Meg's exams got postponed due to to the upcoming GE & so I took the opportunity to explain it to her. Barely halfway through, came her standard response: "don't know, don't care." Undaunted, I told her to imagine if our government was made up of a majority of dog haters & they decided to ban all dogs just like they did chewing gum. Not the best of analogy but it freaked her out enough to sit up & listen to me explain why it's pertinent to have alternative voices in parliament.
I took pains to explain to her cos I didn't want her to be apathetic like I was before. I voted our ruling party into parliament during the 2006 GE & am therefore repenting now by writing this blog post.
I had to sell the matrimonial flat after my divorce & thus shifted in temporarily with my parents while looking for a new home. I sold my flat at $8k COV but in a short span of time, the prices sky-rocketed & I'm now looking at flats with COV of $40k-$50k. Bearing in mind that other than the inflated flat pricing, I had to split the "profit" from the sale of my previous flat with my ex-husband. I am officially screwed! What's all that talk about assets enhancement?! You sell your house, you still have to buy another, isn't it? Such irony that I had always prided myself on being a higher than average wage earner & having close to $200k sitting in my CPF, I'm now homeless.
So here I am, a 35 years old single mum with a 10 years old kid in tow still staying with parents & struggling to save enough for a roof to call our own.
While grappling with the fact that I don't have enough savings for a house, I realised that I'm not going to have enough for Meg's tertiary education either. While we usually only think about how foreign talents are competing with us for our jobs, we didn't stop once to think that their kids might be competing for a place in the schools with our kids too. Just in Meg's class of 32 alone, there are 7 who are foreigners. It isn't hard to extrapolate in 10 years time, how competitive it will be to get into a local university. Whats more with the government wooing foreign students & offering them scholarships, the increasing ratio of foreign students versus local students is evident in the universities.
If there's 150 Singaporeans & only 100 places in the local universities but yet 50 places will be given up to the foreigners. Leaving only 50 places for the 150 Singaporeans to fight it out. Only the brightest will get in. But is that fair? What about the ones who are average. Do you give up on them then? Meg is an average student & the solution would be to send her to a university overseas. Problem is: I don't think I can afford it. And so she'll have to settle for a diploma & lose out on job opportunities as she'll be 'less educated' than her foreign counterpart. In this vicious cycle, the true blue children of Singapore will be relegated to the lowest rung in our country.
It's all a numbers game now. 'The Newpaper' today (5/5/2011) identified new citizens as one of the majority group of voters. I'm pretty sure you know whom they'll cast their votes for. So if we don't act now, by the next GE, we'll never be able to redeem ourselves. I'm probably going to get shoot down for this but I'm past caring whom I'm voting into the parliament just as long as it's an alternative voice. Without a substantial number of alternative voices in the parliament, all will be lost. I too once used to vote for stability & security (Which won't be affected anyway cos the ruling party will still be the ruling party. The chance of the opposition forming the majority is a big fat zero.) but what good is that if my child doesn't have a home & a future. I beseech all to think of the big picture. This GE is not about who will have the cleanest or the prettiest estate. It's about our children's future. We owe our children that.
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