Beyond Personalities: A deep dive into the PE2023 election and the influence of the Establishment

Jen Shek Voon, senior partner Ernst & Young shares his views about PE2023 in his Facebook post.

Dear Friends,

This Presidential Election is not about the personality and intellect of the PE2023 candidates.

It is on how the Ruling Party and The Establishment, have, over the past presidential elections made their preferred PE candidate, sometimes through non-election, truly reflect the Establishment’s views.

And they have ensured their success as they have been pre-selected by the Ruling Party to win the PE by the strict selection criteria and/or vote-splitting tactics.

The situation is further exacerbated by the Role of The Wife of PM LHL, the unofficially non-elected power at Temasek, who controls how part of our Reserves is reinvested (and how can you do this job well when frugality is never the order of the day and when the Temasek’s administration costs are over S$10B (900 people) which is about ten times that of the Norweigan Sovereign Wealth Fund (572 people in 2022)),

It is obvious that one of the two PEs from the Establishment is her preferred choice. This is the payback time when you are given a S$4B fund to invest in your retirement.

This engineered Pre-Selected PE role has further fossilised our system of public governance with fairly little change and also no debate on how our reserves should be utilised for a “ rainy day” -once a year when the annual SG Budget is presented or when the “perfect storm” hits us.

The Ruling Party never talks about such an event, as the amount of our Reserves is a State Secret.

We have seen how the Role of the Presidency has been utilised to shield away from what little debate there is in Parliament and authorised huge spending amounts like the S$40 B during C-19 and the many Government-Linked Companies who benefitted from these measures along with those who deserved these reliefs.

No debate as the measures are presented to the elected President, and they are normally signed off.

Now for the first time, we have two PE 2023 candidates who are establishment figures and another PE Candidate, Tan Kin Lian who asserts that he represents The Alternative Independent Candidate for regaining Trust and Hope for our people, especially the young.

So please listen to the Politically Prude podcast and judge for yourself.

And if you believe in what Tan Kin Lian has said then please spread the words well before Friday, 1 September 2023.