Here and There – Singapore
Against my expectations, I was in Singapore recently. I thought I was finished with paid activities, especially working overseas. Several years ago, I would be visiting Singapore 5-6 times a year, staying at the same hotel, most of the time teaching, sometimes doing a little consulting, and usually managing brief escapes for shopping! I had a favourite circuit for those teaching visits. I would go to Hong Kong first. I had friends there, and my time would be packed: classes and dinners. Next, I went to Kuala Lumpur to find myself in a totally different environment. Laid back, a city where nothing was ever completed, but everything was always ‘nearly there’. Finally, I would arrive in Singapore, which was my transition point, getting me used to ‘my’ world in a half-way house on the way back home.
Singapore is relentlessly well organised. The airport is huge, and yet the arrival process is slick and easy. Within a few minutes you can be in a taxi heading to the city centre. The freeway is always carefully tended, with shrubs and trees on either side for most of the journey. For one straight section the central reservation is also full of plants and trees. However, careful observation will reveal they’re in planter boxes: the freeway can be closed, the vegetation in the middle removed, and instantly Singapore has a military runway.
One of the stations on the railway (subway) system was close to my hotel, and it was a modest walk to get there. However, the real point was that I could go to the station entirely underground, never having to confront heat or rainstorms. Now another section of line has opened, and a second, newer station is even closer. The Singapore commuter train system is amazing. If you miss a train, you only have to wait three or four minutes, and the next one arrives. Yes, relentlessly well organised.
Almost all the attractions of Singapore are centred around the southern part of the island. There is a zoo, a nature park and a bird park. You can visit the largely pedestrian Sentosa Island with its casinos and water parks, travelling over in one of the dizzyingly high gondolas from the Harbour area, or go on the huge Ferris wheel. Singapore has a wonderful Asian Civilisations Museum, far more interesting than the very serious National Museum. As everywhere, there are some strange places, too – in this case a Music Box Museum!
It may seem odd, but I see Singapore and Australia as similar in some ways. Both are in the ‘wrong’ place. Singapore is a western oriented Chinese country, with a relatively small percentage of Malaysian and Indian citizens, surrounded by messy East Asia, with Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, and Cambodia close by, and Indonesia just a few miles across the water. In the same way, Australia (along with New Zealand) is out of place, a European country at the bottom of Asia, with a large percentage of immigrants, an ancient indigenous population, and unlike its neighbours too, especially Indonesia. The poor in other countries are everywhere. The poor in Singapore are almost invisible, and in many respects that’s also true in Australia.
History has created both these odd countries, and while their stories are fascinating, it’s their present that is equally compelling. With almost no natural resources, Singapore is the richest country in the SE Asian region, a nation of clever people living on a tiny island, wealthy from the high-tech skills of its citizens. Like a ripe plum it appears ready to be gobbled up by its neighbours any day, but it keeps surviving. At the other extreme, Australia is a vast island, partly pastoral but packed with natural resources, living off a lazy reliance on selling its ores and coal. A lovely environment, beautiful in many ways, and yet equally vulnerable.
Both regard themselves as democracies, and in both cases it is more of a label than an accurate picture. The same party has governed Singapore since it broke away from the Malaysian Federation: other parties find it almost impossible to win a seat in parliament, and any dissidence is muted, given the willingness of the state to crush any trouble making opposition, often slamming legal restraints on anyone from outside the governing party likely to win a seat. As for Australia, we are moving more and more to a situation essentially similar to the scene in the US: strong divisions, a premium on assertion rather than truth, and governments, once elected, paying as little attention to majority concerns as possible. The recently appointed Labor government might buck that tendency, but only time will tell.
Singapore is a consumerist society, even more so than Australia. Any day of the week you will see crowds in the shopping malls, the stores packed with the latest gadgets, electronics, clothes and fashions. There are hundreds of places to eat, fast food outlets in the malls, and more up-market restaurants dotted around the island, many close to the beaches: it is hard not to be close to a beach in Singapore! Everything looks new, and what isn’t is being refurbished or being torn down to be replaced. On the trip in from the airport I went past a series of multistorey apartment blocks. They’ve been there for many years. Currently they are being cleaned up, and some are being replaced with new towers. Relentlessly new!
