papayagirl: About the draft bill, some thoughts :-p....

Wow. I'm studying China and democracy at the moment as a class... and one of the topics that came up was how China looked to Singapore in several ways. One was that a fraction of the pro democratic segment thought that china could reach democracy through first having a benevolent dictator (in our case LKY). Which i don't agree with but that could be left to another time to argue. The second was when Deng XiaoPing himself referred to Singapore as a model for China... i.e. retaining confucian values, and lack of personal freedoms while being economically successful and relatively free.

All I can say is I can definitely see those marks on the draft bill. J, the exclusions and exemptions for net public benefit or strong public interest definitely did jump out at me. Especially when I start wondering who determines the net public benefit or the strong public interest? Is the Government going to be regulating this bill? or an independent authority. Because if it is the government directly then i can definitely see that there might be problems with govenment-owned enterprises (the ones that are privately run and thus subject to that bill) claiming that it is doing net public interest when it isn't.

I think haivng article 12 raises the same problem because the exceptions too general and i can see too many loopholes in it. I suspect that the exceptions may be necessary for one or two special cases but if in general implemented are going to be huge loopholes. Maybe if they set a harder procedure for an exception to be granted... like exceptions only granted after analysis by independent body?

Although since gov. and stat bodies aren't included in the bill that's an even bigger problem with the stat boards.

I think what I'm really interested in seeing is how independent this competition commission is going to be, and how much under the government they are. As well as how incorruptible they are, especially since if you're dealing with monopolies and supernormal profits of any kind, there is going to be a huge amount of money involved. While I know singapore is generally relatively low in corruption, I'm also interested in the kind of pressure these people will be under because I suspect that if they aren't granted that much power, they will be walked all over, or powerful companies will call in favours with even more powerful people to get themselves exempted.

Or maybe I've just been in the US too long to think that this is how the world works and that Singapore is no different.
Interesting thought. :-p