Letter to the editor

I CAN dismiss much of Tim Hamlett's misrepresentations in his column headlined, In Singapore it's routine to massage electorate (Sunday Morning Post, April 20) as calumnies perpetuated by an ignorant journalist.

But when he writes, "there is one word for using the public housing programme to bribe the electorate: corruption", that needs to be corrected.

Providing decent housing has been one of the pillars of the Singapore government's programme. Today, 86 percent of Singaporeans own their homes. Some of the apartment blocks are now more than 25 years old.

Without upgrading, they will degenerate into ghettoes. At the last election, the People's Action Party (PAP) proposed an electoral programme which includes S$20 billion (HK$107 billion) over the next 20 years to upgrade public housing.

If any opposition party thought this was wrong, it should have fielded a full team of candidates and offered Singaporeans a choice of governments and policies.

Instead the opposition parties acknowledged that the people wanted a PAP government and hoped that their candidates would be elected through a "by-election effect." They failed. Singaporeans have so decided.