Teaching over, I was still in Singapore on 9 August, the National Day of Singapore. This day commemorates the departure of Singapore from the Federation of Malaysia, itself having been created in 1963 out of the various states that made up Malaya and some neighbouring territories. With Covid disappearing, this was the first time for a couple of years that the traditional parade could take place, and Singaporeans were out in large numbers.
The structure of the day was revealing. While events took place in several locations, the main stage was at Marina Bay, close to the hotel where I was staying. As it was a ticketed event, I could only watch the day’s events on television, even though it was less than 500 metres away! The first part of the program comprised the ‘pre-parade’ segment including: choir performances; school band marching displays; demonstrations of armed forces skills, including the simulated capture of invaders in Marina Bay; a fly past and aerial displays; and skydiving. All went off without a hitch, rebels were captured, everyone applauded, except for the moment when one of the skydivers (with more than 200 jumps already successfully accomplished), fell badly and had to be whisked away! Added to all this were various items put on by community groups and schools revolving around the themes of racial harmony, the ruggedness and determination of youth, ethnic dances and a mass gymnastics display.
All that was the preliminaries. We were waiting for the Parade, which turned out to be in two sections, the Guard-of-Honour contingents and the Supporting Contingents. The four Guard-of-Honour contingents were made up of members from the three arms of the Singapore Armed Forces, the Army, Navy and Air Force. The parade started with the Parade Regimental Sergeant Major forming up the parade on either side of the Padang, the field of the National Stadium in front of the Marina Bay grandstand, while everyone waited for the arrival of the members of Parliament. Carefully choreographed, first we saw the rank-and-file members of Parliament join the gathering, then the ministers, and finally the current Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kwan Yew’s son (I’ll return to Lee Kwan Yew later).
Finally, once the President of Singapore had arrived, the Presidential Gun Salute was followed by the President inspecting the Parade. As is customary, she stopped every so often to talk to a member of one of the Guard-of-Honour parade contingents as she passed by. After all that the March Past began, and there were many, many armed forces units, civil groups and several bands, all accompanied by people on the stands enthusiastically waving flags (while waiting for the third stage of the Parade). It was a big parade!
Once all the military stuff was over, it was time for the show segment . Like the military parade, this had a structure familiar to most Singaporeans, with singers, choirs, dancing routines and floats. At the end there was a ‘Grand Finale’, featuring the theme song of that year’s parade, and the fireworks display. Ah, the fireworks. I suspect that was what most attendees had been waiting to see, and they were spectacular. The parade finished with what must have been a collection of familiar National Day songs, a mass pledge taking, and the whole audience joining to sing the National Anthem.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, you might not have been aware that Singapore has compulsory National Service, a law that requires all male Singaporean citizens and second-generation permanent residents to serve a period of compulsory service in the uniformed services. It was first instituted in 1967 to help build Singapore’s military forces, soon after its independence. Later it was expanded to include both the police and the civil defence force as well. Membership of these units is compulsory. Soon after reaching 18 years old, male citizens of Singapore and second-generation permanent residents serve for 2 years in active duty as full-time national servicemen (colloquially known as NSFs), serving in the Singapore Armed Services, the Singapore Police or the Singapore Civil Defence Force. After their two years, they transition to become reservists, operationally ready national servicemen.
The requirements are clear. National service if for men only; women are not required to take part. There are rules. Particularly fit individuals can take a demanding physical test and may be able to reduce the service period by two months. There are fines for avoiding national service; spending time overseas is not considered a reason to avoid this requirement. Most national servicemen serve in the army, which has the greatest need in numbers. Moreover, the manpower requirements of the air force and the navy tend to be more specialised, and on that basis the constant periodic turnover of national servicemen is considered to be too disruptive. There is a statutory age cap for reservist obligations, up to the age of 40 for WOSEs (Warrant Officers, Specialists, and Enlistees) and 50 years old for commissioned officers. At this point, these people are officially recognised as ‘ex-national servicemen’.
