I was just scrolling through Workers’ Party @ Parliament blog when I read the following exchange between opposition MP Low Thia Khiang and one of the so called ‘elite talents’ (精英人才) of the Tali-PAP on 28 Feb 2008:
Mr Low Thia Khiang (Hougang SMC): First clarification, the member in his speech said why should we quarrel with the discrepancy in the estimates because we are in a happy situation where we have a huge surplus instead of a deficit.
Does he agree that he misses the point? The point is not so much whether we end up with a huge deficit or huge surplus, the question is: why is the Budget estimate so far off the mark?
Second clarification: He says that if our estimate is off the mark, Hong Kong is even worse than us because they are off the mark much more than Singapore’s estimates.
I’m afraid that if this is the attitude of the People’s Action Party, we are going down a slippery slope. We are not so good in estimates, he says, but never mind, there are people who are worse than us.
So in Mandarin, this is exactly what we call ‘Ah Q jing shen’ (mentality)*.
Dr Lim Wee Kiak (Sembawang GRC): In fact when I did my block visit last night, a resident asked me the same question: why does the Government have such a huge surplus? Did something go wrong in the estimate?
Looking at the papers this morning, when Hong Kong reported a huge surplus – four times above the estimate – the main reason given was it was an unprecedented year, property prices went up, they had huge transactions in the stock market. A similar phenomenon was seen in Singapore as well.
I told the resident: At the end of the day, I think the key question for this House is how do we look forward?
When the family breadwinner came back and said: ‘I’ve struck lottery”, you shouldn’t be asking, ‘Why did you strike lottery?’
You should be asking: how are we going to use the lottery money? So I think we should not miss the point. The real issue now is: What can we do now to make sure that there will be less and less need for all these social welfare programmes in the future. Look forward and not backward.
* Ah Q is a famous character in Chinese literature, known for his foolishness and optimism.
I was rolling the floor laughing my ass off when I read Lim’s reply. The fact that this guy actually holds a doctorate, makes it even more hilarious. This is the kind of replies I would have imagined Ah Beng and Ah Seng would have come up with.
Try and imagine this… Citizen Lim Dong Chiang told his wife that getting himself sterilised would have been a good idea because they can just continue to enjoy unprotected sex, save the money use for contraception, and not worry about having a baby.
One year later, Dong Chiang’s wife came home and told him she is pregnant. And when Dong Chiang goes looking for Dr Lim, I can almost imagine him giving this advice: ‘You don’t ask where the baby come from, Chiang. I think we should not miss the point. The real issue now is: What you can do now to make sure you have the money to raise the baby in the future. Look forward not backward.’
You know, if it was an opposition MP who said this he would have definitely have been ridiculed in Parliament, and by Singapore’s lapdog media until he has no place to hide. Remember what happened to Lim How Doong when he said, ” Don’t Talk Cock! ” in Parliament?
This is enough to make one weep but at the meantime, you don’t know whether you should be laughing or not!
Well done, Sembawang GRC. This is one of the clowns you gave 76.7% of the votes to. I suppose the Singapore Zoo probably could teach Ah Meng’s offsprings to be MPs better than they act… and they probably takes normal peanuts – not the TT Durai kind – for pay too.
Sembawang GRC, will you find the courage to fix this problem, the next time round? Or will you continue to keep them and spoilt them?