– Advertisement –
SINGAPORE: Before Nomination Day, the Workers Party (WP) introduced a number of candidates with impressive credentials, as many news reports pointed out. However, as the campaign has rolled along, commenters online have argued over who the real breakout star for the WP is this year — with candidates such as Harpreet Singh, Alexis Dang, and Andre Low in the mix.
Michael Thng, who is part of the WP slate at Tampines Group Representation Constituency (GRC), is one of the opposition candidates getting a lot of attention online. On Sunday, at the rally in Tampines, he was one of the standouts of the night, and some commenters have even called him an orator in the making.
The 37-year-old tech startup COO and Harvard University graduate recalled that he had attended his first WP rally way back in 2006, when he was still a teenager.
“Over the past 15 years, I’ve seen how the Workers Party has made a difference, not through catchy slogans or fancy showmanship but through real work on real issues,” he said. “We dragged issues that used to sit on the margins and brought them into the political mainstream. That’s why today, we don’t ask if retrenched workers need support, we ask what kind of support they should get. That’s why we don’t ask today if minimum wage protections are needed for our workers, we ask how broad they should be.”
The candidate said that even the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) has admitted that it doesn’t have a monopoly on good ideas.
“If so, why should they have a monopoly in Parliament?”
Mr Thng further explained that this is the reason why he has chosen to step up and contest an election after more than a decade with the WP.
– Advertisement –
He shared his vision, saying, “I want a political system where issues can be raised early openly and constructively; one that has compassion…. Not one where data is withheld from us or where we are gaslit all the timeabout what we are seeing.
“We don’t want to be told that the sky is white when we see it is blue. We don’t want to be told that raising GST (good and services tax) in the middle of record-high inflation is good policy, when we know it could have been postponed. We don’t want to be told that CDC vouchers will make it all okay when we know it is just a band-aid for a gaping wound. We don’t want to be told that hawker rental rates do not affect the food prices when we know that doesn’t make any sense. We don’t want to be told that after half a billion dollars was spent, the best that Singapore can produce when it comes to the ERP is a clunky three-unit system.
“We certainly don’t want to be told that if we have more opposition in Parliament, the PAP will have to spend all their time fixing us rather than serving the Singapore people.
“In my mind, answering the opposition is serving the Singapore people.” /TISG
– Advertisement –
– Advertisement –
