WALKING  The  TALK    ? ? ? ?

A winning political baptism of fire

The Opposition has collectively indicated that it seeks to contest all parliamentary seats in the forthcoming General Election.engage them at close quarters, to field their questions, and demonstrate their empathy, concern and conviction to serve.

The writer is assistant professor of law at the Singapore Management University School of Law.

Why it’s critical and good for S’pore’s 4G leadership to be elected through contests, not walkovers

At the People’s Action Party (PAP) biennial party conference last Saturday, party Chairman Lim Boon Heng said the PAP was “almost certain” that more seats would be contested. Is a more competitive political landscape in the making?

With there to be at least 12 Single-Member Constituencies (SMCs), smaller Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) and up to nine Non-Constituency MP (NCMP) seats in the next Parliament, many Singaporeans expect a keener electoral contest, rather than one dominated by anticlimactic walkovers.

Elections are not just about placing MPs in Parliament; for a citizen, the act of voting is one of the most powerful political acts, an exercise of their democratic choice. With the next batch of new PAP MPs touted to form the nucleus of Singapore’s fourth generation of leaders, there is much to be said for many of them to experience the political baptism of fire by actually winning at the polls, instead of by dint of walkovers.

This is not to suggest electoral contests merely for the sake of contesting.

Indeed, we wouldn’t want the GE to be reduced to token tussles. Nonetheless, an electoral contest can make a candidate raise his game. The process of earnestly campaigning for votes provides a valuable opportunity for our prospective MPs to demonstrate their worth to the voters, to

The candidates will have to walk the ground intensively and appreciate first-hand

the concerns and challenges of their constituents.

Voters will get to know more about their prospective MPs and assess them up close. An MP’s meet-the-people sessions do not provide the same robust engagement.

Of course, this process of building bonds begins long before and continues even after the elections. What is different about the short (often nine days long) campaigning period is that voters and candidates are engaged in an intensive political courtship with maximum resources devoted to wooing voters.

Furthermore, the law- and policymaking nous and panache of our parliamentarians will benefit from an intimate understanding of the grassroots that the hustings uniquely provide for first-time, even seasoned, political campaigners.

A walkover, on the other hand, reduces greatly the need for and likelihood of such a bonding process during the elections.

Winning an electoral contest also provides MPs with added political legitimacy and the mandate in representing their constituents in Parliament; it enhances their political authority and authenticity.

The affective connect is of fundamental importance in political life. This can only augur well when the MPs go about their duties during their term.

An electoral walkover is still, of course, a proper electoral victory. But, qualitatively, winning a contest endows the elected MP with “extra benefits” – a good measure of earned confidence, an enriching lesson in political engagement with a diverse spread of voters, and a nurtured bond with the voters.

To be sure, it is not the job of the government or the ruling party to ensure that every seat is contested in an election. Neither is it their job to make the opposition parties competitive. Party competitiveness cannot be willed into being by legislative fiat, public funding or providing opposition parties with a handicap.

Notwithstanding criticisms of the unlevel playing field, it is all too easy to lay the blame on the PAP government. Political parties have to earn their spurs and show that their political manifestos are feasible workplans their party can execute to make a positive difference to people’s lives. The key challenge for the opposition parties is to show they are just as competitive as the PAP, which has been returned to power with persuasive mandates since 1959.

Nevertheless, as the dominant political party, the PAP can do much more to influence and shape Singapore’s electoral politics for the better.

The process of seeking electoral victory not only provides our parliamentarians and political office-bearers with valuable political lessons, but crucially, remind our elected representatives that their democratic mandates come from the people and that they have to earn them.

Are too many of our MPs missing out on the steep learning curve that electoral contests provide?

Currently, of the 84 seats in Parliament, 75 are GRC seats which are also perceived by parties and voters as an easier ride to Parliament for the PAP candidates.

This may explain the PAP’s penchant for fielding rookie MPs in GRCs.

