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

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“Sure, we don’t want to sacrifice some key principles, but we shouldn’t stubbornly cling to outdated and outmoded policy ideas, either.”

In a separate Facebook post on Oct 25, PAP party newsletter Petir responded to Lim and said the issue was not whether policies should change, but whether the different positions taken by a political party added up to a coherent approach that accounted for trade-offs and consequences.

On the topic of foreign manpower, it questioned if WP’s policy calls were part of a carefully considered approach to managing the foreign workforce, or “a case of shifting positions to suit whichever concern is most pressing at the time”.

It said that while policy changes could reflect new evidence, changing circumstances or lessons learnt, they must be grounded in a clear rationale, with the wider consequences properly considered and explained.

“That’s what responsible policymaking requires,” it said.