You wouldn’t mind so much if the rulers of Singapore were consistent.
If they were hard on drugs but also hard on, say, people who beat their servants to death.
Because I just don’t see how 18 years is a fair jail sentence for having a few hits of ice in your pocket and also for torturing and then kicking your servant to death.
Call me crazy, but I would have thought one was slightly worse than the other. In fact, given you are executed if you traffic drugs – I would have thought killing someone with your own hands was kind of worthy of the death penalty.
But not so for those wacky Singaporeans. Or the people at the top at least.
In 2002, a Singaporean man, Ng Hua Chye, kicked his Indonesian maid, Muawanatul, to death and he got 18 years and 12 strokes of the rattan. To be more exact, what he’d actually done was poured hot water on the 22-year-old, jabbed her back with the handle of a hammer and burnt her lips with cigarettes. Before kicking her to death. The 47-year-old also denied the foreign servant food – so she went from 50 kgs to 36 kgs.
ABC journalist Peter Lloyd is facing the same sentence as this sicko. For puffing on a pipe.
And in 2006, a Singaporean woman, Ngu Mei Mei, ordered her maid Yanti out a window to hang out washing – she fell to her death. The punishment? Two weeks jail.
In fact over 150 maids, most of whom are desperately poor migrants from neighbouring countries, have died since 1999.
And what about these lashings with the rattan? It’s like something out of the 18th century – next they’ll be putting people in the stocks. And bear in mind this is not some South East Asian third-world backwater – its residents are amongst the richest in the world. Put it this way - their average income is $49,700, America’s is $45,800 and Australia is way back on $36,300.
But for a rich nation the place is peculiarly barbarous. I say that because it looks so clean and ordered – it’s like a cross between a hospital and a shopping centre.
But when you’re there you see strange stuff. If you flick on the TV over breakfast you’re likely to see a heated debate on whether rapists should be castrated or simply jailed and whipped.
Kind of a heavy debate to be having over your Weet-Bix. But not for the Singaporeans – when I was there recently they were obviously loving it because a phone poll revealed 69 per cent favoured castration while 20 per cent were bleeding hearts who favoured jailing and whipping.
Anyway back to the maids.
An interesting fact is that foreign maids are specifically exempted from the Employment Act that provides minimum days off and maximum weekly hours.
In fact, a few years ago, a huge debate exploded over whether maids should be entitled to one day off a month. Some maids are not even paid.
And get this - in Singapore only certain people from the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka are permitted to take jobs as maids.
So if the Singaporean government, which by the way is a virtual dictatorship, wants to crack down on stuff - why not start on employment law?
That might be a good idea - instead of scraping the barrel to find new, interesting and ridiculous laws to charge Peter Lloyd with. A guy who wasn’t hurting anyone.
In fact The Straits Times reported today every three days a worker in Singapore loses a hand or a finger – usually in meat slicing machines, where safety guards have fallen off or have been removed.
Maybe that’s somewhere the trigger-happy nutters in charge of Singapore (who, by the way, execute more people per capita than any other in the world) could point their draconian instincts.
At least then they’d be consistent.
