Doing Her Job

 New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Ms. Jacinda Ardern has just won a landslide in New Zealand’s latest election. Ms. Ardern won some 49.1 percent of the votes cast and has 64 seats in the 120-seat parliament. It is, as the BBC reported, one of the rare occasions when a New Zealand Government has an outright majority.

What makes Ms. Ardern’s victory so incredible is the fact that, on the scale of things, a “newbie” politician who had not held any ministerial posts prior to her elevation to the premiership. Ms. Ardern had been a researcher prior to being elected as a Member of Parliament on the Party List in 2008 and only faced her first election in 2017, when she became a Member of Parliament for the Mount Albert Constituency in 2017, the year she became Leader of the Opposition and then Prime Minister. Within three years of taking the top job in politics, Ms. Ardern has gone from a relative unknown leader of a small country tucked at the edge of the world to being a global figure that has defined an ideal of leadership.

How did Ms. Ardern do it? The first part of the answer is what former British Prime Minister, Harold McMillian called “events.” Mr. McMillian argued that careers in politics were defined by events. Winston Churchill for example, was defined by World War II. How a politician reacted to a significant enough event would have the ability to define his or her legacy.

In Ms. Ardern’s case, history decided to give her not one but two major events, namely the March 2019 Christchurch Mosque shooting and the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic. Both these events defined Ms. Ardern as someone that could be relied when the proverbial crap hit the fan.

The second part of the answer as to what turned her into an international superstar is the fact that she simply did her job as a leader. She showed she had the ability to communicate clearly and to provide real information when it was needed. She showed that she could be tough and empathetic at the same time and more importantly, she had the ability to get things done during the down times.

Copyright – theweek.in

In the Christchurch mosque incident, Ms. Ardern was quick to done a headscarf to show solidarity with the victimized community and refused to speak the name of the gunman, thus denying a terrorist publicity he hopped to gain. New Zealanders stayed united by the tragedy as the following Maori Hakka by a biker gang showed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcfVTP43Yk

More importantly, Ms. Ardern used thus momentum to get gun control legislation passed through parliament.  

If the Christchurch Shooting put Ms. Ardern on the world map, her handling on theCovid-19 pandemic further enhanced her status as an icon of great leadership.  New Zealand does have the advantage of being relatively small and geographically isolated but this should not detract from the fact that Ms. Ardern once again provided text book leadership. New Zealand went into lockdown mode early and Ms. Ardern was quick to communicate to New Zealanders that they would face economic hardship but it was necessary to get the pandemic under control. The results speak for themselves. At the time of writing, New Zealand has less than 2,000 cases.

The most important part of her leadership was the fact that she showed that she was willing to enforce the rules with no exceptions. She demoted her health minister, Dr. David Clark who took his family on a beach vacation during the first week of the lockdown. The message was clear, nobody was above the rules.

https://www-businessinsider-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.businessinsider.com/nz-health-minister-david-clark-demoted-beach-trip-coronavirus-lockdown-2020-4?amp

New Zealand has come as close as has been possible to beating the virus. It did have certain advantages like geographical isolation. Yet, that alone would not have been enough to make New Zealand one of the key success stories in the Covid-19 pandemic. Ms. Ardern’s leadership shown that it’s not so much a case of size but what you do with it that counts.

Let’s start with the obvious. Ms. Ardern has recognized the seriousness of the situation and communicated facts quickly, clearly and most importantly factually. Unlike her American counterpart, she’s avoided “downplaying” the virus and unlike her Brazilian counterpart understood that the virus is serious. Ms. Ardern has led by example and stayed healthy and not turned the seat of government into a hotbed of infection.

Unlike her Indian counterpart, she’s also done things that have been possible to execute and hence you don’t have the congestion of infrastructure that was seen in India as people were forced to stagger back to far away villages at the last minute.

