Crisis never helps the PAP any more. Covid-19 speeds up the fall of the PAP.

 

Crisis never helps the PAP any more.

Covid-19 speeds up the fall of the PAP.

Crisis is good for the ruling party.  The PAP likes it and knows how to use it. 

However, the mismanagement of the crisis will cause the party dearly.  International press has given high marks to the PAP government - one of the best countries in handling the Covid-19 crisis.  This is the impression outside Singapore but locally the picture can be quite different.

GE2020, under Covid-19 crisis, never helped the PAP.  Chan Chun Sing predicted it wrongly. Here is the record:

As the Covid-19 crisis develops,  the weaknesses of the PAP will be further exposed.  

Increasingly, the PAP government is facing hospital, labour and finance problems. All these will affect the economic performance, construction activities, and the moods of the people. 

We once hoped that the High-speed rail project with Malaysia could help boost our economy.  It failed. We also hoped to build another airport terminal to add economic activities. It will certainly be delayed or worse cancelled. 

Our productivity is low (so that the government can claim that workers can not get higher wages).  With excess capacity under Covid-19 and persistent lower value-added jobs in the market, the vicious cycle of low pay will continue.  The low wages-low productivity model of the PAP is unable to provide any solutions to our low wage problems.

Covid-19 challenges not only the low wages-low productivity model but also the whole PAP economic model of cheap labour, cheap finance, low healthcare spending, big defence budget.   This will certainly widen the rich-poor gap.

‘Higher value jobs for foreigners, low value jobs for Singaporeans’ is this really good education planning? Job mismatch and displacement are covered by re-skilling, re-training and importation.