Quora Answer: Do You Believe Singaporeans Who Say You Will Not Get Arrested for Criticising the Government?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Do you believe Singaporeans when they say that you will not get arrested for criticising the government?”

You assume that Singapore operates as a surveillance state in which any dissenting word about the government results in a knock on the door at two in the morning.  This assumption is wrong.  It is also amusing to anyone who has spent five minutes on Singapore social media.  Have you visited the social media page of any Singapore minister recently?  The comment sections resemble a competitive sport in which citizens attempt to outdo each other in creative expressions of displeasure.  Our local media — Channel NewsAsia, The Straits Times, Mothership — routinely publish commentary that is, at minimum, pointed.  Quora has an entire subgenre of Singaporeans cataloguing the government’s failings in detail.  My own blog, my Quora profile, and my social media accounts contain criticisms of specific government policies and specific politicians.  I am not in prison.  I am writing this article.

If the Singapore government arrested every citizen with a dissenting opinion, it would need to incarcerate the entire adult population.  The Changi Prison complex would require a massive expansion.  The government would face the logistical problem of who feeds, houses, and guards most of the productive workforce it has just imprisoned — and who pays the taxes to fund this operation.  The economics alone make the proposition unworkable.

What the Law Says

Criticism of government policy is not only legal in Singapore — it is a necessary feature of any functioning democracy, and Singapore’s government has, on multiple occasions, reversed or modified policies in direct response to public criticism.  The Elected Presidency review, the Population White Paper, the ministerial salary formula revision, the graduate mothers priority scheme — each was subjected to sustained public criticism, and each produced a policy response.  This is how a functioning society works.  The law draws a line at a different point, and the line is reasonable.

The Defamation Act 1957 (revised 2021) prohibits false statements of fact that damage a person’s reputation — including a public servant’s reputation — without the protection of justification, fair comment, or qualified privilege.  You may say that a minister’s policy is catastrophically ill-conceived, that his reasoning is intellectually dishonest, or that his public communications insult the intelligence of his constituents.  These are opinions about conduct and policy.  You may not state, as fact, that he is corrupt, that he has misappropriated public funds, or that he has committed a criminal act — unless you can prove it.  If you cannot prove it, you have defamed him.  The distinction between robust opinion and unsubstantiated factual allegation is not a uniquely Singaporean concept.  It is the foundation of defamation law in every common law jurisdiction.

The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act 1990 and Section 298 of the Penal Code prohibit statements that wound religious feelings or promote enmity between racial or religious groups.  These provisions exist because Singapore’s social compact — a multi-racial, multi-religious society in which the 1964 racial riots remain within living memory — depends on the active maintenance of communal trust.  Attacking someone’s religion or race is not political commentary.  It is an attack on the social fabric.

The Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019 — POFMA — is the provision that generates the most international commentary, most of it from people who have not read it.  POFMA does not prohibit opinion.  It requires corrections to be appended to factual statements that the government determines are false and contrary to the public interest.  The correction does not remove the original statement.  It sits alongside it.  The speaker retains the right to maintain their position and challenge the correction direction in court.  Several have done so.  The track record in court is mixed in the government’s favour, but the mechanism itself is not suppression — it is mandated juxtaposition.

The Anecdotes

Roy Ngerng Yi Ling — then a blogger — published an article in May 2014 that implied, through a chart comparing CPF returns with the National Kidney Foundation case, that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had misappropriated CPF funds.  The implication was false.  He was sued for defamation, lost, and was ordered to pay damages of S$150,000.  He was not arrested.  He was not imprisoned.  He was held accountable for a false factual allegation through civil proceedings —the mechanism that defamation law provides.

Blogger Han Hui Hui organised a protest at Hong Lim Park in September 2014 that encroached on a concurrent event for special needs children and their families, causing distress.  She was charged under the Public Order Act for failing to comply with conditions of the public assembly permit.  She was not charged for her political views, which she continues to express publicly.  She was charged for the conduct of the protest, which disrupted a vulnerable group.

Preacher Nalla Mohamed Abdul Jameel was charged in 2021 under the Sedition Act for distributing sermons that promoted enmity between Muslims and non-Muslims.  He was sentenced to eight weeks’ imprisonment.  He was not prosecuted for his religious beliefs.  He was prosecuted for actively promoting inter-communal hostility — an act that every functioning multi-racial society must prohibit.  I was the one who reported that case.  He deserved to be deported, and every Muslim who cried foul in the name of Islam is a damned hypocrite.

The Reasonable Conclusion

I have, over the years, described certain government policies as poorly designed, certain ministers as intellectually underwhelming, and certain legislative instruments as solutions in search of problems.  I have done so in public, under my own name, and in considerable detail.  I remain at large.  What I have not done is accuse any public servant of corruption without evidence, attack anyone based on race or religion, or publish false statements of fact about identifiable individuals.  These limits are not unique to Singapore.  They exist in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and every other common law democracy that takes both free expression and personal reputation seriously.

The myth of Singapore as a state that arrests its critics conflates two separate things: the enforcement of laws against defamation, hate speech, and deliberate falsehood — which exists everywhere — and the suppression of political opinion — which the evidence does not support.  Anyone who believes that Singaporeans do not criticise their government has never sat at a coffeeshop in Toa Payoh on a Tuesday morning, within earshot of three retired men with opinions about the MRT, the cost of living, and whoever is currently the Minister for Transport.  Those men are not in prison.  They are having kopi.  Bitching about the government is a national sport, and we are the world champions.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code