Travelling in Fridays always disrupts the newsletter and I never remember this until it's too late! Then I got back and almost immediately went straight into running Mekong Review's booth at the Singapore Independent Media Fair, so I'm only getting to write this wrap today.
(1)
We got some changes in Cabinet this past week. First, we started with the announcement that Faishal Ibrahim, the acting minister in charge of Muslim affairs, was resigning from politics over some naughty text messages between him and an unidentified woman. We don't know exactly what was in those text messages, but K Shanmugam described them as “objectively, inappropriate and questionable”. According to the PAP, the mess blew up when the woman emailed Prime Minister Lawrence Wong with screenshots. Thoughts and prayers for what Wong might have seen in those attachments. Better him than me, I guess.
Then we got an announcement from Wong about his Cabinet reshuffle. This, Wong said, is part of the ongoing leadership transition: "...we are giving the newer and younger officeholders greater responsibilities as they step up. At the same time, we are maintaining continuity and experience in the core leadership team."
Some notables:
- K Shanmugam has been promoted to Senior Minister on top of his current positions of Minister for Home Affairs and Coordinating Minister for National Security
- Ng Chee Meng, he who was not so popular during the general election (but managed to win), is back in the Cabinet as a Minister in the Prime Minister's Office
- Manpower minister Tan See Leng is now shifting over to become Minister for Trade and Industry (Energy and Industry), while Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong is Minister for Trade and Industry (Trade)
- Jeffrey Siow and David Neo have been promoted to full ministers, the former now the Minister of Transport and the latter the Minister for Culture, Community and Youth and also Second Minister for Education
- Jasmin Lau will take over as Acting Minister of Manpower since Tan's shuffling along
- Zaqy Mohamed is now the Acting Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs, because, well
Selected members of the PAP 5G are getting more responsibility with this reshuffle, while some of the 4G stay on to provide continuity and stability. There are plenty of obligatory commentaries, but personally I'm not holding my breath for there to be very much change.
(2)
How does this happen? A 71-year-old man has admitted to sexually abusing 11 children over a period of 30 years, including his daughter, two granddaughters, and four nieces. He'd been convicted and incarcerated for similar offences in 1999 and 2020, but, according to the information in the article, managed to own an enrichment centre in and around 2005.
This led me to wonder how someone is able to own an enrichment centre in 2005—it's not clear when he opened it—when he'd been found guilty of sexual offences years prior. Singapore has no sex offender registry, but police have records of people who've been convicted of sexual offences (and more besides), which can be used to run security checks without the need for a public registry. According to this 2021 Mothership.sg report, the non-public record is used to screen people who want to work in places like licensed childcare centres, kindergartens, and schools. The article also says "MHA is considering whether further steps much be taken, such as imposing a mandatory screening requirement for everyone employed in childcare and other similar sectors"—which suggests there wasn't any mandatory screening at least up to 2021, so that could potentially be an explanation for how that guy managed to still own an enrichment centre through which he preyed on young girls.
I've not yet been able to find anything about whether there's such mandatory screening now—if anyone knows more, please let me know! I looked up the Ministry of Education's website for registering private schools (which I understand includes enrichment centres), and it goes over the sorts of documents that need to be submitted, and there is a part of the form for teachers where they have to declare they've never been convicted of anything that led to imprisonment, but I didn't see anything about a formal or mandatory police screening process. This doesn't mean there isn't any; MOE could forward on the IDs of the people registering the school and those who are going to be teachers to the police to check, but that's not explicitly stated.
What I do know, though, is that Singapore has increased the penalties for some sexual offences over the years, which is very much our usual response to problems. I'm not an advocate of sex offender registries either, but apart from penalties we need to think much more about how to protect children and address harms in a way that's human-centric rather than about delivering pain and retribution.
This is something I'd be interested in finding out more about and following up on, so if anyone is familiar with the screening process (or lack thereof?) for people who work with children and young people, please reach out!
(3)
Another successful Singapore Independent Media Fair under our belts! The fourth Independent Media Fair, organised by NIMBUS, took place on Saturday at Golden Village Cineleisure. This year, the theme was the role of the independent media in a time of crises. (Full disclosure: I/We, The Citizens am a member of NIMBUS, and am currently also serving as an executive committee member.)
There were booths run by independent media and civil society groups, as always, two panels, and two (short) workshops. I was running the Mekong Review booth all day, so couldn't attend any of the events, but I'm glad there was space to have conversation about the need for independent media while multiple crises are going on across the world, and also (very importantly!) about the importance of maintaining hope and optimism throughout it all.
I know this isn't much of an update since I can't tell you about the content of the panels or workshops themselves, but I still wanted to have a section to acknowledge the fair because I'm always so proud to see it come together. I so often see comments about Singapore being boring or soulless, but there's so much happening here—you just have to find it. The media fair is one such place, and I'm always really glad to speak to people who come by the booth and say that it's their first time at the fair, learning about the different groups and causes and work.
Events like the media fair represent the part of Singapore that I love most: people earnest and dedicated to the things they care about, and people eager to be supportive however they can. In keeping with the theme of this year's fair, the energy of the indie media fair provides us with some hope and strength at a time when so much feels overwhelmingly bad.
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Music for the weekend!