While they technically have opposition parties, they've de facto always been a one party state.
There is an extreme level of censorship in the state as well and media is almost entirely owned by the Government.
While I absolutely love visiting Singapore, I could never live there.
Afaik porn sites are also blocked there.
The root cause article here is about openly reporting commonly known things that upset Muslim|Christian puritan values ..
On July 23, 2021, an article appeared in the Tokyo-based English-language weekly Nikkei Asia Review, calling attention to the Singapore government's handling of so-called KTV lounges, alleging that decades of institutional failures in dealing with what the article called "organized crime cartels” were running what amounted to illegal brothels, which were responsible for the widespread spread of Covid-19 among the lounges’ patrons.
... As most Singaporeans know, the KTV lounges have been an embarrassment to strait-laced Singapore for decades, ... [1]
Initially I met with individuals that owned fleets of ships and several skyscrapers (top floor, free top shelf everything) ultimately I socialised after hours with ships crew (ground floor, unsolicited lap dancing | hands on groin unless firmly pushed aside).
Officially this didn't exist, in practice it appeared to be open knowledgge.
[1] https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/singapore-kills-chicken-scare...
It also had negative impacts on Vietnamese and Thai women in Singapore due to the stereotypes that women from Vietnam and Thailand are only there as sex workers.
This was also around the time that Singapore was seeing a severe backlash against immigration (eg. The anti-CECA protests, the KTV stuff, Opposition MPs stoking the xenophobic fires, etc)
> To be clear twenty years back I was taken for business meetings to a 20+ story tower that was lounges and clubs from the basement to to the top floor .. with a strong height from ground correlation to sophistication|sleeze levels.
Orchard Towers. It's open knowledge it's all brothels there. The SG govt legalized and heavily regulates prostitution and organized crime.
Organized crime is kind of regulated too (a lot of the tongs that would have been in the drug trade ended up in the postitution trade and construction)
The government knows if they ban it. It drives it underground. So they tolerate it and try to ensure locals don’t use it.
The twin standards and negative stereotype issue were there in Singapore 20+ years ago .. and common enough in various forms in many countries.
I worked in geophysical remote sensing and across many years visited | worked in nearly 3/4's of the ~190+ countries and territories across the globe.
You rapidly develop a habit of identifying the best and worst aspects of variopus countries and rolling along with whatever locals you are there to liase with and suspending judgement.
My year or so of working in and out of Singapore surveying the Spratly islands region exposed me to many "contradictions" of life there - overall it's a nice city | island with a strong dash of double think surrounding issues of (say) local Singapore citizen V. expat worker expectations.
- You have to be between 21-35 years of age
- You cannot be Malay or Muslim
- You cannot be Male on your ID card (this includes pre-operative transgender persons)
- You have to be from a list of approved countries (i.e. China, Malaysia, Thailand, etc)
There are organizations that support sex workers in Singapore that you can find out more:
A few examples:
- There are open and free elections; the current ruling party, PAP, has ruled since the countries inception
- However, the ruling party is more than happy to "tweak" the rules to make sure they stay in power. A good example is when they turn single member constituencies (one person is elected to one seat in parliament) to a group representation constituency (GRC), where 5 or more people are "elected". The argument was that it improves minority representation, but it also puts a barrier to opposition parties running because they need to field way more candidates (each one costs money). It's not surprisingly which constituencies were turned into GRCs when you look at how many voted for PAP
- They are also quite blatant about "if you vote against PAP, we'll take money away from your constituency". Since PAP controls the purse, they "punish" constituencies that don't vote them in by deprioritizing infrastructure and public housing improvements. And they don't hide this.
- There is no freedom of information act, so the ruling party (PAP) controls all government data. Opposition can ask for it, but the response is often "what is the purpose of your question?" or "releasing that information would disrupt racial harmony". So without hard data, the opposition has can't prove there is a problem.
- The "grassroots" setup PAP has resident committees, neighborhood committees, resident's networks, etc. It's a massive group of volunteers for PAP that allows them a broad interaction with voters that the opposition can't really replicate
- One opposition member made a claim in parliament that a woman who was raped was not treated fairly by the police. Well, turns out she made statements to parliament that were false. So the entire party was put on "trial" and every statement was run through with a fine tooth comb forcing the person to leave parliament. But then when PAP does it (like when Covid tracking data was shared with police, directly against what they promised) and it's smoothed over, an apology made and the laws changed to make it legal.
So it's democracy, but set up to make it very hard for opposition to get into positions of power. It has happened, but the cards are stacked against them.
That said, the PAP works very hard to keep the voters happy. When I lived there I was amazed when problems would happen and they would be fixed within a day or two. They are incredibly responsive to complaints, use their grassroots network to quickly collect voter sentiment, then quickly respond.
So in the end, most of the voters are happy with PAP.
> They are also quite blatant about "if you vote against PAP, we'll take money away from your constituency".
Not cool!
> The "grassroots" setup PAP has resident committees, neighborhood committees, resident's networks, etc. It's a massive group of volunteers for PAP that allows them a broad interaction with voters that the opposition can't really replicate
Unpaid volunteers? Wow...
Honestly I think if they were serious about it they could create processes and entities in place that would benefit constituents without depending on the ruling party.
As an aside, it's funny how Singapore is known as a hypercapitalist utopia, but the ruling party was originally quite socialist and that's still visible in the naming.
- Most people work for the government for example. PSD (public service is the largest employer). Temasek, controlled by the Singapore Minister of Finance owns the every major local company (Singapore Airlines, Captialland, DBS, JTC, etc).
- The housing market is 80% HDB and directly government controlled
- The tax system is very progressive with foreigners paying a lot and locals collecting a lot of subsidies.
People in the US swoon about capitalist wonderland when in reality Singapore is the strongest case for government run economy you can probably find because it a actually works quite well to keep the country competitive and extract maximum value for the population.
Go ahead, verify it.
And if you measure "democracy" by representation of the population in the elected leaders, the State Senate is 33% Democratic, the House is 40% The cities are Democratic, the rural areas Republican. The state has had both Republican and Democratic Governors in it's history, with some times the Democrats controlling all three seats of power.
Seems pretty democratic to me.