Too often, the GRCs have operated as safe electoral havens not just for minority MPs but also female and rookie MPs. (Although closely contested bouts for GRC seats are less frequent, the bruising ones are well known:

Eunos in 1988, Cheng San in 1997 and Aljunied in 2006.)

The PAP can be bold in the next GE which has been characterised as a watershed one. Such a move would do a lot to change voters’ mindsets and stereotypes.

For instance, the last time the PAP fielded a minority race candidate or a full minister in a Single-Member Constituency was 22 years ago in 1988!

The PAP last fielded a female candidate in an SMC in 1991. And they all won!

Since 1991 all first-time MPs, female MPs and minority MPs (all from the PAP) have entered Parliament on GRC tickets.

In the Cabinet, four of the 21 ministers have been elected through walkovers since they entered politics, including one extending back to 1997.

Nine other ministers have only contested in GRCs since they entered politics.

If the next GE is to induct the new generation of leaders, then it is important for some of the more promising rookies (and political office-bearers) to be fielded in SMCs.

Former Prime Ministers Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok Tong, and current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong all fought electoral contests in their maiden elections. Would it not be deeply meaningful if our future Prime Ministers can walk that same path and wear the badge of honour, so to speak?

When does scuttlebutt become inside information?

Andrew Ross Sorkin

On Wall Street, it is called the “mosaic theory”.DealBook’s website: “If major banks, whose compliance departments are presumably staffed with former Securities and Exchange Commission lawyers, regularly publish industry data like iPhone build and Dell motherboard production changes, the rest of us can reasonably conclude that this must have regulators’ blessing. Otherwise, why would it have been allowed to proceed unchecked for years?”

The New York Times

Andrew Ross Sorkin is an assistant editor of business and finance news at The New York Times.

Every day, professional investors and research analysts work the phones to ferret out information about companies that cannot be found by simply reading news releases. Some will walk through shopping malls interviewing Gap store managers, for example, to gauge how sales are going.

Investors use multiple tidbits of nonpublic information from various sources to build a “mosaic” to try to get an edge on other investors. For better or worse, that is what passes as “research” in the finance world.

Amid a wide-ranging investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and federal prosecutors into hedge funds and the “expert networks” that supplied them information, some investors may be asking themselves if their “mosaics” may soon be considered “insider trading”.

“The SEC’s recent enforcement docket reflects a belief that certain buy-side investors’ investment activities were rife with insider-trading violations and that there are more to be found,” the law firm Fried Frank wrote in a note to its clients last week.

Indeed, the mosaic theory itself is one of the central defences in the insider trading investigation of Mr Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group.

“Throughout his career, Mr Rajaratnam has worked tirelessly as permitted by the securities laws to build a mosaic of public information about the companies he follows,” his lawyer said.

In other words, Mr Rajaratnam contends that none of the individual bits of scuttlebutt they pick up constitute material insider information; the edge they get, they say, comes from putting it all together. That is the “value add”, in Wall Street parlance.

When young analysts are trained on Wall Street, they often read the CFA Institute’s standards and practices handbook, which declares: “The idea behind the mosaic theory is that each individual piece of information is non-material by itself ...

Taken together, however, the bits of information can form a meaningful mosaic. This practice is perfectly legitimate.”

But is it?

While it has long been considered standard practice to ask the local Gap store manager how sales are going, the store manager’s answer may actually fall into a grey area.

According to most white-collar lawyers, the ultimate test is whether the information is “material”.

In truth, knowing the sales at one Gap store is not material because the company has some 3,100 stores around the globe.

However, if you went store to store and managed to find out sales figures for 1,000 of them, you might have something closer to “material” information. Materiality, according to law firm Fried Frank, is “information that a reasonable investor would consider significant in deciding whether to purchase or sell a company’s securities”.

It is the breadth of that definition that has some people worried that it will be stretched even further.

