4 October 2025: What was that all about, ICA?

How is it October already?! Time is stressing me out.

(1)

Tang Liang Hong, a former opposition politician, died on 15 September. When he stepped up to contest in the 1997 general election with the Workers' Party, he very quickly became a target of the ruling People's Action Party. During the hustings, the PAP accused him of being an anti-Christian "Chinese chauvinist" who was a threat to the peaceful oasis of multicultural Singapore. In response, he filed police reports against some members of the PAP, accusing them of making false statements and inciting hostility against him from religious groups. PAP leaders whacked back with lawsuits claiming that he had defamed them through those police reports. Tang's WP colleague, JB Jeyaretnam, was also hit with defamation suits for supporting him.

In 2019, Bertha Henson published an interesting blog post about how The New Paper (where she and PN Balji were editors at the time) had been given access to the police reports, which they published. She wrote (emphasis mine):

To cut a long story short, we did not get into trouble, but Mr Tang and JBJ et al did. They didn’t win the election but did well enough to earn a non-constituency MP seat which JBJ took. But more importantly, JBJ was smacked with a massive law suit, 11 in all. That was when it began to dawn on us that we had been made use of to disseminate a supposed libel to an even wider audience, which could mean higher damages if the PAP side won.

After that election, Tang left Singapore and eventually settled in Australia. Default judgments were obtained against him in all the defamation suits—with damages in the millions—and the High Court declared him bankrupt.

Cherian George has made available his chapter on Tang from Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation. You can read it here.

(2)

Nathan Law, a pro-democracy Hong Kong activist now living in exile in the UK, was denied entry when he tried to come into Singapore this week. He was coming to attend an invite-only conference, and had been granted a visa weeks before his arrival.

I was surprised that Singapore had granted Law a visa in the first instance, but even more surprised that he was even willing to come. The Hong Kong authorities have accused Law of endangering national security and put him on the wanted list, and Singapore has an extradition treaty with the city. Law told the Financial Times (paywalled) that he'd been given legal advice that political crimes aren't covered by the extradition treaty—which, frankly, is stupid advice. But he also reasoned that, if Singapore had intended to extradite him, they wouldn't have granted him the visa, which he'd applied for using his UK refugee travel document.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Home Affairs has told the media that "Mr Law's entry into and presence in the country would not be in Singapore's national interests". But, if that's the case, why give him a visa in the first place?

Law was detained while trying to get through immigration and, 14 hours later, was put on a flight out—fortunately, to San Francisco (his last port of call), and not Hong Kong or China.

(3)

A domestic worker was recently fined for doing some extra part-time cleaning work when her work permit only allows her to work for her official employer. For this, the court fined Pido Erlinda Ocampo $13,000; the parties who hired her without permission were fined, too, but less.

The fine is a huge sum for a migrant domestic worker. It's a really severe punishment for something that didn't cause any harm: Ocampo provided a service that people needed for compensation that all parties had agreed on. She did it while still covering her responsibilities in her main job. Why should the consequences of doing honest labour be so harsh? How is that proportionate in any way?

As a feature in The New Paper highlights, domestic workers are generally poorly paid and, with dependents to support in their home countries, are often in need of money. If, outside of their regular work, they find opportunities to earn a little more without hurting anyone, then why not?

According to the Ministry of Manpower, the strict rules against moonlighting help to avoid tricky situations, like when it comes to medical treatment and workplace injury: "Should a migrant domestic worker fall ill or sustain injuries while working elsewhere, the official employer remains liable for her upkeep and medical costs, even though the injury occurred outside their direct supervision and control." But this is a situation created by migrant worker policies that infantilise the worker, making their employers responsible for them in ways that no other sort of employer in Singapore has to be.

The employer–worker power imbalance is extreme here, which is why there are also problems with illegal deployment, where workers are forced by their employers to work extra without their consent. What's needed here is not to ban moonlighting, but to change the system into something that respects labour and migrant workers' agency. Instead of blindly implementing rules, we should be looking out for and taking action against exploitation instead.

(4)

Did you know that Singapore dodged the bullet of dangerous sectarian politics recently? According to Ong Ye Kung, Minister for Health and Coordinating Minister for Social Policies, we came "dangerously close" to mixing race and religion with politics during the GE period. Again, he brought up Noor Deros's claims about meeting Workers' Party's Malay candidates and endorsement of the party, as well as how Malaysian politicians and a former Singaporean ISA detainee had stuck their two cents into the discourse. Standing in Parliament, he issued warnings about populist politics that play on "Us versus Them" narratives. "Populism takes societies on the road to ruin—creating irreconcilable rifts between communities, and fuelling xenophobia and racism," he said.

Hmmm... if only he'd had this clarity back in 2019 when he compared a cancelled Yale-NUS workshop on dissent and activism to courses "designed by jihadists to promote violence" or "teaching that Nazism is good", and quoted selectively from Alfian Sa'at's poem to question his loyalty and insinuate that Alfian is anti-Singapore.

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