Singaporeans, heading for poll, say they want choices

SINGAPORE, Mar 8: It's Friday night and Singaporean member of parliament Indranee Rajah is out meeting her constituents. A jobless man seeks government help, a taxi driver complains about a traffic fine.

It's business as usual for an MP anywhere in the world as an election looms, except in one respect -- Rajah, who belongs to the ruling People's Action Party (PAP), has never faced an opposition challenge at the polls.

While voting is mandatory in the Asian city-state, two thirds of the 84 elected seats were not even contested at the last general election in 2001; PAP candidates won automatically.

And with so few opposition candidates, only a third of eligible voters had a chance to cast their ballot that year, down from about 40 per cent in 1997.

''I would like to vote,'' said Gladys Lee, a 25-year-old bank officer who missed a chance to cast her ballot in the last election at her uncontested constituency.

''It may or may not affect the outcome but it gives you a sense of ownership to make a decision on your own. Besides, I think there is a danger of political apathy if, generation after generation, we don't get to vote.'' Social activists say such low voter participation is unhealthy in a country criticised by the US State Department and Amnesty International for curbing political expression.

''The shrinking percentage of people that vote is disturbing,'' said Geh Min, one of nine so-called nominated parliamentarians, appointed by the government to represent community views.

Even ruling party politicians have called attention to the problem. Last month, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern-day Singapore, said he would like to see a contest in his Tanjong Pagar constituency.

''I welcome a contest. It will be good for the constituency, it will be good for the PAP organisation, and I look forward to it,'' Lee was quoted in the Straits Times newspaper as saying.

An early poll is expected within months.

Last month, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Lee's son, announced a S 2.6 billion dollars budget package with generous handouts in a sign of an impending poll. On Friday, a government-appointed panel set new electoral boundaries, carving the island into multi- and single-member wards.

LEADERSHIP TEST

The election will be the first real test of leadership for the younger Lee, 54, who took over as Prime Minister in August 2004.

The PAP, which has dominated parliament since independence in 1965 and overseen economic growth and security in a region beset by political and social unrest, is in no danger of losing power.

Sound policies are one reason, but critics say people are also discouraged from joining the opposition because of the readiness of PAP ministers to file defamation lawsuits that can lead to bankruptcy and loss of the right to stand in elections.

Just last month, opposition politician Chee Soon Juan was bankrupted in a defamation suit brought by former Prime Ministers Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok Tong. Opposition veteran J B Jeyaretnam, 80, is making a bid to get out of his bankruptcy in time to contest the election.

The redrawing of electoral boundaries and use of multi-member wards also put the opposition at a disadvantage, critics say. Since 1988, the announcement of new electoral boundaries has come anywhere between two days and two months before an election has been called, giving the opposition little time to prepare and campaign.

Several hotly contested constituencies have been carved up, scrapped or merged with others in the past when boundaries were redrawn. After the opposition Workers' Party narrowly lost the five-member constituency of Cheng San in 1997, the ward was wiped out in the next boundary review.

MPs such as Rajah have never had to court voters thanks to the use of multi-member wards, known as Group Representative Constituencies or GRCs.

The GRCs, where constituents vote for teams of up to six MPs, accounted for 14 of the 23 electoral divisions in the 2001 election.

The small opposition parties say it is harder to compete against such large teams, which are often led by high-profile senior PAP politicians and cabinet ministers.

NOVICES AND VETERANS Rajah, for instance, was a political novice until she was approached barely two weeks before the 2001 election to participate in a team of six MPs led by Lee Kuan Yew.

''Multi-member wards have allowed the PAP to bring in new recruits with no political experience by leveraging on the strength of their veteran campaigners,'' said Garry Rodan, Asia Research Centre director at Australia's Murdoch University.

The PAP says GRCs help to maintain ethnic harmony by allowing it to field candidates from the island's different ethnic groups.

Under the GRC rules, at least one member of the team must be from the Malay, Indian or Eurasian communities, which together account for 23 per cent of the population. Ethnic Chinese account for 77 per cent, in a country which has strict ethnic quotas for public housing to prevent the formation of race-based ghettos.

''Once we had integration in terms of housing, there was a danger that minority candidates could lose to Chinese candidates.

Like it or not, there is always a tendency to vote for your own kind,'' said Rajah, who is of mixed Chinese and Indian heritage.

But social activist Alex Au is not convinced.

''There is a general feeling that there has been some abuse of the original intent of bringing in minority members of parliament. It was initially three members in each constituency but now it's grown to teams of five or six. This is a serious structural disadvantage for small opposition parties,'' Au said.

Opposition parties stood in only four of the 14 multi-member wards at the last election and they lost them all.

The absence of opposition candidates for the other 10 GRCs automatically gave the PAP 55 out of the 84 elected seats in parliament.

''The rules of the game remain stacked against the competition,'' said Workers' Party activist James Gomez.

REUTERS