked to pay for a Rolls Royce. You expect the car to run perfectly and when
things go wrong, the workshop will fix it immediately. Rolls Royce is about the
service as much as it is about the car. There is an urban legend that says that
when Ogilvy wrote his classic tag line of “At 60 miles an hour the loudest
noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock," the head of
the workshop is reputed to have said, “Damn, I’ll now have to get the electric
clock fixed.”
Singaporeans are not unreasonable. We understand that the
government will mistakes along the way. However, we’re paying for Rolls Royce standards
so, we expect the government to react like Ogilvy’s Rolls Royce engineer and
fix the problem. However, this isn’t what we’re getting. What we’re getting is
angry responses and libel threats. Then, there’s Fawning Follower and his ilk
lecturing you on the values of being screwed by the government.
OK, our ministers to stack up pretty well against their
regional counterparts. However, our brethren across the causeway are paying for
a “Proton Saga” and when the Malaysian government behaves like a Proton Saga, it’s
a case of getting what you paid for. By contrast, Singaporeans are paying for a
Rolls Royce, getting a Toyota and when they complain, they’re told to be
grateful that they didn’t get a Lada. I don’t know about you but I don’t think
this is how someone who is paid a million plus a year from my taxes should
behave.
Since the government is so fond of comparing itself with the
private sector, we should use private sector analogies. The heads of multinationals,
particularly the American ones are paid astronomical sums. However,
shareholders expect them to perform and customers expect not just the maintenance
of high standards but a constant improvement. Look at John Flannery who
succeeded Jeff Immelt as CEO of General Electric. The share price did not improve
within a year and Mr. Flannery got the boot and that’s even if you can argue
that he was merely trying to solve problems that came from his predecessor.
Shouldn’t we apply the same standards to government
ministers? We can entertain the argument that we need to pay our ministers the
same as top level executives. However, in return why don’t we have an election
once every two years instead of once every five. High pay needs to be matched
with high performance, which is admittedly stressful. However, isn’t a million dollars
a year worth the stress of a bi-annual job appraisal instead of every half a
decade? The public is paying a million per minister per year. It has a moral obligation
to demand what it is getting for what it is paying.
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