Singapore is what you could call a “hyper achieving” nation. Nothing excites our government more than the opportunity to talk about all our wonderful achievements, which we managed to do without any resources and despite lacking just about everything that you need to get by. We have the best airport (rankings of the world’s best airports actually make national news in Singapore), the world’s best airline, the world’s best port and as a former 155mm gunner, we actually bragged about having the first 52 calibre gun howitzer in the world (which we cannot fire in Singapore).
It seems that the world is actually impressed by our list
of hyperachievement’s. We’ve moved from being a “sane spot” in an insane
neighbourhood. In the pre-covid days, even the Europeans were impressed with us.
As a White (sorry, the world isn’t colour blind) Dutchman once said to me when
talking about where to live in the world – “Singapore – where else is there to
live?”
However, whilst we have been very successful and
creating something to impress the world’s wealthiest people, there is one area
where our hyper achieving little island has achieved remarkably little – if at
all. One of the areas where this has been glaring has been in the area of our
treatment of anyone who has had the misfortune of born in a less developed
Asian nation (particularly in any of the South Asian ones), dark skinned and
working in a “rough” job. The glitz that our ministers push to the world’s
wealthiest, was actually built-under pretty s** awful conditions.
Unfortunately, its not considered proper to talk about
these things. The government gets very offended and labels you a threat to our perpetual
economic miracle (whose economic miracle is a topic for another debate). The
general population has been trained into telling you things like “it’s good
compared to what they’re used to,” whenever you raise in the question of making
life a little bit more tolerable for the dark-skinned labourers. Raise the
topic of the welfare of migrant labour welfare and people will start accusing
you of wanting to house the estate cleaners in the Ritz Carlton.
This is obviously not true. Activist like Jolovan Wham
and Alex Au of Yawning Bread are not advocating for labourers to be housed in
luxury. What they are promoting is for workers to have same things that the
rest of us take for granted – namely housing and transport that is not life
threatening.
Take transport as an example. The standard way of
transporting workers is in the back of an open top lorry. It’s not a case of
having one or two guys in the lorry – it’s usually a whole group of at least
ten cramped onto the back of an open top van. It goes without saying that
things like “seat belts,” which are mandatory for the rest of us don’t exist on
such forms of transport. Here is an example of what transporting workers looks
like:
Taken from my personal Facebook page
It goes without saying that when accidents happen, the
results are quite horrific. Below, is a shot taken from Lianhe Zaobao,
Singapore’s main Chinese daily of what happens in such situations.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the only isolated incident and our proverbial activist
have been calling on the government to do something:
Taken from Lianhe Zaobao.
I guess you could forgive our hyper-achieving government’s
inability to act on transportation in as much as transportation is a relatively
new issue and if one wants to be cynical, traffic accidents don’t make
headlines.
That cannot be said of the issue of housing workers.
Prior to last year’s explosion of Covid-19 cases, there were cases of workers
dying of diseases that one would have imagined our hyper-achieving government had
eradicated from Singapore’s shores decades ago, though unsanitary conditions in
worker dormitories. These cases were treated like White Supremacy attacks – lone
nut cases – though in this case, the victim was considered the lone nut for
having the audacity to die of a disease that was not his (they have all been
men) fault.
Last year’s explosion in the dormitories proved that
this was not true. It became very clear to the rest of the world that the
dormitories that the workers were being housed in, were designed to help the virus
spread like wild fire.
In fairness, our hyper-achieving government acted
quickly. Tax payers were obliged to pay up to help the very profitable dormitory
owners upgrade their facilities to be less disease friendly. There was a national angst about needing to
look after the workers who were doing all the s***ty jobs that we were not
willing to do.
You would have imagined that our hyper-achieving
government would have at least solved the problem in the dormitories. Well, it
seems that we haven’t solved the issue as can be seen from this report from
Bloomberg in August 2021:
So, we had a period of national angst about foreign
workers. The tax payers subisidised profitable businesses to bring their facilities
up to liveable standards and a year later the problem exists in the same place.
Now, this may not be as ground breaking as the American 20-year, US$2 trillion
exercise in Afghanistan but it’s not definitely not something you expect from a
government that claims to be hyper-achieving and brought you the best of
everything.
Disclaimer – In view of Singapore’s introduction of
the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Bill (“FICA”), I declare that I have
received no foreign funding – as a matter of fact I receive no funding at all and
would in no way resist anyone who was willing to give me a few pennies regardless
of status (ie I don’t care if you’re an “evil” Hungarian Jewish Financier or a “good”
White wearing politician from Singapore as long as you put the money in my
pocket)
No comments
Post a Comment