News this week included: Tharman extols Malayan brotherhood on first state visit to Malaysia; RSIS’s Ariel Tan analyses last week’s Johor state election; economic growth eases in Q2; Singapore contributes S$2.5m to support Ebola outbreak response in Congo and Uganda; the Auditor-General’s annual report finds lapses and irregularities across the government, including 120 people entering casinos despite exclusion orders; IRAS nabs 279 high-income earners over sham tax arrangements; more seniors living alone; the tragedy of Abdul Rani, the caregiver who snapped; a Singapore international school provokes nativist backlash in Sapporo; Sheng Siong’s new S$520m facility; FairPrice to remove vegetables from at least three local farms; SCMP on how scammers are using AI-generated visuals of leaders’ faces to con you; CNA analysis of AI-generated women spreading disinformation about Singapore on TikTok; three in five PMETs not confident in identifying AI-generated misinformation; ketamine therapy at IMH for hard-to-treat depression; ST obituary of Jeffrey Low, sports journalist who coined the Kallang Roar; the Circle Line completed; some 25 ha of forest to be cleared for housing “designed around nature” in Gillman Barracks and at Sunset Way, sparking environmental concerns; and Malaysian durian parties as prices crash.
Below are the issues we explore in depth:
Society: Poor ministers defamed
Few public figures are as polarising as K Shanmugam, Singapore’s fearsome home affairs minister. For over three years, his housing has been under scrutiny. First were revelations that he’s been renting from the government a palatial colonial bungalow on Ridout Road; and subsequently that he sold a good class bungalow (GCB) on Astrid Hill for S$88m, or almost 150 times the value of a median resale flat. With the former, he emerged unscathed from a ministerial review. And this week saw the dénouement of the latter saga, when a court found that Bloomberg and its reporter Low De Wei had defamed him (and manpower minister Tan See Leng) in an article, “Singapore Mansion Deals Are Increasingly Shrouded in Secrecy”.
Though the accuracy of Bloomberg’s reporting on both ministers’ respective GCB transactions was not disputed in court, in her judgement Audrey Lim, high court judge, mentioned “material falsehoods” and repeatedly referenced the “impression” that was being conveyed to the reader, concluding that “the natural and ordinary meaning of the Article is that the claimants took advantage of the absence of checks and balances or disclosure requirements to conduct their property transactions in a non-transparent manner, and that they did so in order to hide their transactions and avoid scrutiny that might extend to the possibility of money laundering.”
Bloomberg’s editor, while respecting the ruling, said “we continue to believe that the ministers have imposed an extremely strained meaning on what was a solid story.” This too is our view. We worry that such interpretations by the subjects of stories will have a chilling effect on all journalists. It’s notable that while the mainstream media regularly reports on property transactions by the rich, it appears to shy away from the political elite. Put another way, such public interest journalism is not being performed by our taxpayer-funded behemoths. Sure, not all in this country would agree with this purpose. “[T]here isn’t any legal recognition or political acceptance of the media as a Fourth Estate,” SMU’s Eugene Tan told The New York Times.
But maybe there should be. This is a world where wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of plutocrats. The wealth gap between Singapore’s senior politicians and ordinary citizens appears to be widening by the day, whether through property dealings or otherwise. Unlike many other democracies, Singapore doesn’t require public asset declarations by its politicians. How might personal investments in, say, Singapore landed property, Chinese firms, or AI bias one’s policy decisions? Even if we accept that our current politicians are squeaky clean, will it always be so?
These weren’t Bloomberg’s lines of inquiry, but we worry about the judgement’s broader impact on such interrogations. In his response, Shanmugam said that he chose to “bring defamation proceedings” because if “irresponsible outlets like Bloomberg get away with publishing lies and falsehoods about public officers, it will set a new norm” that might eventually deter others from seeking public office. It’s a puzzling assertion. None of these property “scandals” appear to have affected Shanmugam’s popularity—his team romped home with 73.81 percent of the vote at GE2025. And the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) has such a robust pipeline that it was able to introduce a whopping 32 new faces last year, nudging five MPs out after just one term.
On the contrary, beset by digital disruption and other forces, the media industry globally is staring into the abyss. The vulnerable group in Singapore is not PAP politicians but journalists. Any suggestion of victimhood by the former effectively functions as a sophisticated exercise of power. What Singaporeans should actually worry about is that one day we’ll be left only with neutered, sycophantic media outlets and lots of AI slop. Which perhaps is what some prefer.
Some further reading: Lim’s entire judgement, particularly her discussion of the Reynolds privilege, a development of the common law defence of qualified privilege in England, which the defence had argued they can rely on (she disagreed), and which touches on the balance between constitutional free speech and protection of reputation. She ordered Bloomberg to retract its original article but a copy remains visible at the bottom of the judgement.
Society: Aye, robots
You wouldn’t know it from the hundreds of construction sites teeming with toiling workers—you can probably see one from your window right now and almost certainly hear it—but the sector is facing a manpower crunch. Mega-projects like the Cross Island Line and Changi’s Terminal 5 have driven up demand, alongside the surge of HDBs due to hit the market over the next few years. Meanwhile, competition from other countries has reduced the supply of foreign labour in an industry that locals still eschew. “Frankly speaking, whose son wants to go into a construction site?” a subcontractor told The Straits Times (ST), a reminder of who builds and rebuilds this shiny city.