Ms. Ardern has also done what her Singapore counterpart could not do, which was to remember ALL New Zealanders. While Singapore has a similar death rate from Covid-19 to New Zealand (and similar population), its case load was significantly higher. Why was that? The answer is simple – Ms. Ardern focused on doing her job at hand and remembered ALL living in New Zealand. While Singapore’s statistics remain comparatively good on the global scale, it was too focused on headlines that it forgot about a certain segment of society that was living in conditions designed to spread the virus. 

Her insistence that her ministers followed the same rules as everyone else also made it easier for ordinary New Zealanders to go through the economic hardship caused by the lockdown.  She turned down a salary increase and ensured that the ordinary person understood that the rules were for everyone for a reason.

Covid-19 has been tough on everyone. However, like all good crisis, it has helped to show up real leaders that the world needs and thanks to Ms. Ardern, New Zealand has shown that a small nation can show the rest of the world how things are done by doing her job.

Buddy Capitalism Continues

 A few nights ago, the Young Pork Guzzling Muslim Politician sent me a photo of several Linkedin profiles of people working at Standard Chartered Bank. The only thing that that connected them, other than the fact that they were working for Standard Chartered Bank was the fact that everyone was from India. I told him that I didn’t know why he was sending me the photo; a copy of which can be seen below:

He called and explained that people in one of his WhatsApp chats were getting agitated by the fact that Singaporeans were getting upset that plum jobs were going to Indian Nationals and not to Singaporeans. It was, as they say, the same story about the Indian Nationals stealing jobs from locals and only helping themselves and so on and so on. As far as most Singaporeans (or at least the ones on the net are concerned) the Indian Expats are a group of unqualified louts stealing from the hard working honest, Singaporeans graduate.

Unfortunately, this isn’t quite true. While it’s easy to take a snap shot of someone’s Linkedin profile, it’s another thing to actually read that person’s profile and assess whether he or she has gotten to where they have been through fair or foul means. If you look at the 15 profiles, you’ll note that one of them was from the National University of Singapore and another one was from INSEAD. If you look at those who were from Indian Universities, one was from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA – the place that gave you Ajjay Bangha, CEO of Mastercard) and another was from Indian Institutes of Management Calcutta (IIMC, - the place that gave you Indra Nooyi, former CEO of Pepsico). If you were to delve deeper into these profiles, you’d notice that the majority of them had at least a decade of experience working with the bank and more often than not, they had experience in the big market of India and within the Southeast Asian region.

So, while I don’t doubt that there are Indian Expatriates who are not qualified to be where they are (which is the same that can be said for any other group), Singapore as a collective, needs to get rid of the idea that the only talented people in the world are Westerners and Singaporeans as the loyal servants of the West.

The reality is that “developing” Asia is producing people that are qualified to do great things and are doing great things. If you look at the world’s game changing companies, there is Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, who from Indian Institutes of Management Kharagpur (IIMK) and there’s Microsoft CEO Staya Nadella from Manipur Institute of Technology. It may be hard for the average Singaporean to swallow, but the fact is Mr. Nadella is credited for making Microsoft sexy again after years of being dull when it was being run by Steve Balmer.

By contrast, I can’t think of a Singaporean, trained in Singapore who has gone onto run a company outside the Singapore and the Singapore government. OK, Ogilvy hired Tham Khai Meng to be its world-wide creative head, but Khai was trained in the UK. There was apparently a vice-president on the board of 3M who was from Singapore.

However, nobody talks about this because it’s politically inconvenient. For the “opposition” camps in Singapore it’s easier to talk about how our government has sold us out to India and China. It’s easy to talk about how unfair life is for the ordinary Singaporean who will be overwhelmed by unqualified Indians stealing their jobs.

If the “opposition” camp is guilty of playing on native resentments against dark skinned people, the government is playing an equally insidious but far more subtle game. The government is currently playing a rather confused game. On one hand, it is claiming that welcoming foreigners is good for Singaporeans and on another it is calling Singaporeans racist and xenophobic when they complain that they are being discriminated against in their own land. What is going on here?

