This week, Parliament debated on whether the Constitution should be changed to allow the President to hold international appointments in his personal capacity. On 22 November 2023 Parliament passed into law allowing the President to take such appointments, retroactively bringing the law into effect from the 14 September 2023, the date Tharman Shanmugaratnam ascended into office. This is the second time the Constitution has changed with regard to the President in less than 10 years, the other being the introduction of reserve elections in 2016.

I am not a fan of amending the Constitution so frequently. And it’s not just me, the first generation of leaders in Singapore thought to change the amount of votes needed to amend the Constitution from a simple majority to a two-thirds majority in 1979, which suggests that they thought the Constitution should not be a document that’s easily or frequently amended. In fact, even the heir apparent Lawrence Wong agrees with this, in his closing speech on the 22 November 2023 sitting he expressly said that the Constitution should not be “amended frivolously”.1

The arguments

The main argument pushed by the PAP can be summarized as such: allowing the President and Ministers to take up international appointments in their personal capacity will allow Singapore to have a seat at the table, a platform to shape global policies,2 all other benefits of the amendment flows from this one benefit.

The opposition Members of Parliament (MPs) raised several points in disagreement, which can be briefly summarised as such:

First, the President should dedicate all his time to Singapore instead of holding other international appointments:

As Mr Giam points out, internationally most political office holders relinquish their international appointments the moment they ascend to political office. The concern, which was echoed by both Denise Phua and Gan Thiam Poh, was impact on the President’s official duties. Duties which cost the tax payer 12m SGD a year, 1.5m of which goes towards the President’s salary. You might ask, what duties? What duties indeed. Either President Tharman is the world’s most efficient person in the world, having picked up four international appointments on top of his constitutional duties as President, or our previous Presidents had an incredible amount of free time.

It is worth noting that the PAP envisions these international appointments as part of the President’s duties, that raising Singapore’s profile internationally is part of the President’s duties as Singapore’s top diplomat. Which leads us to the second objection by the opposition:

Second, why can’t the President accept these international appointments in his official capacity as President?

Gerald Giam and Leong Mun Wai clarify that they have no objection in principle to the President accepting international appointments in his official capacity, what they object to is the President accepting these international appointments in his personal capacity.3 According to Christopher De Souza, these international organizations see the “elevation of Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam… as an advantage” but somehow did not want him in his capacity as President because they did not want him as some government mouthpiece. So they would only accept him as a free and independent man, free to speak as he wishes, unhindered by the bindings of his office or the Singapore government.

Except of course, under the new proposed changes to the constitution he would still be bound by the Singapore government and his office. Under article 22Q(2), the Cabinet will advise the President against commenting on domestic policies, laws and policies4, so how free is the President to speak his mind in these international meetings anyway? Also, how can the tax payer know if the President is actively stumping for Singapore’s interests rather than his personal interests, given that many of these meetings happen behind closed doors in foreign countries, a point which was raised by Mr Giam. Finally President Tharman had been holding these same positions since he was Senior Minister, and these were held in his official capacity. Are we to believe that now that he has become President these international organizations now want to be rid of him unless he switches to holding these positions in his personal capacity? What changed between him being a Senior Minister and President? Is a Senior Minister allowed to espouse views that are contrary to national interest?

And so the PAP have created a most interesting conundrum: the President must hold the appointments in his personal capacity, and yet this is somehow to further Singapore’s national interest and also therefore in keeping with his acting in his official capacity as President. And because he is acting in the national interest and in his official (yet personal) capacity, the costs of fulfilling these international commitments will be footed by the taxpayer, including his security detail and entourage of civil service advisors. The truth is that the PAP doesn’t care for the rule of law in so much as they care about wanting their cake and eating it too. They don’t care about the inconsistencies of having to pay for what is supposedly appointments in the personal capacity, they don’t care that article 22Q(2) makes it so the President has no actual autonomy on what he can say, and they certainly don’t care that most Singaporeans voted for a President that can focus on his national priorities.

Of course the PAP has no answers for any of these questions, and instead of answering them they proceed to double down on the only point they can make, which is that international appointments are good for the country. I don’t disagree that international appointments of repute are good for the country, but if they were so important as the government suddenly claims, then why did they send the only Minister with these appointments to run for President? Could it be because they’re fresh out of popular candidates? That Tharman Shanmugaratnam is now the last popular person they have in the PAP?

