Food for thought: lessons from Singapore for remote Australia

I came across this article from the Global Times recently (h/t Pearls and Irritations). The following extracts are from a longer interview article focussed on China / US Relations and the future of Hong Kong. The article is titled ‘US needs to decide its core interests: Mahbubani’ dated 25 December 2019 (link here). I republish the following extracts without detailed comment or analysis, and merely note that this Blog has argued repeatedly over the past two years (eg link here and here and here) against the Commonwealth Government’s retrograde decision to withdraw from its historic role over the past half century in funding capital investment in remote housing.

Editor's Note:

…Are the world's two biggest powers doomed to be enemies? Kishore Mahbubani (Mahbubani), distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and a veteran diplomat, shared his insights with Global Times (GT) reporter Yu Jincui.

How do you view the problems Hong Kong faces? What could Singapore do to avoid a Hong Kong-like situation?

Mahbubani: Singapore is a very lucky country because it has clearly been one of the best governed in the world since independence in 1965…

…The second difference is that the Singaporean government decided long ago that we must take care of the interests of people at the bottom. So you must build public housing for them. So Singapore has the best public housing program in the world. In the case of Hong Kong, when Tung Chee-hwa was chief executive in 1997, he wanted to build 85,000 units of public housing per year for the people at the bottom, but he was blocked by some tycoons in Hong Kong. So no public housing was built. So if Tung had succeeded in 1997, there would have been 1.7 million units of public housing in Hong Kong in 20 years. So the problems Hong Kong is encountering today are not the results of decisions made yesterday but the result of decisions made 20 or 30 years ago. It is a deep structural problem, but at the same time, it can be fixed….

This analysis, and its recognition that public policy decisions have structural implications, should raise questions for policymakers here in Australia about our own approaches to recognising the ‘interests of the people at the bottom’. In our case, the largely invisible and definitely short-sighted decisions made over the past two years to retreat from a national program to support remote housing provision here in Australia will have long term consequences and implications for the life opportunities of thousands of remote citizens.

These decisions speak to our capacity as a nation to think strategically about our future. They highlight our apparent inability to prioritise quality of life for all over the interests of the few, and raise serious questions regarding the robustness of key governance institutions such as parliamentary oversight, ministerial responsibility, an independent public service and the effectiveness of our federal financial arrangements.