Do you know how your MP votes?

The short answer is : No.

Do you know why no media outlet ever tells you the margin each bill passed by? For example, how many MPs actually opposed the Budget?

The reason is that the voting record for each bill is not on the official Singapore Parliament Reports.

Instead, this is what they record (in summarised form) when a bill passes:

Question put, and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time and committed to a Committee of the whole House.

The House immediately resolved itself into a Committee on the Bill.

Bill considered in Committee.

Bill reported without amendment; read a Third time and passed.

The only indication we get on whether a MP supports or opposes a bill is from his public statements or his comments during parliamentary debate (which do get recorded).

Now, I’m not a lawyer or an expert in the workings of Parliament. Perhaps there are other ways to obtain the voting record of an MP.

But, compared to other countries like the UK and Canada, where voting records are freely available for others to compile and compare, I can say that it is exceedingly difficult to do so in Singapore.

And that is one of the most harmful things that undermine confidence in our government.

Afterall, what is the point of electing MPs when we have absolutely no idea how they would vote?

I know that this is a rather unsexy issue compared to the more emotive topics of immigration and housing prices. However, we cannot and should not expect our MPs to address our issues fully if they are only held accountable during elections.

When we say we live in a representative democracy, what do we really mean? We mean a place where your MP cares , serves and believes in your interests. Yet the status quo means we have no way to

Previously, I said that the gravest threat facing our nation is letting others do our thinking for us. It is time for us to start thinking about what sort of government do we really want.

How much is 10 billion?

We are enlisting soon, so expect posting to slow down quite abit. Nevertheless, we will try to post once every week or so.

But before we go, here is something to chew upon.

Most people are quite unhappy with how our government spends taxpayer money. But lost amidst this anger is a true sense of proportion. To put it simply, we just lose sight of how excessive government spending can be, causing us to end up missing the forest for the trees.

So lets regain this sense of proportion by talking about what 10 billion can do.

How large is 10,000,000,000 dollars exactly? It is:

• Enough to cover all of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve with $50 notes
• Enough to go to the Moon and back with 1 cent coins
• Enough to provide a $5 plate of chicken rice to every single person living in Singapore every lunch for an entire year.
• Enough to provide more than $30000 to all resident retirees in 2008. To break it down further, thats $2500 every month, much more than quite a few make.
• At a price of 10 USD per tonne,  enough to offset our 2007 CO2 emissions (39.9 million tonnes) 17 times over.

It is more than enough to eliminate GST and all motor vehicle taxes/vehicle quota premiums i.e. COE. Alternatively, we could cancel off all personal income taxes, or exempt all companies from corporate taxes.

Its 2.5 times the cost of the entire GST offset package, nearly 10 times of the 2009 A*STAR budget, more than 3 times what has been allocated to the LTA on the MRT system this year and 22 times the MFA budget.

And while you may complain about the ministerial pay increases, 10 billion is more than sufficient to pay for 35 PMOs, or for that matter, nearly double what the government spends on all its manpower, which was projected to be 112,113 employees. Thats 2% of the entire Singapore population.

With 10 billion, we could pay for all food and non-alcoholic drink consumption by our residents in 2008, or pay for 7 months worth of all their transportation costs.

Or, the government could just pay for everyone’s consumption for an entire month.

Amazing?

What is more amazing is what 10 billion isn’t enough to pay for.

10 billion is a drop in a bucket compared to our $187 billion of official foreign reserves

Neither for that matter is it enough to cover the $163 billion sitting in the CPF board .

They are a drop in a bucket compared to the $265 billion and $185 billion locked up in the GIC and Temasek respectively. For a sense of how truly stupendous these figures are, $265 billion is more than enough to give everyone the entire year off.

On a final note,10 billion isn’t enough to fund our annual military expenditures and it would only have kept our government running for 83 days in 2009. Granted, government is supposed to spend in times of recession, but even in 2007, that figure would have extended to 110 days, or less than 4 months.

So really, we the people need to take a good look at how government finances itself.

PS: We have not adjusted for the impact of inflation here, but this should not be that significant given that we are considering a rather short time frame.

Representation: How many voters does it take to control Parliament?

For all the controversy about GRCs, it turns out that the system  is still relatively equitable. In theory, 45.8% of the 2006 electorate can elect a majority to Parliament.

We took the number of voters in each constituency in 2006, and divided it by the number of seats in that constituency to get the number of voters per seat (Rounded to nearest integer). The data is presented here in ascending order.

By going down the list, we find that 43 seats can be most easily reached by getting the top 14 constituencies in this list. These constituencies have a combined total of 989,841 voters, out of the 2,159,721 voters in Singapore.

However, half of the voters in each constituency would be sufficient to win there. Such an approach would suggest that 494,925 strategically placed voters (or 22.9% of the electorate) could theoretically elect the next Parliament. Of course, all of this is just an thought experiment.

The real value of the list above is that it suggests which constituency is ripe for redistricting. In this aspect, Nee Soon East SMC and Sembawang GRC are likely to be redistricted, while Potong Pasir SMC and Jalan Besar GRC will probably be expanded. But one wonders if the authorities really do dare to redistrict Potong Pasir SMC.