I believe there’s an element of distraction here. If Singaporeans were to look at the “real” cause of their job losses, they’d realise that they’ve been screwed by what I’ve called “Buddy Capitalism,” rather than by evil geniuses from India and China. This came out very clearly in a blog piece by Emanuel Daniel, on Piyush Gupta, the CEO of DBS. Mr. Daniel’s blog entry can be found at:

https://www.emmanueldaniel.com/singaporeans-dont-deserve-piyush-gupta/

Mr. Daniel, who runs the Asian Banker, is a well-connected figure in the Asian Financial Industry and he’s spent decades studying trends in the industry. He takes Mr. Gupta to task for not doing enough to prepare his bank for the future (He’s accused Mr. Gupta of believing his own hype and enforcing a system rather than preparing for a changing world), but at the same time he argues that Mr. Gupta has done more for DBS and Singapore than his four immediate predecessors (all foreigners) and when compared to the CEOs of the other Government Linked Companies. Mr. Daniel points out that under Mr. Gupta, DBS has continued to see a growth in revenue and profits (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DBSDY/dbss/revenue) unlike a good portion of the GLCs who have lost money despite having a near monopoly on their respective markets.

A few people were offended by Mr. Daniel’s article, arguing that he was ignoring the fact that the other GLC’s like Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) and the Singapore Mass Rapid Transport (SMRT) were run by military men who had been parachuted in with no commercial experience and thus screwed it up. It wasn’t Singaporeans per se.

However, I think their missing the point. Mr. Daniel has very clearly articulated that the key issue in Singapore is the fact that “talent” is inevitably about creating compliance rather than competence. Brilliant people are taken over by the government and made so comfortable that they have no need to excel at anything in particular. One only has to think of the number of military scholars who have been promoted effortlessly to very cushy positions. In the SAF, competence can be a handicap. You will inevitably be replaced by a scholar with no experience. I think of 21 SA in my day. There was a CO called Tan Chong Boon, who was what we call a farmer (A-levels, worked his way up). The then, Major Tan turned a sleepy unit into a fit fighting force by sheer guts. Then, 21SA was awarded the best artillery unit, they posted him out so that a scholar could replace him and get the glory.

The second point that Mr. Daniel makes is that the big GLC’s have a habit of knee caping small enterprises with the blessing of the regulators. In another blog piece, Mr. Daniel argues in another blog piece that the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has made it such that all Fintech Systems must have an actual bank account with an established bank, unlike say China or the USA. This ensures that the Fintechs will never be able to take away from the banks and in turn serve as convenient contractors rather than competitors.

https://www.emmanueldaniel.com/why-dbs-is-not-the-worlds-best-bank/

Why would the government do that? I believe that as much as the government talks about wanting to be “future ready,” it is in fact unwilling to prepare for the future and thus moves to protect its established companies from anything resembling competition. As such, you get companies that think of monopoly profits as a right rather than something that has to be earned.

Let’s look back at the attempt to introduce competition into the media in the early 2000s. That experiment ended within four years when both MediaCorp and SPH found they were losing money. They then spent the next few years arguing over whether readership or viewership figures were more meaningful without realizing that people found more relevant news sources online than they did in print or TV. Unfortunately for both media houses, the advertisers noticed too and before you knew it, SPH was trying to reinvent itself as a real estate company and has shed Singaporean jobs.

Why does the government mollycoddle companies like that? Well, it’s a case of buddy capitalism. Where can you put your buddies if you don’t have profitable sectors?

Our system has worked to make the Singaporean incapable of shinning in their own land and the need to hire foreigners to run the show is the inevitable result. If you listen to government communications, you’ll notice that its always the same theme – Singapore has a limited talent pool and therefore you need to rotate buddies from the government and private sector and supplement them with people from elsewhere.

