High ministerial pay: A persistent question in the hearts of ordinary citizens

by Teo Kueh Liang

I refer to The Gutzy Asia’s opinion, “Will PM Wong address Singapore’s astronomical ministerial salaries? asks former ISD director” (June 13).

It has always been a controversial topic which concerns about our top political leaders who receive their salaries that are many times higher than those foreign political leaders.

Our former prime ministers, the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew and Mr Goh Chok Tong, argued in the parliament that our political officeholders must be paid a salary pegged to or matched with the salary package of the top CEO of the private corporate world. Otherwise, we can only attract mediocre candidates or no people of high calibre to join politics.

Undoubtedly, the top and influential political leaders have to make hard, rational, and wise decisions on many important policies, and these decisions will definitely be closely related to the future development direction, the future of the country, and the destiny and interests of the people. This reason has already justified that they deserve to draw a high quantum of salary.

However, how much or what figure of the salary for the ministerial political holders is perceived as “justified,” “sufficiently enough,” “not over successive,” or “too low” has always remained an arguable/debatable subject in the hearts of ordinary people.

Even some people argue that by paying a salary package of mediocrity to politicians will create some risks for them to corrupt and lacking of passion, motivation, vision and commitment to serve the people and nation?

Anyway, it is quite subjective too. It all depends upon an individual’s character, basis of morality, values and beliefs as well as capability.

Last but not least, another interesting but perplexed subject is that the total land area of Singapore is approximately 734.3km² as at end December 2022, but it has in total five mayors, each responsible for the CDC in a specific district.

If compared with the city of Shanghai, the People’s Republic of China has only one mayor with a land area of 6340.5 square kilometres. And, each of our mayors is not paid a “peanut”of salary with $660k every year, on top of their annual MP allowance of $192k.

The views and opinions expressed in this letter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of this publication.