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Not sure if anyone has seen this http://news.omy.sg/News/Local+News/Story/O...523-247913.html ‎"If the annual salary of the Minister of Information, Communication and Arts is only $500,000, it may pose some problems when he discuss policies with media CEOs who earn millions of dollars because they need not listen to the minister's ideas and proposals, hence a reasonable payout will help to maintain a bit of dignity." - Dr Lim Wee Kiat, PAP MP for Nee Soon GRC. And I thought I had some dignity 😛

To PM Lee or the person assigned to read on behalf of PM, You have taken a bold step to revamp your cabinet. And Singaporeans are being assured that you do listen to our problems. We also hope that you are able to relook into the salaries of the cabinet. Singaporeans feel unjustified towards the amounts of salaries that are being paid and the performance. Having a realistic salary range will keep checks and balances on the real motivations of ministers and potential MPs wanting to serve the people of Singapore, as a Public Servant. Thank you.

From CNA: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/sin...1187350/1/.html Govt paid Mercer S$860k for work with salary review committee Posted: 06 March 2012 1959 hrs

MP Pritam Singh

http://theonlinecitizen.com/2012/01/minist...ing-to-attract/

Dunno if this is for real from yahoo web...man....u think it is a good suggestion? The Ministerial Salary Review Committee has proposed a 28% pay cut for PM, 31% for entry level ministers and 51% for the President. Pensions to also be done away with...

The pay of the ministers and senior civil servants seems to be a major issue. If they take a significant pay cut, would that make you want to vote for them in 2016 ?

Yahoo News Murdoch praises Singapore

In the past week alone there has been alot of public outrage over the captioned issues. Every one also knows the review process is a wayang show and the review committee is a bogus PAP yes man committee. See below ; 1) Obscene Salaries Justifies on Grounds of Dignity??? : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Sg_Review/message/7256 2) PAP MP Lim Wee Kiak's defence on Obscene Ministers pay sparks more : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Sg_Review/message/7257 3) Bogus Committee to Review Million Dollar Ministers Salaries???: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Sg_Review/message/7247 Its also really quite revolting to the senses how the pigs from Animal farms try to justify such payouts and its even more disgusting that the propaganda local SPH media is ochestrating and supporting this deceit....