In 2016, this was proven untrue at the Rio Olympics. We had Joseph Schooling, who beat the world’s greatest swimmer to win our first ever gold medal. What should be very telling is the fact that had Mr. Schooling stayed behind, he probably would never have won anything. His good fortune was to have parents who were willing to leave Singapore so that their son could develop his talent and in the end, bring glory to Singapore.

You’re not going to make life better for Singaporeans by mollycoddling them on this island and telling them everything is OK when it isn’t. You’re not going to help by banning foreigners. You will only get a solution when you break up the buddy system and ensure that Singaporeans have to develop their talents.  

“Not competitive at all.”

One of the highlights of my working life in corporate insolvency came from a meeting which involved one of Singapore’s foremost insolvency and restructuring practitioners. I was part of a team bidding for a case that was being held up in the American courts and my employer felt that it was necessary to rope in a “brand” name practitioner and so got this particular practitioner into the coalition that we were trying to assemble. Towards the end of the meeting, the solicitor who was trying to build the team turned to this practitioner and asked, “Are your fees competitive.”

At that very instant, the practitioner said, “I’m NOT competitive at all,” and he said so with a certain amount of pride.

I think of this moment and the way this man took so much pride in being “NOT competitive at all,” because it underlines one of the most fundamental aspects of doing business – price. One of my favourite clients said it best when he told me – tell me:

1. 1.      What can you do?
2. 2.      How quickly can you do it?
3. 3.      How much will be cost me?

As someone who was inevitably desperate for the job, the answer to these questions were as close as one could get to the following:

1. 1.      Anything you want?
2. 2.      It was done before you even thought of it?
3. 3.      Nothing at all.

Quite often, the most important factor in deciding who got the job, often boiled down to the third point. It is in the buyer’s interest to get away with paying as little as possible and the seller will inevitably try to show that he or she can give the buyer the price that he or she wants.

If I look back at my freelancing days, I realise that I had one key advantage over my competitors, who were inevitably sizeable companies – price. I could do the job at a certain standard at price that my competitors could not do. When I took my last big job in the industry, I was presented with a quote that the client had gotten from a multinational and was told – “It’s yours if you can do it at half the costs.”

I was hungry enough to agree and we ended up settling at around 40 percent of what the competitor had quoted. However, while I had won the job on the third point, the client had high expectations about the first point. I was expected to deliver coverage on a multinational level without the multinational team (which would have required a budget). I managed to deliver the expected results at the expected budget (so much so that they told me to invoice and paid on the spot) by working through a relationship that are not commonly used by conventional practitioners.

Business is inevitably about balancing points one and two with point three. The adage is that success inevitably boils down to being able to be “good, fast and cheap.”

I’ve noticed that national economies, particularly the Asian ones do something similar. Japan, the most advanced economy, built itself up by being able to make things cheaper and better than the West. Gradually, as prices rose in Japan, manufacturing moved to South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Being able to work cheap has done wonders for Asia. Millions have left poverty because we were able to give the multinationals a cheaper alternative. This went into hyperdrive when China started becoming the world’s workshop and India the back office.

However, while price is often an important factor, I have to ask if this is sustainable, particularly for the mature economies like Hong Kong and Singapore. Our politicians are particularly fond of reminding us that in order to stay competitive in the global economy, Singapore needs to be competitively priced.

I don’t think they’re wrong to suggests to say that Singapore needs to be “competitive.” We are a pipsqueak island with no domestic market or resources. Our larger neighbours have more to offer and so we got to be on our toes and constantly find things to offer the world.

While I do understand that we need to be competitive in the global economic arena, I do question if the “need to be competitive,” is becoming an excuse to justify unacceptable practices, especially when it comes to making life better for the poor and needy. Just think of the two most common instances when the need to stay competitive is brought up to stop a discussion. They are inevitably:

1.      Having a minimum wage – common argument is that this will make us less competitive (read cheap) and therefore our economic system and well being will collapse;

2.      When it comes to slave labour from South Asia. Once again, the common point is that if we gave the slaves a dollar an hour more (and actually gave it to them) and got them to spend an hour less in the sun, our infrastructure costs would sky rocket and our economic system would collapse (believe it or not, even when Covid-19 was showing us very clearly that slave hovels were endangering the rest of us, there were people fretting that improving the lot of slaves would endanger our economic survival).

