An interview with the BBC’s Asia Business report was aired on Thursday. South-east Asia correspondent Jonathan Head asked Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong some pointed questions, and the Straits Times reported the following parts of the Q&A:
JONATHAN HEAD: Your own family has been quite involved in two of these funds. Your wife until recently ran Temasek, your father’s deeply involved in GIC. Is there a risk that when the news is bad, as it has been over the past year for these funds, that people will tend to blame your family rather than look at the institutions?
PM LEE: I think the way you put it is not the way things work in Singapore. The Minister Mentor is chairman of GIC not because he is my father. It’s because he is the best man for the job and he has been chairman since he was Prime Minister.
And Ho Ching is CEO of Temasek not because she’s my wife but because the chairman of Temasek, who’s Mr Dhanabalan, and the board decided that they wanted to appoint her as CEO.
And they are there as long as they are effective, performing, and if they don’t perform, well, they have to take the consequences.
JONATHAN HEAD: Perception is important in politics and in difficult times like this, do you think, in retrospect, it might have been better if your family had a lower profile?
PM LEE: (laughs) Life would be much easier for me if the Minister Mentor was not my father and Ho Ching was not my wife. But they are there. This is the way Singapore has worked. I think Singaporeans have understood that this is how the system works and they will render judgment when elections come.
Now listen to the complete audio for yourself.
Some of the bits left out by the local press:
Asked if he anticipated some shows of public anger or displeasure, PM Lee said: “I think it’s quite understandable that in a situation like this Singaporeans will be quite anxious, will be worried about their future. And I think they have seen what the government has been doing. We had a very decisive budget this year. The package was not only a big one but a very directly focused one on saving jobs and helping people to see through the downturn.”
Querying PM Lee on his take home pay, Jonathan Head put it thus: “Finally, Prime Minister, I read that you are apparently the highest paid head of government in the world. Your salary is about four or five times what President Obama gets. Are you worth all that money?”
PM Lee laughed and said: “I am not comparing myself and I don’t look at these rankings.We go on a system which is open, honest, transparent – what is the job worth, what is the quality of the person whom you want. We need the best people for the job and these are jobs where you make decisions which are worth billions of dollars. And you cannot do that if you are pretending and you just say, ‘Well, we are all in it for the love of King and Country’. We want it to be honest, we want people not to come in for the money. But at the same time the sacrifice cannot be too great. And at times like this, you want the best possible government you can have.”
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