Adjusting party position is a mark of wisdom and maturity, not opportunism: WP’s Jamus Lim

SINGAPORE – Adjusting a policy position if it was wrong previously shows a political party’s wisdom and maturity, Workers’ Party MP Jamus Lim said on Oct 25.

It is not opportunism, he said, adding that political parties should be open to and welcome policy shifts when justified. 

“This is precisely how democracy, at its best, is supposed to work: to be open to feedback so that collective knowledge is harnessed,” said the Sengkang GRC MP in response to remarks by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong.

PM Wong had said at the PAP’s biennial conference earlier in the day that the WP had not always taken consistent or coherent positions on policy.

Citing WP’s past and current stances on housing and foreign manpower, PM Wong said the opposition party’s positions seemed to shift with the “political winds”.

The PAP’s approach is different and as the governing party, it must take a wider and longer-term view, he said.

PM Wong said that unlike the opposition, the PAP had to reconcile competing demands and take responsibility for the consequences of its decisions, rather than argue for positions that might be popular at a particular point in time.

In a Facebook post, Lim said he found PM Wong’s claims to be an “incredible double standard”, pointing to what he described as policy reversals by the PAP over the years. 

He cited changes in the Government’s positions on issues such as stopping at two children, unemployment insurance, minimum wages for local workers and the repeal of Section 377A, which criminalised sex between men.

Within this term of Parliament, the PAP had also changed positions on smaller class sizes or COE categorisation by engine size, he added, noting that in these cases the ruling party had “shot down alternatives till the last second”.

Lim also said that PM Wong’s criticism lacked nuance and that the WP’s positions on housing and foreign manpower had been taken out of context.

On housing, PM Wong said the WP called for fewer new HDB flats to be built in 2019, when resale prices were falling, but later criticised the Government in 2023 for not building enough flats following construction disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Lim said the WP’s earlier position on managing HDB supply was raised in the context of lease decay, a longer-term policy challenge, rather than the short-term construction disruptions caused by the pandemic.

On foreign manpower, PM Wong had cited the WP’s calls for greater flexibility in hiring foreign workers in 2012 and for zero growth in the foreign workforce during the population debate. He contrasted this against the WP’s more recent calls for the easing of foreign worker quotas amid manpower shortages faced by small and medium-sized enterprises.

Lim said the WP had always maintained that the presence of foreign workers was not fundamentally an issue for Singapore as a nation of immigrants.

Rather, he said, the party’s concern was the pace of foreign manpower inflows and the pressures they placed on Singapore’s physical and institutional infrastructure.

Beyond the specific policy disagreements, Lim argued that political parties should be willing to change their positions when circumstances or evidence warranted doing so.

“It is this sort of back-and-forth debate that refines policy and keeps it relevant,” said Lim, who is the WP’s head of policy research.

“Sure, we don’t want to sacrifice some key principles, but we shouldn’t stubbornly cling to outdated and outmoded policy ideas, either.”