Shouldn’t it be clear by now that a mature economy like Singapore’s can no longer compete on being cheap and we need to reinvent our focus on being good instead of being cheap. This is not to say that price will not be an important factor – merely that we need to compete on something other than price.

I go back to my freelancing experiences and the insolvency practitioner who is proudly not competitive. I competed on price because I went to look for my customers. The insolvency practitioner has reached the stage where customers look for him. He does not need to be cheap. He does not need to do every job to stay alive – merely the ones that pay very well.

There are examples of this. The most famous example of Apple, which designs products and reinvents the way we do things. Apple is an example of a company and business that creates our need to need their products. This is an example of what type of business Singapore Inc needs to aspire to.

Unfortunately to be good, you need to pay and this where Singapore needs to get away from its obsession with “cheap.” Let’s face it we will never make things cheaper than China or 3D printing or do back office work cheaper than India or AI and that’s even if we give away factory land away and exempt foreign multinationals from paying CPF contributions to locals.

Our economic role models can no longer be other developing countries. I think of the German model as an example. Germany has one of the highest hourly wages in the world:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/minimum-wage-by-country

Yet, at the same time, Germany is also the third largest exporter in the world. Germany with one third of the population of the USA and not even 10 percent of China’s, competes in the global market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports

What does Germany export? It exports good quality products. The ones that come to mind are Mercedes and BMW, which are known as some of the best cars in the world rather than the cheapest:

However, there are others. The German economy or Europe’s largest and the world’s fourth largest, is driven by SME enterprises that specialize in unique goods for very niche industries. I think of the Rational Combi-Oven that every chef I’ve worked with used to drool over as an example.

Isn’t it time we moved away from trying to be the world’s cheapest for the world’s big boys? Why can’t we be proud of being good and not being embarrassed of getting the world to pay for Singapore Inc’s products what it pays for that of the West.

We’re a small economy but in the interconnected world we live in, there’s no reason why we can’t do big things on the world stage? Surely this is something the government should drive us towards.

Why Won’t They Join?

I got a call from the Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC yesterday. He was intrigued by my last posting which asserted that the last election results had shown that the roots of a two-party system in Singapore had been developed.

As with all intellectual discussions with the Young Muslim Politician, he ended up answering his own question and then it came to the topic of the quality of opposition candidates. He rightfully observed that the quality of opposition candidates was exceedingly good. First there was the news that Professor Paul Tambyah, Chairman of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), had been elected to head the US based Society for Infectious Diseases (see - https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/paul-tambyah-first-singaporean-infectious-diseases-isid-12847020) and then came the performance in of the Dr. Jamus Lim of the Worker’s Party (WP) in the debate against Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, our Minister for Foreign Affairs. An excerpt of the debate can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5B6w7YGuwo

Dr. Balakrishnan is a former school debater and considered one of our more articulate ministers. The PAP must have been hoping that Dr. Balakrishnan would wipe the floor in the debate and he did not. Dr. Lim’s performance in the debate was exemplary. He was articulate and consistently on message and somehow, that gave the Young Muslim Politician a great moment of insight, when he told me to look at Dr. Balakrishnan’s expression throughout the debate. The expression was – this guy should be on our team, why the hell couldn’t we recruit him.

Apparently, the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) had tried to recruit Dr. Lim when he returned from Abu Dhabi, after serving as an economist for the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, which is the third largest Sovereign Wealth Fund in the world. Apparently, Dr Lim turned the PAP down.