In case you missed the point, this is an unashamedly paternalistic society. The spirit of Lee Kwan Yew lives on. Lee was born in Singapore when it was under British rule. After studying law and becoming a barrister in England, he returned to Singapore as one of the co-founders of the Peoples Action Party (PAP), first entering parliament in 1955. As the de factoopposition leader in the legislature, he led his party to its first electoral victory in 1959 election and was appointed as the state’s first prime minister. Anxious to avoid continuing rule by the British, he campaigned to have Singapore one of the states included in the proposed Federation of Malaysia in 1963. A mere two years later, on both racial and political grounds, Singapore left the federation to become a ‘sovereign city state’.
The PAP has never lost parliamentary control, and it’s been challenging, to put it mildly, to stand against a PAP candidate. For twenty-five years, Lee Kwan Yew oversaw Singapore’s transformation into a developed country. He was both paternalistic and demanding, driving the country to achieve a high-income economy, ensuring the country was free of corruption, and pursuing a long-term approach to planning and economic development. Among other issues, he ensured the country ran as a meritocracy, with English as its business and parliamentary language (although a policy of bilingualism ensured students could also learn their home language – most were Chinese, Malaysian or Indian by ethnicity). How would we describe his approach? Authoritarian? Possibly. He would like to talk about Singapore having a guided democracy. On the negative side, he restricted press freedoms, public protests, and the right of labour groups to strike. He was willing to allow libel lawsuits to prevent potential alternatives to the PAP. It was, as he saw it, a necessary series of measures to ensure Singapore’s development, all under the rule of a ‘benevolent’ leader. He stepped down as Prime Minister in 1990, but he remained in the Cabinet, first as ‘Senior Minister’ until 2004, and then ‘Minister Mentor’ until 2011 when his son, Lee Hsien Loong, became the third Prime Minister of Singapore. He died in 2015, leaving a legacy of achievements, but also a culture that still informs the government’s values and style of operation.
In the last few years, Lee Hsien Loong has gently shifted some of the more restrictive policies of his father, but it has been a slow and careful process. One example was just after I left. On 21 August 2022, Lee announced Singapore will decriminalise sex between men, effectively making it legal to be a homosexual in the city-state. He explained the government would repeal Section 377A of the penal code, a colonial-era law that criminalises sex between men, noting that ‘society was becoming more accepting of gay people’. “I believe this is the right thing to do, and something that most Singaporeans will now accept”. I missed hearing him make the same comment days in his annual National Day rally speech.
It was an example of the slow and careful approach that marks the leadership of Singapore. Lee has made it clear the government had no intention of changing the city-state’s legal definition of marriage as ‘a union between a man and a woman’. “Even as we repeal Section 377A, we will uphold and safeguard the institution of marriage. … Under the law, only marriages between one man and one woman are recognised in Singapore,” Lee declared. In practice Section 377A had not been actively enforced in recent years, allowing an LGBT environment to develop, including a vibrant gay nightclub scene. But activists had sought for many years for the ban to be scrapped, saying it perpetuated social stigma and discrimination aimed at gay people. Step by step, slowly and carefully.
By chance, it was exactly fifty years ago when George Duncan, a gay Australian law lecturer was drowned in the river that runs through Adelaide’s River Torrens. Homosexuality was illegal in South Australia at that time, and the banks of the Torrens were known as a popular place for gay men to meet. His murder attracted national media coverage, and Duncan was held up as a martyr by the gay rights movement. As a result of all the media attention, a bill was introduced in the South Australian Parliament to amend the Criminal Law Consolidation Act that criminalised homosexuality. It passed in November 1972, but various amendments and challenges meant that it took until August 1975 for it to be finally enacted, making South Australia the first Australian state to fully decriminalise homosexuality.
Is this, then, a major difference between Singapore and Australia? Singapore has retained its male dominated family character. Change happens slowly, carefully managed by the political leadership. In contrast, Australia wants to sustain its multicultural, rebellious and individualistic character. Change can happen quickly, as it did in the case of decriminalising homosexuality, and did so equally dramatically years later in relation to gun rights. Both populations are proud of their country, but you’re unlikely to see thousands of Australians watching military parades for Australia Day, waving the country’s flag, all on tenterhooks to hear the PM speak. True, but I have to admit we do celebrate Anzac Day, and wave flags then. Maybe this is another way in which we are not so different after all …
