From the front page of today's Straits Times:

"The trouble now is that Singaporeans believe that we'll always have a PAP government." This allowed the oppposition to say that if voters chose the opposition, "then the PAP governemnt will have to give them more."

I have suggestions for the men in white to combat this problem, that seems so enormous that if they don't solve it, Parliament will collapse, the MNCs will take over Singapore, there will no longer be any hope of air-conditioned underwear, and (gasp!) chewing gum will be allowed on the streets!

One part of the problem, as seen by the statement, is that Singaporeans think that the PAP will have power forever. There are 2 paths they can take to address this. First, they can make Singaporeans stop believing it. They can stop meddling around with GRC boundaries, screw up the budget, and stop suing oppposition party members. To be more interesting, they should go along Orchard Road selling flags to raise funds for the party. Their slogan can be "Help us! We're only paid in peanuts." This will prompt a mass outcry, followed by an investigation, with some lowlifes being sent to jail, hopefully leaving some space for the opposition.

Alternatively, they could make sure they stay in power forever. This is easier, but more boring. It involves doing exactly what they have always done, with the inclusion of hijacking all the hawker centres. Then they can threaten those constituencies who don't vote for them by saying "We will shut down all the hawker centres with our 90% majority!" This will scare the shit out of people who are concerned about bread, butter, and ba chor mee issues. Since the PAP believes that most Singaporeans are like that (and their believes are always correct), Singaporeans will continue to keep them in power in order to eat chwee kueh and chee cheong fun every morning.

If they really are worried about having 3, instead of 2 opposition MPs, would result in them having to pay more attention to constituent opinion, there is a brilliant solution to their quandry. All they need to do is announce mass resignation from Singapore Parliament, and let the opposition take all the seats. Then, they don't have to pay attention, or "give more", since they will have no mroe responsibilities! This would free up enormous amounts of time that would allwo them to put their excellent qualifications to use.

For example, they could use their expertise gained from the encouragement of the math and sciences in the education system during their day to develop a production technique that wrings water from wet hair fresh from the shower. Do you know how much water is wasted when you let your hair dry? I mean, if we manage to utilise hair-water, we could cut our dependency on Malaysia by 11%! You could even extend it to squeezing and refining the damp from bath towels! No more need to clean up and drink all that pee! The possibilities are endless!

Or, they could help us solve the ageing population problem. A long ignored statistic is that 15% of Singaproean children are conceived under trees. I propose that they start a nation wide campaign to turn our "garden city" into a forest. That way, there would be no shortage of trees for the conception of our future. We will put our little red dot on the map for replacing the term "red-light district" into "greenery avenue". Perhaps they could look into creating parks right next to office blocks, to facilitate those career minded people who would like to have a family, if only they had the time and place.

Personally, I don't see what the problem is. They just need to get a little entrepreneurial, enterprising, creative, considerate, unique, engaging, or whatever their word for the day is.