This is a problem for the PAP. Like every good business, political parties need to attract good people, and the PAP used to have a monopoly on the brains. The government’s scholarship system was designed to ensure that smart people stayed within the system. The system worked like this, sponsor a bright kid through to university, get him or her into the civil service for a few years and then, after they had cut their teeth, get them to stand for election. 

The Singapore government has been very open about the fact that it competes with the private sector for talent. Our Ministers are the world’s highest paid. Political salaries are comparable with those from top private sector organisations.  The official reasoning is that this prevents corruption (there’s no need to think about dipping your hands in the cookie jar when you’re being well paid) and that its necessary to pay well because if we didn’t pay our public figures well, they’d run off to the private sector and make their fortunes elsewhere instead of working for the betterment of the nation.

Professor Tambyah and Dr. Lim are living proof that Singapore has the people who can compete on the international stage. The problem for the ruling party is that they’re not on the side of the PAP, which given the PAP’s hold on the government, is the only party with the resources to give them things. If you want money, the PAP is in the position to give it to you. If you want the backing of the state to get things done, only the PAP can give it to you.

So, the question that the PAP needs to answer is why aren’t people like Professor Tambyah and Dr. Lim not flocking to join the side of the PAP?

The government has traditionally used the purse strings to attract people. Personally, I don’t disagree with paying people in public service well. Why should you expect people to work for some higher ideal if it doesn’t put food on the table? I know that the guy with the backing of the state machinery can get things done in a way that the guys protesting on the streets will never be able to do. Our entire system has been based on this. Whenever a smart guy even gave the appearance of being interested in joining “the other” (which means any side other than the government approved one) side, the government and PAP would inevitably “buy” them over.

Now, there’s a problem. Bright guys are turning them down to work for the “other” side. These are the people with the expertise needed for the future. Think about this, we are in the middle of a global pandemic that has ravaged the economy. Who else could be better to be leading the charge against these things than a world recognized expert on infectious diseases and an internationally recognized economist? Yet, these people are not joining.

So, the PAP has to ask itself, why can’t it recruit people like this. It’s been doing it successfully and suddenly you get flawed candidates like Ivan Lim. By contrast, the opposition, which lacks the resources to offer great things is attracting brains like these. The ruling party needs to do some soul searching on why it has been unable to get great minds like Professor Tambyah and Dr. Lim instead of trying to demonise the great minds that won’t join if it is serious about ensuring that Singapore’s machinery has the best minds working for it.

Slow but Steady Wins the Race

It was an election result that everyone expected. As usual, Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party (“PAP”) ended up with 83 of the available 91 seats in parliament and 61 percent of the popular vote. Yet, despite winning an election margin with more resemblance to a North Korean referendum approving the hair style of Kim Jong Un than what might consider a democratic mandate, Singapore’s Prime Minister appeared like a chastened school boy appearing before the principle. He muttered some words about how the electorate had made its intention for more diversity in parliament and talked about external conditions like Covid-19 that damaged the economy. The Prime Minister’s post election comments can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlxfbE2VvfY 

Why would a Prime Minister of a ruling party in the middle of an economic meltdown appear like a chastened school boy after a thumping electoral win? The answer could be found in the fact that instead of wiping out the opposition, the ruling party lost another Group Representation Constituency (GRC – a particularly unique Singaporean feature Westminster Democracy, which involves four constituencies being molded together and you get four MPs for your vote – which means that its possible for a heavy weight minister to bring in fresh blood into parliament on his coat tails). Just as the loss of Aljunied GRC had come with the costs of losing then Foreign Minister, George Yeo, the additional loss of Sengkang GRC came with the loss of Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office and Secretary-General of the National Trade Union’s Congress (NTUC – our only union), Mr. Ng Chee Meng. The party that celebrated the most was the Workers Party, which had up to that point received minimal press coverage.

