Hawker Centre Spat: Heat and no Light from TNP

Link to article republished in Soshiok

TNP has added more heat than light. How many times have I congratulated myself that I never spent a single cent in my life buying their paper.

At the end of the day I am not clear who is in the right. I just feel this was a small matter. Many people also feel the same based on what is reported all over the place and on radio.

Now this isn't a small matter if Ng Kok Khim is complicit in stirring up trouble but the PAP and the MSM had chosen to keep quiet. I do not need to make up my mind now but if people choose to keep the water muddy until such a time I have to come to a view, I will assume the worst.









Update: 4:45pm

Just found a far better story on TOC whose reporter(s) visited the hawkers to hear their side of the story.

The WP must learn from this episode that the PAP have likely adapted and playing back with more sophistication. I am always suspicious when a blow up is in the end traced back to a misunderstanding or mis-communication.

I can imagine various reasons why the WP MPs weren't there but this is not the place to speculate. Looking ahead there will be more incidents of equivalent nature. Gutter politics here, so they just have to strategize and shrewdly respond.

Finally WP can do a more thorough job but the fees residents will have to pay will go up. For years I feel as I have written recently the PAP TCs collected too much money. Such funds give them a lot of flexibility which in a competitive environment they will never have the pricing power to gather.

There is no free lunch in this world. Everything must be paid for. Often we thought we pay for more than could be delivered or even promised in the fine print, and the service provider hopes they would never be called upon to do so. The simplest and most common example is insurance.

At the end of the day, should we accept and tolerate higher than necessary fees which PAP TCs have been collecting for a rainy day especially when we mostly do not know we are paying more. At least those money are not corrupted away but moral travesty might still exist in unnecessary estate works which some complain about.