Good evening fellow Singaporeans! It is good to see so many of you here! It is time to empower your future!
But there is one thing that stands in our way. And that one thing is FEAR.
Many friends and family members feared for me when I joined the Workers’ Party and again when I told them I would be standing as a candidate.
They warned me, they will throw the kitchen sink at you, they will even throw the toilet bowl.
I shared this during my first rally speech at the Punggol East By-election, my answer to them then, and now, is life is too short and special to be Kiasu, Kiasi and Kiagui.
The problem is for 50 years, the PAP government has created a huge system that makes us all face these feelings of fear every day. The Workers’ Party seeks to reform this system to remove the fears.
Let us start with feelings of Kiasu. Our children enter the education system playful, curious and adventurous. They come out stressed because they are afraid to lose.
One exam after another, getting told whether they are smart or stupid, getting super pressure from parents, most students end up beaten down and lacking in confidence.
Those who do not make it to Poly or University tend to feel they have failed in some ways. Only the brave ones not beaten down aspire to be successful in other ways.
Those who make it to Poly or University feel more even stressed to perform. As a professor, I find myself trying to undo the many years of Kiasuism cultivated by the system, encouraging my students to find their own voice and be creative.
This is why the Workers’ Party is proposing a series of educational reforms.
Reform the PSLE so as to use the grades to show actual achievement by the student and not to rank children from smart to not so smart. 12-year olds need to be encouraged, not sorted like sheep and goats.
Offer 10-year through-train school programmes in every cluster to give parents the choice to opt out of the PSLE.
Implement smaller class sizes so that teachers can nurture critical thinking and confidence, rather than teach over the heads of students.
How about being Kiasi, the fear of dying?
In the last 10 years, the PAP opened the floodgates to let massive numbers of foreign manpower into the country. Our population grew from 4 million in 2004 to 5.5 million in 2014. Local workers made up 74% of the labour force in 2004, but only 62% in 2014.
They say the rising tide lift all boats, but this is more like flash flooding of the labour force depressing wage growth and pushing up costs of living. Many Singaporeans have been thrown overboard by the flood and are treading water to keep alive.
So our workers lose confidence and become afraid of becoming unemployed. Instead of being proud of their work and spending time and energy to become more productive, our workers try to be safe and not to rock the boat.
We worry about our livelihood and our family’s daily bread and butter. Our work-life balance suffers because we work even harder, not productively, but just harder and longer, so that we won’t lose our jobs to foreign competition. We sacrifice our family time to save our families.
The Workers’ Party is proposing a series of reforms for better employment and wage security.
We are proposing an Employment Security Fund, where employers and employees will each pay 50 cents per $1,000 earned every month and in the event of you being laid off, you will get up to $9,000 depending on how much you earn up to 6 months of unemployment. This will help you buy time to retrain, reskill and reapply for jobs.
The Workers’ Party is not anti-foreign talent, but we want to protect Singaporeans from unfair competition from those with fake degrees.
We therefore propose all Employment Pass and S Pass applicants with university degrees and diplomas earned outside Singapore must have their degrees checked by an expert education consultancy.
On Kiagui, you can see how the PAP has been acting this entire period. It is trying to make us Singaporeans to be Kiagui Kiakuai, to be afraid of ghosts and monsters.
They have been calling the opposition party names, making us less than human, trying to paint us as monsters, from mouse to Frankenstein. This is disrespectful politics.
Worse, as our Chair Sylvia Lim puts it, the PAP itself is becoming such a huge party-government machinery that can try to attack and eat you up if IT thinks you are not on its side.
This is why we need a proper opposition party in parliament to check and balance the ruling party, so that it will work for the people and not become an arrogant monster.
My fellow Singaporeans, life is too short and special to be Kiasu, Kiasi and Kiagui.
This also happens to be the Seventh Month for many Chinese following traditional customs. I remember when I was young, even my parents, who are Catholic, would tell me to be afraid, to not anyhow touch and say things. Seventh Month was a month of fear.
I learned something important since I started helping with the Workers’ Party. I see mutual respect more often now, with neighbours taking care to burn paper money without disturbing others and others not minding some smoke and ashes too much.
I follow the Workers’ Party MPs on temple dinners and it is about charity, honouring community spirit and traditions, and encouraging the “Huat Ah!” courage to pursue business success. Seventh Month is more a month of respect.
This is the way to go for our political system. Mutual respect and courage must replace fear. We cannot because of fear, tolerate the overwhelming power of the PAP machinery to interfere and run our lives.
If we want to be successful in the next 50 years, we all need what made our founding political leaders great in the first place: courage and being unafraid to fail, unafraid to die and unafraid of ghosts and monsters. It is this spirit that will bring us forward, not the track record of a few highly educated people.
各位选民， 我们是你们的， 不怕死， 不怕输， 不把鬼， 的工人党候选人，
掌握你的民权， 把握你的未来， 投我们一票
Empower your future! Vote the Workers’ Party!