I for one thought that the Japanese would go through the motions of their recent Upper House election as business as usual & vote for the LDP. From my sojourn in Osaka, I had the impression was that most Japanese saw politics as a game that they could never really have any meaningful impact & there was nothing they could do to change the status quo. The conventional wisdom was that LDP stays in power so long as the typical salaryman got their gohan, sushi and soy sauce delivered. The effects of the current & lingering painful recession changed that & Japanese democracy is the stronger for that.
What the LDP fancied was that the Japanese electorate would be so complacent that they had no choice but to vote them in since the Japanese taste for oppositionists have soured since those heady days of PM Hosokawa which saw the temporary end of LDP power but the opposition were soon riddled with scandals, ineptitude & internal strife - disenchanting them with the Japanese electorate - so the LDP slowly crept back to political control & power with the accession of Hashimoto as Prime Minister.
The similarities between Singapore & Japan political dynamic are few but some pertinent similarities could be gleaned. The fragmented Japanese opposition were labeled by the LDP as a bunch of rowdy fools with no ideas to improve Japan (sounds familiar here). The LDP had a inherent superiority attitude since they had held near untrammeled power presiding over the path towards wealth and prosperity for a nation that suffered stone age poverty induced by merciless WWII US firebombing - the LDP had a reliable track record of experience & success guided by one dominant political party (this has a familiar rags to riches story guided by the PAP, in re., kampong backwater, eviction from Malaysia, race riots, British withdrawal, oil shock recession, etc.) The LDP had a simple but effective contract with the Japanese electorate, they managed the economy well & delivered the goodies to make Japan the second largest economy in the world. In fact, they were thrown out in disgust over government-wide corruption scandals - something that we have fortunately not suffered from.
But what the LDP did not contend was the globalization and internationalization of trade and the economy where they could no longer shelter inefficient, unaccountable, opaque institutions (re. banks, financial services etc.) with regulations and excuses that were put up by the Japanese civil service & bureaucrats. There were cumbersome tools and obstacles put forward by an entrenched Japanese civil bureaucracy who had sidled up to the crony & corrupt business interests that no one bothered to investigate because no one knew the extent of the corruption nor the ineptitude of the participants of the grand charade. They saw no need to shake the status quo - the bureaucrats were just unaccountable to anyone - so it did not matter who was elected in the elections.
The HIV-AIDS tainted blood products scandal exposed this lethal consequences of lack of transparency and accountability. It showed the lengths to which the bureaucrats took great efforts to cover up, in the name of government confidentiality or security of proper procedure & process, the near criminal negligence and incompetence of the Ministry of Health and Welfare bureaucrats who were tasked to investigate the problem and were supposed to manage and administer the crisis. But as the truth unfolded, it was discovered that they may actually have contributed to it, exacerbated it, ignored it and then covered it up. It is therefore, no surprise that currently Japan's most popular politician is Naoto Kan who was viewed as a fearless Minister of Health & Welfare (MHW) under the LDP coalition government who stood up and confronted the MHW bureaucrats and forced accountability, transparency and got to the truth of the matter & cleaned up house after years of denial and cover-ups. It is also telling that ex-Prime Minister Hashimoto was at one stage also Minister of Health & Welfare under an earlier LDP administration and as prescient as it was, did nothing during his tenure as MHW minister and in fact, he was also Finance Minister when the banking problems were already surfacing.
So the symptoms of failure were the lack of transparency & accountability - lessons that the LDP knew but did not want or could not tackle because of the status quo & just plain over confidence that the Japanese electorate (long docile & ever forgiving) would not second guess the party with the track record. This election went against conventional thinking & there was a revolt at the ballot box & they punished the LDP for not taking the necessary measures to transform the economy when it was clear that they had to do so.
Now will the same erstwhile foibles that plagued the LDP replicate itself in Singapore and the PAP? Well only if the current PAP leadership mistakes itself in knowing all the answers. The PAP always pays attention to world trends & globalization pressures & needs - this is a structural linkage that the Singapore economy has long had with the global (US & Japanese really) economy. So the institutional structural problems that the Japanese problematic sectors are facing (banking sector) are not really present in S'pore.
Nevertheless, an important underlying principle that it intertwined with all this is a general ideals of transparency & accountability of several of the government's economic institutions that have long been discussed and griped about till the cows come home. That is one of the time bombs - we don't even know whether it will be a time bomb or not because we know nothing.
Take for example the Suzhou industrial park debacle - there had been long 'rumors' about the health & well-being about our la grande plan in China with drip-like anecdots about Suzhou was just a rat hole for wasted investment contrary to the continued reporting from the local media regaling Singaporeans with news that a thousand flowers were blooming, foreign investors were delighted with Singapore replicating the success of Jurong in China, pictures of happy taxpayer financed junkets & jaunts of Ministers, trade missions et. al., taking in the miracle of birth of a barren unproductive wasteland being transformed to another economic showpiece - it turned out to be just a show.
