Long-term Strategic Issues and The 1-trick Pony

I stopped expending effort on reading temasekreview.com a very long time ago.  The reason was quite simple: After several weeks of reading articles on the site, I realised that they essentially attributed all of Singapore's problems to 1 thing - the lack of opposition representation in Parliament to serve as a check on the PAP government.  Having thought long and hard about the variety of issues and challenges facing the country all my adult life, I found such thinking to be rather ridiculous.

I had not wanted to broach this issue for a long time on this blog since its main focus is on the energy and resource scarcity issues facing Singapore, and not on politics.  However, today, Google News Search returned an article from that site discussing the long-term strategic and economic issues facing Singapore which also covered the issue of energy and resource scarcity.  And so I decided to do a very quick scan to see what it was about.  What provoked this blog post response from me was the following passage from that article:

This election, did NOT discussed these medium to long-term strategic issues. I believe we have NOT the right political structure and institutions of essential checks, balances and even the much-desired provocation of directional input in the opposition to drive our economy in these times of great turbulence.

Having concerned myself with the energy and resource scarcity issues for the past 6-7 years as well as being a keen student of global macroeconomic developments since my JC days, I found the aforementioned assertion to be patently absurd.  If having the 'right' political structures and institutions with checks and balances were the solution, then:

• Why can't the USA come up with a credible energy policy to wean itself away from crude oil imports, a promised repeated by every president since Richard Nixon?
• Why can't EU countries face the fact that they are fiscally bankrupt, with public-sector workers deep in denial when fiscal austerity was attempted?

I can list a whole host of strategic economic and resource issues faced by the democracies in the developed world for which there is no political will on the part of these countries to confront, but the 2 above should suffice for illustrative purposes.  There are obviously many other factors besides the lack of checks and balances that account for these problems not being addressed.

While the benefits of checks and balances are undeniable, blaming all of our problems on their absence is stupid and unhelpful.  But for a site which dares to publish unverified rumours as if they were true and then not apologise when found later to be false, I guess expecting mature and responsible behaviour is asking for too much.