Mr John Kinnucan, a principal at Broadband Research in Portland, Oregon, wrote on

Many of the “expert networks” that may be a target of the government’s investigation help investors ferret out such behind-the scenes information. “The intrinsic purpose of these firms, which is to help uncover non-public information, does not violate insider trading regulation,” Integrity Research Associates wrote on its website last week after a series of FBI raids of hedge funds.

Whatever suits are brought, many of them may be compared to a 1973 insidertrading case against Raymond Dirks, a research analyst. According to Fried Frank’s memo, the court in that case determined that insider trading could be established only if prosecutors proved three separate points:

That the tipper has breached his fiduciary duty to the shareholders by disclosing the information to the tippee; the tippee “knows or should know that there has been a breach”, and that some benefit inured to the tipper as a result of providing the information.

But there may be an even more important and larger lesson in the Dirks case. All this “research” is actually quite important, even if it gets close to the line. Otherwise, investors would be left making decisions simply based on what they are fed by companies.

MFA spokesma n expresses concerns over WikiLeaks

In response to media queries, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman “expressed deep concerns about the damaging action” of WikiLeaks in releasing “confidential and secret-graded US diplomatic correspondence”.

The spokesman said: “It is critical to protect the confidentiality of diplomatic and official correspondence, which is why Singapore has the Officials Secrets Act.

WikiLeaked:

MM’s closed-door meeting with US Deputy Secretary

Loh Chee Kong

SINGAPORE

Among the some 250,000 US diplomatic memos — which are marked as “secret” — released by online whistle-blower WikiLeaks were details of a meeting in May last year held at the Istana between US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.

The leaked six-page document was published in full on

During the meeting, held on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue last year, Mr Steinberg stressed the importance of Chinese cooperation in addressing the North Korean nuclear issue and sought Mr Lee’s take on China and the rogue state.

Mr Lee was also asked for his views on the Chinese economy, Taiwanese and Chinese leaders, as well as Sino-American relations.

According to the document, Mr Lee said that, while China does not want North Korea to have nuclear weapons, “the Chinese do not want North Korea ... to collapse” — given that if South Korea takes over the North, China “could face a US presence at its border”.

Mr Lee also noted that the North Korean leadership has “no friends, not even Russia” and has not trusted China since the Chinese began cultivating ties with South Korea with an eye on attracting foreign investment.

Describing the North Koreans as “psychopathic types, with a ‘flabby old chap’ for a leader who prances around the stadium seeking adulation”, Mr Lee said he had learnt from living through the Japanese Occupation that “people will obey authorities who can deny them food, clothing and medicine”.

Mr Lee also said that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s successor “may not have the gumption or the bile of his father or grandfather ... and may not be prepared to see people die like flies”. China is calculating all these, said Mr Lee, who also expressed worry about the effect of North Korea on Iran.

Unlike North Korea, Iran “has very high ambitions”, is rich and has ties to Shiite communities in other parts of the world, Mr Lee noted.

On the Chinese economy, Mr Lee said China’s leadership would shift temporarily — by providing microfinance — to a more consumption-oriented economy, “if only to avoid unrest”.

Mr Lee noted that “the pragmatists are in charge. There is nothing Communist about it.

They just want to preserve one-party rule.”

Turning to cross-straits relations, Mr Lee said that China’s President Hu Jintao — unlike his predecessor Jiang Zemin — was “more patient and does not have any fixed timeline” to resolve the Taiwan issue.

“What mattered to Hu was that Taiwan not seek independence”, Mr Lee said, according to the document.

On China’s rise, Mr Lee noted that the Chinese “are not stupid” and have avoided the mistake of Germany and Japan which tried to “challenge the existing order”.

Mr Lee said China would not reach America’s level of military capabilities “anytime soon, but (it) is rapidly developing asymmetrical means to deter US military power”.

“China understands its growth depends on imports, including energy, raw materials and food,” Mr Lee said.

Revealing that his own experience as a student in the United Kingdom had left him with “an enduring fondness”

Make the most