Now that the truth is out - where was the watchdogs? The safety-valves or the whistle blowers? What were the civil servants doing & advising the political leaders? If there was a system of transparency on the progress or lack thereof, could the ultimate damage and lost investment been reduced? Was it really too late to extricate from a bad deal? Could not the wasted money have been better diverted elsewhere? Could a rational businessman have made a different decision? Were these civil servants just as blindly obsessed with this DOA project that it led to their suspension of rational thinking? Or worse still, these civil servants saw that serving the political mission was enough to trash an independent and frank assessment on the folly of the endeavor?
[I could go on and on about how ironic the PAP says that Singapore is run like a S'pore Inc., when one sees how many or how few of those in leadership or the civil service actually worked in the private sector & made a fortune from scratch - not counting those from old money or families' legacies or leading positions in government linked companies or people who work for MNCs - this is largely managerial not pioneering entrepreneurship].
The festering Suzhou quagmire in a way can have eerie echoes of the Japanese banking fiasco. The banking problem was apparent for a long time after the Japanese bubble economy broke but everyone from the bureaucrats to the LDP were in denial. The ex-PM Hashimoto was even Finance Minister at one point & should have known the magnitude of the banking problem but was in a congenital state of denial or had the bureaucrats put a hex on him to suspend belief. There was also a period of great mystery and perhaps even denial about the progress, or lack thereof, of S'pore's Suzhou adventure. The defining moment was when LKY came out of the closet absolving Suzhou's sins due to 'municipal shenanigans' that was faithfully parroted in Parliament. However, as a January 3, 1998 Economist report had noted, there were some alternative facts that tempered the official line. In any event, no one will know the truth of the matter because there is hardly any raw, 'un-spun' information about Suzhou.
That is clearly a structural (hardware) & attitudinal (software) problem with information management in the Singapore governing apparatus. The lack of information may conceal even deeper problems than what we are already now facing. Would the PAP government or the Singapore brain-trust at the Admin Service or the PSD prefer to release more information or would they prefer to think that they are the almighty omniscient bureaucrats like their Japanese counterparts at MITI, BOJ or MOF?
Clearly this parallel is unfair since there are hardly any problems of the Japanese bureaucracy that are present in Singapore - at least none that we know of save the rare corruption case or two. However, the principle of the issue still stands even if we are less vulnerable than the Japanese, and that is: vigilance, supervision and accountability should be in place to prevent the Japanese mess from replaying in Singapore.
Thankfully, we can hope to learn from the lessons of the Japanese but I'm afraid that the tools for vigilance, supervision and accountability of information over the civil service is not there. The solution - A Freedom of Information Act. I recall the words of James Madison & Confucius:
"A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy - or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." - James Madison
Or for those who fault with my alleged Eurocentric views, there's this li'l bone from Confucius: "When Zilu asked Confucius how to serve a prince, Confucius replies, 'Tell him the truth, even if it offends him." Well - I guess that both the PAP government and the civil servants could do with a frank truth-telling once in a while. But the truth can be clear from documents and information and a FOIA allows access and scrutiny. Words that are anathema to the Singapore civil service.
How will this FOIA work? Based on the premise argued by Madison and Confucius that openness and truth in government will assist citizens in making the informed choices necessary to a democracy, a FOIA creates procedures whereby any member of the public may obtain declassified records of government agencis and "open that agency's action to the light of public scrutiny" resulting in openness, transparency and information.
This dovetails conveniently with NMP Lee Taso Yuan's call in Parliament to let government parliamentary committees play a more active role in gathering and presenting feedback on important issues, White Papers could be prepared for a fuller discussion, GPCs should lead debate on major policy issues, extended Question time for follow-up questions. The Roundtable's persuasive paean also highlighted this issue of access to information and how the local civil service, with the top-down excuse or rationale have viewed information or requests for such information with apprehension.
The means to obtain information and the availability of such information would strengthen the confidence in the political process over how certain decisions are made. Even if some may disagree with the final decision, with the relevant information available to all, they would at least respect the decision made and have the opportunity to air well-informed alternative opinions. One way to give concrete meaning to these voices is to set up a freedom of information apparatus. Such an initiative is at least worth studying in view of PM Goh's call to question existing mind-sets or even BG George Yeo's observation - that the Singapore government must adapt to a changing world by opening up and that a "civil society would have an increasingly important role in Singapore."
This issue may be more urgent in view of developments in Japan. The Japanese electorate threw out the LDP in 1993 because of disgust with corruption scandals, not unhappiness over the mismanagement of the economy even though all the symptoms of the current malaise were already germinating and present since that time. What had changed was not any new-found Japanese 'liberalism' but a a ruling party's isolation from reality on the ground and their abject refusal to understand the need for transparency and accountability for decisions. Developments in Japan and the LDP have shown that a continued state of aloofness, arrogance and refusal to have transparent institutions for decision-making could lead to worsening of problems and even shake or cost governments their hold on power.