You could argue that Singapore politics has had a turning point. The ruling party can no longer take winning GRC’s for granted and future election results are more likely to be like 2011 rather than 2015, which saw the death of founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and the Nation’s 50th anniversary. The bad news for the ruling party is that the main opposition party, the Worker’s Party has been very good at holding onto seats that it has won. Mr. Low Thia Khiang held onto their first win in the Single Member Constituency (SMC) of Hougang for nearly 20-years before jumping over the Aljunied GRC, which they have held onto in the last two elections (2015 and 2020).

The benefit for the ruling party is that ministers no longer guarantee electoral success, which means that new candidates will have to fight harder and smarter to gain votes. The ruling party, which has gained a sense of belief that elections are a given, there is the reality of having to change its mindset to a changing world. Policies will have to be sold in a more consultative manner rather than in a “Me, smart and you stupid” manner.

While the ruling party will have to go through a bit of a cultural change, the biggest change that the election gave us was in the nature of opposition. The biggest winner of the evening was the Workers’ Party, which had its position as our main opposition party cemented. While the Workers Party has remained the only other political party to have seats in parliament, it had been quiet throughout the election.

The attention was focused on the Progress Singapore Party (PSP), which was led by former Presidential Candidate, Mr. Tan Cheng Bok who had been endorsed as “the leader that Singapore needs,” by non-other than Mr. Lee Hsien Yang, the Prime Minister’s Younger Brother.

The story of the Worker’s Party’s success his highly instructional for entrepreneurs. The party has worked on the “slow but steady” strategy, a strategy that should be credited to its former secretary-general, Mr. Low Thia Khiang. The strategy is simple, to win seats one at a time. The Worker’s Party faces criticisms on a regular basis from both sides. The government has a way of lambasting Worker Party MPs for being quiet in parliament. The more radical elements criticize the Worker’s Party for being “PAP lite,” and not proposing anything terribly different from the PAP.

Despite this, Mr. Low and his team have understood that the most important element in the game is seats in parliament. For the Workers Party the key is to win seats and hold onto them. Speeches in parliament and talking about holding the executive to account are pointless if you don’t have seats in parliament. Hence, Mr. Low ensured that his team worked hard enough for their respective constituents to ensure they would hold onto their seats.

What makes this such an effective strategy is the fact that the PAP has been effective in running the show and takes great pains in drumming in the message that its not worth changing a winning group. The subtle message (which is not very subtle in as much as the government has famously withheld funds to opposition held constituencies) has been voting opposition will turn things to crap. 

Hence, while we may want to irritate the ruling party or we vote opposition to protest certain things, we’d always give the main votes to the PAP to ensure our standard of life continues. However, by winning seats and holding onto them, the Worker’s Party is showing that it can run things despite the handicaps of lack of resources, law suites etc. This counters the ruling party’s argument that it holds a monopoly on managerial competence. 

The seeds of change in the nature of opposition politics have been sowed. Within three elections, it looks very likely that there will be an opposition party that campaigns on the premise that it is capable of forming and running a government, as opposed to the current situation where opposition parties’ campaign on the premise that they’re there to be opposition to the ruling party.

The business analogy best explains Singapore’s political landscape. We have the former monopoly player in the shape of the PAP, which dominates just about everything. There is the sexy start-up which looks good and has a great visionary founder in Tan Cheng Bok, with the backing of a rich VC in the shape of Lee Hsien Yang. This is the player that everyone talks about.

The Workers Party is by contrast, a slow growth business. The initial founders have spent their fortunes building the ground-up infrastructure and product and the current and future generations test and expand markets. 

The records speak for themselves. Sexy start ups are sexy but unless they’ve built a real business and prepared for life after the hype, they tend to fade. Think of We Work as a cautionary tale. Then there are the former monopolies that have had to undergo painful changes in order to adapt. Those that have succeeded have continued to thrive, like SingTel, those that failed have ended up costing tax payers billions – think of the Detroit Big Three. Finally, there are the businesses that grow slowly but steadily, getting their products right. Think of Apple as a positive example. The lessons are there, it’s just whether we want to take them.