A huge thank you...

As if the people at hardwarezone couldn't wait to prove my point, almost immediately after the first blog post came up, a thread criticising the creation of this blog to represent the silent majority was created.

You can find it here...

I am absolutely astounded by the baseless vitriol dispensed by the netizens there. I certainly am flattered, but as I expected, their noise was base, baseless and without substance. Well, the joke is on them because I certainly am no Tin Pei Ling.

Let's talk about something with a little more impact on the lives of Singaporeans though. A lot of noise has been made about Ministerial salaries being to high. Or Singaporean Ministers being the best paid office holders in the world.

The principles of how we remunerate our ministers have been extensively debated ad infinitum. The substance however is easily lost in the noise.

I believe that when selecting someone to run a country, you want to have the best that you can possibly get. It only makes sense doesn't it? We live in this country. If I were to select someone to run the country I so dearly love, I wouldn't want someone who is incompetent or inadequate to do so. It's an age old adage that some might have heard before. If you pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys. Let's try to practise a little empathy here and put yourself in the shoes of someone who has the calibre to run a country. Why would you choose to be a minister if you can earn much much more in the private sector. This is why civil servants and ministers are remunerated based on a benchmark, DISCOUNTED to private sector professionals of the same level. This will obviously be  higher wage than what most public servants in other countries get. As such, the system that we have allows us to attract the cream of the crop into public service and even then they still have to sacrifice by earning less than what they would in the private sector.

Bear in mind as well that these salaries are all encompassing. Even gifts have to be declared. Compare this to Hosni Mubarak of Egypt where the recent protests happened, Mubarak was a politician and a military commander, yet his personal wealth was estimated at between 40bn - 70bn dollars. Surely he wasn't living on his salary alone. This might be an extreme example, but it is a scenario that happens all over the world. When you look at salaries of ministers in places other than Singapore, take some time to consider the fact that they may have other less legitimate sources of income. Oftentimes public servants in many countries are very rich despite their low salaries, even if the system is not corrupt. Take the United States for instance. Many opportunities arise for their high ranking public officials to make a lot of money after they leave public service through lobbying for special interest groups or to speak on the lecture circuits.

As a result of our remuneration system for public officials, Singapore ranks highly on having an efficient Government and the absence of corruption(Transparency International Survey 2010: Singapore was ranked joint first with New Zealand and Denmark)

Based on this then New Zealand and Denmark are good countries to compare ourselves to?

Let's take New Zealand, the government budget for New Zealand is 43% of GDP. In Singapore it's 17%.
In 1960, New Zealands's GDP was 3 times that of Singapore. Now, Singapore GDP is much higher than New Zealand's. Let's think about all these things the next time we're being quizzed about ministerial salaries.