DPM Wong: ‘Look at what I have done the last 27 years’

Repost from Temasek Review 26 April 2011 http://www.temasekreview.com/2011/04/26/dpm-wong-look-at-what-i-have-done-the-last-27-years/
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DEPUTY Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng on Sunday urged voters to decide if the escape of Mas Selamat Kastari was a ‘fatal’ enough security lapse that it will affect whether they will elect him.

Mr Wong, who is leading the People’s Action Party team in the Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC, believes that residents in his constituency will ultimately consider his track record and the work he has done there for the last 27 years.

Mr Wong said this after a market visit to Toa Payoh East, with his other team-mates, who included Education Minister Ng Eng Hen on Sunday morning. He was asked by the media whether the escape of Singapore’s most wanted fugitive – who was recaptured in Malaysia a year later – would cost him votes.

The former Home Affairs Minister said: ‘I told Parliament the day of his escape that a mistake was made, there was a lapse in the security and I apologised for that and I said that we will do everything to find him.

‘Eventually it took us a while to locate him after he ran away and we gave the Malaysians information where he was hiding. Now, having done all that, I think people did understand that yes indeed, we have done what we could.

‘Of course, the first mistake cannot be obliterated. It was there, I owned up to it, as the minister, I took responsibility for it. That’s the right thing to do.

‘And I think people will look at that and see on the whole, based on what I have done here for the last 27 years, is that one lapse by a department fatal to their decision on electing me or not. I think that, they will have to consider.’

Citing the transformation of the Bishan-Toa Payoh area over the last two decades, he said residents in the GRC were generally happy and appreciated the improvements in the area, and no resident had raised the Mas Selamat issue with him.

The Singapore People’s Party (SPP), which is facing off the PAP team in Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC, has cited the Mas Selamat incident as an example of the need for greater public accountability, a key issue of the SPP’s manifesto.

Source: Straits Times