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In today's newspaper, cartoonist Chew asked a relevant question regarding all the fines collected by the Singapore government since 2002, for example for the LRT breakdowns and for the mobile phone service breakdowns, which caused great inconvenience to the public.

http://www.chewonit.net

Wonder what the government did with all the millions in fines collected? Perhaps it was to help pay for all the expensive Minister's salaries, and there was no more money left to compensate all those who actually suffered from the bad service provided by the government appointed contractor (i.e. the LRT provider and the phone service company in the example).

One thing that the Singapore government (in this case referring to the PAP and its Ministers) and its proxies especially HDB, Singtel, SingPower or PUB and LTA should bear in mind is that even if work and services are sub-contracted to others, and if there are any problems, faults or major outages in service due to bad planning, then the government is still fully responsible for whatever went wrong. The public should not be so stupid as to allow the politicians to shift the blame to others when they are the very ones who should take the blame and be fined or punished instead for not doing a good job. The public should be the ones to be compensated and the people who should be fined must be the PAP government! My suggestion is for the Ministers and those in the relevant government department or civil service to take a pay cut, and the public (being the share or stake holders) receive compensation in the form of dividends such like Singapore shares.

Case in point is the recent events disclosed in the ongoing inquiry on the LTA tunnel collapse at Nichol Highway. It is very obvious that most of the people in charge of the project were not doing their job well. Wonder in this case if the government and the LTA will be successful in shifting the blame for the accident as usual, to some unfortunate scape-goat.

Another incident in which the HDB really bamboozled the public was the case of some of their windows falling off due to either bad design, workmanship or materials. Instead of the public sucessfully suing the HDB for compensation or replacement costs, the government was able to force the public instead, to pay for fixing the defective HDB windows! I do not think something like this could happen anywhere else in the world, and there was not a single protest from the public as well.

Although I do not stay in HDB apartments myself, I do not know of anything as ridiculous. This is because the HDB designed and installed the windows, therefore if after only a couple years these windows start falling off, shouldn't the HDB be fully responsible for fixing or replacing them?