That what we are looking for , this kind of ppl should be in the review committee not some pap yes man! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC11...-private-sector by Mak Yuen Teen 04:46 AM May 26, 2011 Last week, I taught executive and director pay to an executive MBA class and, during lunch, the subject of conversation at my table was ministerial pay in Singapore - a regular topic among the executives attending the programme over the years. While most of the rest of the world is concerned with high executive pay, this must be the only country where ministerial salaries are of more interest. Quite coincidentally, on Saturday morning, I had begun writing a commentary with the tentative title of "Ministerial pay: Lessons from corporate scandals and the financial crisis". That night, I saw on the news the Prime Minister's announcement that he was setting up a committee to review ministerial pay. When you pay poorly, you might still get good people but, undoubtedly, the pool you select from will be smaller. You may also attract some who are willing to take low pay because they want to use their position for other benefit, such as taking bribes or getting directorships in companies. When you pay very well, the pool will be larger, but you also risk attracting the wrong people who are motivated purely by money. People who are attracted to politics because of the money (or power) might still want to use their positions for their own benefit because for some, it is never enough. I personally do not believe that high pay is effective for fighting corruption; I think it is an affront to the many who make an honest living on low pay to suggest that paying little encourages corruption. However, it is very difficult to determine what is the "right" pay for CEOs, people with very specialised skills - and government ministers. For CEOs, certain "benchmarks" have been suggested, such as some percentage of profits, some ratio to average employee pay, the pay of sports stars and celebrities or fellow CEOs. None of these are wholly satisfactory. Benchmarking ministerial pay to other professions has its limitations because they are totally different jobs, and different jobs come with different lifestyles and employment risks. When I look at my peers who have gone to the private sector, many are earning a lot more than I do now, but they do not have my more flexible lifestyle as an academic, and they are not able to achieve tenure which gives better job security. In any case, I believe that the best people in any field are those who are driven first by their passion and calling. IT'S HOW THEY EARN IT As a corporate governance advocate, it has never been my concern if someone is well paid and earns it in the right way. I would be outraged if someone makes a lot of money but does so in an illegal or unethical manner, where it is not related to appropriate measures of performance, or the pay determined is through a contaminated process. The corporate sector suggests the following "best practices" which should be followed in setting senior executives pay: - An "arms length" process for determining remuneration policy and packages - Benchmarks used should be comparable (similar job responsibilities, similar size and industry, etc) - There should be a reasonable mix of short- and long-term pay - Pay should be based mainly on factors within the executive's control - Performance measures used for evaluation should have strong links with the corporation's long-term performance - There should be minimal benefits and termination payments that are generally unrelated to performance - There is good disclosure and transparency A private sector approach which treats running a country as equivalent to running a corporation is, of course, flawed to start out with. After all, a government can always print money, raise taxes, determine whether it wants to make a profit (budget surplus) or a loss (budget deficit) and so on. Tying ministerial bonuses to annual GDP growth can create the same perverse incentives as tying CEO pay to annual revenue growth. For example, it can lead to incentives to invest in projects with high economic payoffs, but with attendant high social costs and under-investing for long-term growth. But if we are determined to follow a private sector approach to setting ministerial pay, then we should go the whole nine yards and adopt similar sound pay practices, which could involve the following. (Incidentally, when I showed someone the draft of this commentary, I was alerted to a 2007 speech by MP Denise Phua in which she made some similar points. I am glad there was such an alternative voice in Parliament and wish that her views were taken more seriously then.) DEFER PAY, BE TRANSPARENT One, have an independent ministerial pay committee to oversee ministerial pay policy and levels (members must be independent and perceived to be so). Two, adopt a small number of macro performance measures which capture overall performance in a holistic way (such as average GDP growth, average wage growth, Gini coefficient and unemployment rate) and micro performance measures which directly reflect a particular minister's performance (such as traffic accident rates, average expressway speeds, admission rates of Singaporeans into local universities, percentage of low-income families owning HDB flats). Three, tie a minister's pay primarily to his individual responsibilities and performance, based on his portfolio (a small component can be tied to more macro measures but these may be more relevant to assessing the performance of the "chief executive", that is, the Prime Minister). Four, benchmark targets such as GDP growth to trends in comparable economies, to better ensure that improvements are not largely due to external factors (for example, a significant increase in GDP growth - just like a significant increase in a company's stock price - may be driven more by general trends in the inter-connected global economy). Five, defer a part of a minister's pay for a number of years and put in place conditions under which the deferred pay may be reduced. Six, eliminate or significantly reduce pensions and other benefits not linked to a minister's performance. And seven, publish a report each year on the actual amount of each minister's pay and its breakdown. This may sound like an awfully tedious process for setting ministerial pay. Unfortunately, corporate scandals and the recent financial crisis have taught us that poorly designed pay schemes set through a flawed process and which lack transparency can create perverse incentives and undermine governance. The current approach to setting ministerial pay emulates the pay levels in the private sector but not the sound pay principles that well-governed companies follow. If we are not prepared to adopt similarly robust processes and practices for setting ministerial pay, then perhaps we should just follow how other countries determine pay for their government officials. We can then rely more on robust selection processes and strong enforcement of laws to take to task ministers who are corruptible, in order to ensure that we get ethical and competent government leaders. However, even if we decide to "de-privatise" ministerial pay, I believe there are certain merits in adopting some of the good practices in the private sector approach - such as having a more independent mechanism for setting ministerial pay, having better measures of ministerial performance, creating mechanisms to encourage ministers to focus on longer-term consequences of decisions, and greater transparency in ministerial pay. This may minimise the risk of receiving an "unexpected" performance appraisal from the electorate every four years. Mak Yuen Teen is an associate professor at NUS Business School

