The series – a co-production between Radio Australia and the University of Sydney - examines the role of media in democracy with particular reference to Australia’s neighbours in Southeast Asia.

In the sixth program, Media and Political Change. Today – ‘Media Web’ – Singapore specialist Garry Rodan and former solicitor general Francis Seow comment on this phenomenon.

The program was broadcast on April 14.

Globalisation has been as potent a force in the media as in other areas of social and economic life. The new media, from satellite broadcasting to the internet promise an abundance of information channels never before dreamed of. And while some governments like Singapore and Malaysia are promoting new communication technologies to capitalise on the new economy paradoxically these same technologies promote a free flow of information that they have raditionally tried to inhibit.

Transcripts of the programs on the ABC website http://www.abc.net.au/ra/media/

The full transcript for Program 6: Media and Political Change. Today – ‘Media Web’ is available at: http://www.abc.net.au/ra/media/radio/s257332.htm

What follows is part of the transcript dealing with Singapore. The interviewer is Peter Mares of the ABC.

DR RODAN: There have always been more cracks in the authoritarian system so to speak in Malaysia than there have in Singapore. The systems of control in corporatist Singapore have been more perfect or more complete.

MARES: Singapore specialist Dr. Garry Rodan is with the Asia Research Centre at Western Australia’s Murdoch University. He says that critics of the Singapore government have been unable to match the virtual space created on the internet by their counterparts in Malaysia.

DR RODAN: One of the reasons for this has been that the pre-eminence of the Singapore government economically as well as socially in terms of its organisations has given it the capacity to co-opt many potential opposition groups and to bring them in virtually under the umbrella of the state. This has never been quite as effective in Malaysia.

Now secondly what does this mean in the context of the Internet? What it means is that the capacity for groups to harness the Internet for oppositional or confrontational purposes or even for alternative media purposes is nowhere near as great. The concern about running foul of the existing laws is one consideration but it’s also the risks that are involved in falling out of this system of co-option and the consequences. The capacity to have well organised networks to be able to operate things like an equivalent to Malaysiakini don’t exist to the same extent in Singapore.

MARES: In Singapore, the government is building an entire communications network to create the world’s first fully interactive nation state. But as Garry Rodan points out, this will give the Singapore government cyber access to every home on the island.

DR RODAN: The idea is to provide the infrastructure so that as many Singaporeans ideally all Singaporeans are part of the knowledge economy and it puts Singapore in a great position to attract investment for industries related to e-commerce and other electronic services. It’s also symbolic of course because it underlines to the international investment community that here is a government that is very serious about this direction, has made a substantial commitment and is doing everything possible to make investment worthwhile in these areas.

SEOW: Well I think it’s very good, what they are trying to do but you see they cannot run away from this control.

MARES: Francis Seow, author of The Media Enthralled, Singapore Re-visited.

The fact that Internet services in Singapore are provided by government owned or government linked companies, leads him to believe that the authorities have been playing ‘big brother’.

SEOW: Did you read about what happened not so very long ago when the internal security department was scanning through the websites of a lot of Internet subscribers? I mean you don’t do these kind of things and how do they explain it. We don’t want to upset the subscribers. In fact what we are doing is we were trying to check to see whether they were looking for viruses and whether they had been hacked into. I mean to me that is monstrous.

Do they really expect people to believe it? But apparently that is the line they shoot and some people believe. The converted of course there would be no problem where they’re concerned. But I think the general population do not believe it for one moment. All they know is I have to be more careful what I say now on my email because they may have access to it.

MARES: Francis Seow former President of the Law Society in Singapore, who now lives in exile in the United States.

Singapore and Malaysia both promote themselves as information hubs in Asia, and they view with one another to attract foreign media companies to set up operations. But according to William Atkins, there are often strings attached and neither government will tolerate criticism of its domestic political affairs.

DR ATKINS: The position of Malaysia and Singapore as information hubs is one of the great curiosities of the 1990’s and this current decade, because they placed so much store in achieving this and they play off against one another all the time in order to attract media companies. But I think it has become quite clear that they only want particular types of media companies.

That said Singapore is willing to take all comers if you like. It embraces media companies to come to Singapore and to use it as a regional base, but in some cases doesn’t allow distribution of the content within its own borders. You can only use Singapore as a base to launch out into other parts of the region. And I think the lesson we’ve seen from the last ten years is that mostly international media companies aren’t too concerned with what they see as the marginal elements of transparency and news and information and so forth. They simply just cut that out of their media operations to get on and they’ve done that in China, they’ve done in it in Malaysia and they’ve certainly done it in Singapore.

In the main, its entertainment, its sport, its music, its youth programming and its business programming to an extent and the issue of news and current affairs doesn’t really feature that highly in their thinking.

MARES: William Atkins.