I was at Hong Lim Park on Saturday afternoon. I went because the event is symbolic, as Singapore has never seen anything like this since its separation from Malaysia. I also went to be counted to show my revulsion as to how the government is managing the influx of foreigners in all aspects – labour, education and immigration. I didn’t go because I agree with those who spoke or their agenda, and I personally did not pay much attention to what some of tne speakers were saying. In fact, my friends and I were having our own separate discussion on how we felt about the White Paper at our little corner. We even joked that the foreign guests at the Parkroyal Hotel on Pickering Street has the best vantage point.

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These few photos were taken around 4:30pm and I took so little because I was more interested in protecting my almost new DSLR from the rain

When I arrive around 4pm there were probably more people than the Reform Party rallies during the Punggol East by-election. Regardless of my reservations about some of the speakers at the event, I was heartened to see the number of people who slowly trickled in and everyone were calm and no one was behaving aggressively. I was also heartened to see no riot police vehicles in the vicinity, nor an excessive deployment of police in contrast to that of the Singapore Democratic Party’s IMF protest in February 2006. I also met another friend who went on his own and he told me there were also a few other familiar faces, and my own estimation was that there were at least 3500 ~ 4000 people by the time I left at around 6pm for dinner. This was in stark contrast to another event called ‘Occupy Raffles Place’ in October 2011 where no one – not even the organisers – showed up. It is of no wonder one of my friends thought the Hong Lim protest was another joke but it is crystal clear to me that we Singaporeans are a rational, law abiding lot who preferred to do things within the strictures of the law.

However, I am saddened to read that someone was scorned for not going because she felt convicted not to participate in the event as she objected to the racial profiling of foreigners in our midst. I have no words to describe the outrage I felt towards those who scorned her, and I could only say that this conjures up images of extremists and loonies of the likes of Mao’s Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution whereby no alternative views are tolerated.

I certainly think a lot of us would be more receptive to the White Paper and the projected population figure for 2030 if the following hasn’t happened, and is still happening –

I am not suggesting that the government has taken no measures since the last General Elections. I don’t have to talk about the transport and housing issues either, because it is utterly meaningless to talk about that if we do not have jobs. So I will focus in particular on point 3 above and talk about whether the measures are focused correctly, or effective at all.

First of all, there appears that there is now a indiscriminate tightening on foreign labour, ostensibly to force workers to raise productivity but some employers have already started to groan. From all the friends who are open with their views on this matter, a lot of them are aware that we need low-skill laborers such as cleaners and construction workers. That’s not forgetting waiters, and I am not saying that is a low skilled job since any service job that requires handling of another human being requires a certain skill set that some of us do not possess. Talking about waiters, I am personally not sure how productivity can be raised here, in spite of an example cited by our Deputy Prime-Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam on more “productive” waiters in US, Europe and Japan are.

The one question that needs to be asked based on the DPM’s example is not only whether they are getting better paid for their alleged “higher productivity”, but also the customer to waiter ratio and also the cultural impression people have of the job. I recalled when a lady friend said she would want to be a barista in Star Bucks everyone told her to drop the idea as if there’s some kind of stigma associated with the job. Anyway, I was at White Dog Cafe in Vivocity the other day, and I clearly think they are understaffed because I saw only two waiters (not including those are the cashier and the kitchen) and they apparently cannot cope. I can thus reasonably understand why the the Restaurant Association of Singapore (RAS) has urged the government to re-assess curbs on the inflow of foreign workers or businesses will face dire consequences. After all, customers will stop patronising a joint when the service is bad and it will only force the joint to cut the number of staff. Needless to say, that which will further aggravate the service standards which ultimately leads to the joint closing down. In other words, the government can stop feeding us biased examples designed that suits the agenda of the day. To talk about increasing productivity as an abstract without providing the specifics is useless.

Meanwhile, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are calling on the government to examine whether there are enough quality jobs for Singaporeans who may have lost job opportunities in the Professionals, Managers, Executives and Technicians (PMET) sector due to the inflow of foreign talent. It is strange that nothing seems to be done here because this is the main peeve of Singaporeans. Why the focus is thus placed on low-skilled foreign labour is beyond me. For the information of the Ministers of Manpower, Singaporeans aren’t daft and we could tell the difference between a so-called “Foreign Talent” with a masters or bachelors degree from “NHU” (Never Heard-of University) displacing Singaporeans and the Bangladeshi worker digging a hole at a construction site. We are quite clear we don’t want dubious “talents” with their rubbish degrees taking up our jobs and we clearly understand we still require cheap low-skilled labourers to do some of the work that we clearly can’t find anyone to do. Furthermore, some of us are also able to see how MNCs satisfy the troublesome unions in their home countries during negotiations by transferring their headcount to Singapore so that they can still meet their headcount reductions and yet satisfy their shareholders on cost reduction. The end result is that Singaporeans lose their jobs because our sham of a union won’t even lift a finger to help us, while these MNCs engaged in an elaborate manpower shell game. If not, an open position which a Singaporean maybe able to fill is instead taken by a foreigner transferred from another location, because he’s kawan-kawan (Malay: friends) with the department head, and they have always ‘worked as a team’. I wouldn’t complain much when a foreigner from the MNC’s home country is the head of a department, but I would certainly frown on such nepotism.

Back to the matter of dubious “talents” with rubbish degrees. A local-born polytechnic diploma holder may thus be disqualified from a jobs simply because a foreigner has a degree of some sort. How is it fair for him to suffer from such qualification discrimination, or to his parents who have struggled to allow him to finish his studies? Faced with the fact that we don’t even have enough universities in the first place, not to mention that some of the positions in our universities are given to so-called “foreign scholars”, how can Singaporeans be not bitter? While there used to be a time someone could start work with a diploma and find a decent job first so they can later finance themselves and take up a part-time course to pursue a part-time degree, it is becoming increasingly hard for them to do so under this context.

It gave me the impression that the government is deliberately mucking things up on foreign labour so that it could justify relaxing the controls later. The lapdog mass media will bombard Singaporeans with the impression that such measures could not be implemented without detrimental – if not disastrous – effects. Unfortunately, the government is mistaken if it believes it can use such a method to hoodwink us, so that we will continue to accept the absurd methods currently used to expand the population.

Simply put, let’s cut all that bullshit about a Singapore identity and keeping a strong Singapore core. It is easy for some of those white-shirted clowns to sit in the comfort of the air-conditioned parliament chambers and give speeches filled with nothing but hot air. But all we Singaporeans want is just a chance to live our lives again. When some of those white-shirted charlatans get off their ivory UFO in cloud nine and look beyond their statistics and GDP figures and see how we are actually surviving – even struggling – and do something about it, then we will all perhaps be more receptive to whatever policies they want to implement.