By Susan Long, Enterprise Editor THE upcoming General Election is possibly one of the most consequential in Singapore's history. Not only because Singaporeans will choose their fourth generation of leaders - as People's Action Party ministers have framed the event - but because it may usher in a transition to greater political contestation and pluralism. But cynics see PAP's allowing more competition as a tactical calculation, even a necessary concession, because some parts of the ground - especially the online community - are turning out to be quite sour. A scroll through local online socio-political blogs these days throws up not just the perennial grouses over rising costs, foreign worker policies and congestion, but a disconcertingly malevolent streak that has caught many political watchers off-guard. Sure, in past elections, the issue of high ministerial salaries has predictably surfaced. But most people bought - at least to some extent - the ruling party's justification that high ministerial pay was the price for good government. But increasingly, a phenomenon has been observed here called 'Six degrees of ministerial pay' - whereby all political arguments made in Singapore invariably originate from or lead back to the issue of public sector pay. A quick scan of blogs or netizens' remarks on any given day will reveal this peculiar trait. Be it good news such as Singapore achieving another world first or business-friendly accolade, or say, the floods on Orchard Road, the escape of Mas Selamat, or the candidateship of Tin Pei Ling, all and sundry issues today seem to be viewed through the monochromatic lens of pay. When Minister in the Prime Minister's Office Lim Boon Heng cited the parable of Jesus and the lepers as an example of how little appreciation MPs receive from constituents, the immediate retort on Mr Brown.com was: 'Mr Lim, you got salary + pay rise, Jesus where got?' Similarly, when Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong contrasted Singaporeans' complaints of sporadic floods here with the stoical Japanese response to last month's earthquake and tsunami, local blogs chimed in that PAP ministers, being more highly paid than Japanese ministers, should be subject to higher levels of performance standards. Every perceived misstep - whether real or imagined - by the government has been subject to a similar critical refrain: That well-paid ministers should have anticipated and pre-empted the mistakes well in advance. It's not clear how widespread this cynicism is and whether what we're reading online is the work of just a small group of highly vexatious and critical people. To be sure, there are some who are willing to take them on, including one reader of The Straits Times whose letter was published last week. He had argued that what was important was not how much ministers were paid but what it cost taxpayers to run the government, and on this score, he concluded that Singaporeans had a very good deal, compared to many developed countries. But for many value-conscious tax-payers, high pay is commensurable with high expectations. This entrenched mindset is further reinforced by the ruling party itself. Over the past few days, Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean has advanced the analogy used by opposition MP Low Thia Khiang on how voting in the opposition is a form of 'insurance' against potential failure of the PAP, adding that Singaporeans may end up paying a 'high premium' but find that when they try to 'cash in' the policy, the opposition 'can't deliver'. It is regrettable because this dollar-sign focus has become the primary lens through which many Singaporeans view office holders. Political watchers fear this lens has a distortive effect in that it creates the widely-held expectation that ministers should be infallible. And of course, no one can hope to live up to that. Besides being an impossible yardstick, bureaucrats lament that such an expectation is also unconducive for governance. It reduces the public's tolerance of errors and limits the amount of manoeuvrability that governments needs to govern effectively. In the long run, political watchers fear this "Six degrees of ministerial pay" cynicism will canker the political discourse in Singapore as people begin to question the motivations and moral authority of office-holders. As has often been said, the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table, so that people can focus on the work rather than on the cash. But instead of taking the issue of money off the table, as raising ministerial pay was intended to do, it has unfortunately become THE issue foremost on the minds of many. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Your critical thinking cap is sought.

We need more opposition like her to perform the checks and balances of the PAP. I hope there would be many willing to support her. Check out her speech: http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?xl=xl_blazer&v=pIJzks6ByRs

Finally! Some respite for our suffering citizens! Read about it here! http://www.mrbrown.com/blog/2008/04/some-good-news.html