Third, why does the amendment need to be backdated to the 14 September, the day President Tharman takes office, if indeed according to Lawrence Wong, there is no need for this backdating?

Associate Professor Jamus Lim makes the point that there would have been no need to backdate the law had they drafted it into prospective law given that the government must have known about the potential conflict in the Constitution prior to the most recent Presidential election.

According to DPM Wong, the need for changing the Constitution was brought about when the Attorney General advised the Cabinet that the Constitution as is “was not ideal”, but then he doesn’t go on to say what makes it not ideal. I agree with Associate Professor Jamus that any retroactive amendments to any law, and even more so in the case of the Constitution, should be done so sparingly and with care. One can only speculate as to why it was so urgent to modify the law and backdate it.5

This objection would be the easiest to rectify, just simply not backdate the amendment. The PAP would still get through the bill, and the Constitution would still be amended, without having set horrible precedent of retroactive amendments seemingly without any good reason, because DPM Wong did not offer any compelling reasons6 as to why it needed to be retroactive at all. President Tharman could have easily relinquished his roles and then taken them up again once the law took effect. But of course as with everything else, the PAP simply had to have their cake and eat it too.

My biggest objection to this (aside from the ones raised above) is that this power is once again delegated to the executive, despite the fact that we are a Parliamentary democracy, and Parliament should be supreme. This concentration of power in the executive rather than the legislative or judiciary is just another in the line of bills passed through Parliament, including the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019 (POFMA) and Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act 2021 (FICA) where the powers of authorization and process of appeal all lie directly with the executive. My worry is that the balance of powers in Singapore are slowly being eroded, and it does not seem like anyone else shares this concern, at least certainly not in Parliament.

Why do we even have these guys

The PAP MPs once again put up a show in Parliament, despite having already been whipped into voting for the bill. Denise Phua, Gan Thiam Poh, Dan Wee and Christopher de Souza all took turns giving the same speech, and then promptly declared that they were in favour of the bill. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that they all raised “concerns” about the bill, all in the same vein of:

1. what impact on the international appointments have on the official duties of the President;

2. the need for an objective framework to assess whether an appointment is in the national interest; and

3. who will bear the costs of meeting the obligations of these international appointments.

These are all valid concerns. In fact, you would think that with concerns like these, these MPs might want to hear clarifications or get answers before being able to vote for the bill in good conscience. Not so. All MPs ended their speeches declaring support for the bill, before even having gotten clarifications or reassurances that their concerns were noted or addressed. Given these concerns, you might think that these MPs might actually have amendments they would like to propose to make the bill better. You might think that these MPs would do their jobs.

Instead we get a charade where these MPs pretend to ask questions and raise concerns about the bill in question, then pledge their undying support for any motion that they had been whipped into affirming. Why do we even have these guys? Do they even add anything to the conversation? Mr de Souza for his part at least played the attack dog, doing his best Minister Shanmugam impression. It wasn’t a very good one, he snapped wildly at anything he could7, and ended his speech with what in his mind must have been a brilliant gotcha moment, with all the pomp and flourish, the lectern banging and slapping, accusing Associate Professor Jamus of making a political spectacle of the debate by calling the pushing through of the bill an “abuse of the Parliamentary super majority”. Sure, it’s all politics, but I think he has a point here: did DPM Wong put forward a strong case for the retroactive application of law, a process which he agreed with Associate Professor Jamus should be done sparingly? As discussed above I don’t think DPM Wong had made any case for this at all.

But of course this is all just projecting on the part of the PAP, the real political point is made by DPM Wong in his closing statement: in his mind and in the PAP canon and consciousness the opposition only opposes for the sake of opposing.8 Why else would anyone oppose this perfectly drafted bill? What other motive could anyone have for besmirching the agenda of the PAP government? Clearly, in DPM Wong’s estimation, the only reason for this is that the opposition are once again opposing for the sake of opposing. Never mind that the opposition had made some salient points as mentioned above. Never mind that members of his own party had raised concerns as well, some of which overlap with the concerns the opposition had raised. If you oppose the bill, it is only because you hate Singapore and are against the advancement of Singapore’s interests and the benefits the bill will reap. Where is de Souza when you need him to call out actual political gamesmanship in Parliament?

So the Constitution gets amended again, and the people may complain for a day or a week, but there is a famous saying in Singapore, I know it’s from the United States but I’m in Singapore, it says “Singaporeans get the Government President they deserve”.