Interview with Sylvia Lim

Victorious Sylvia, after crossing the Rubicon

Business Times - 31 May 2011

By ANNA TEO

'IT is hard to describe the feeling when one works towards a day for years, and finally is standing on the banks of the Rubicon.

Our people have been tireless, rooted in a sense that our efforts will bring about some good for Singapore.

It is hard to predict the course of the campaign and its outcome. But we wish Singapore well in every sense.

I know that as I proceed tomorrow with comrades to our respective nomination centres, we are living an enormous moment. Wish us luck!'

Sylvia Lim was pensive - in fact, 'quite emotional', she says - when she updated her blog the night before Nomination Day in April. A hectic, heady four weeks later, it's a decidedly different Ms Lim who is discussing the polls. The Workers' Party (WP) chairman and newly elected Member of Parliament, clad in colours outside the WP's sky-blue shade, is relaxed amid banter about the lighter side of the electoral battle, including the numerous satirical jibes out there in the run-up to Polling Day - she's Princess Leia in a series of mock movie posters featuring Opposition candidates - laughing heartily at the hilarity of it all.

She and her Aljunied GRC teammates lived their 'enormous moment' in the wee hours of May 8, but are mindful of the enormity of their job ahead. After five years as a non-constituency MP (NCMP), she's now in charge of the Serangoon division of the Group Representation Constituency (GRC) - an area that she's 'quite familiar' with, the 46-year-old says, having grown up in Seletar Hills and gone to school in the vicinity.

Barely a week after the election, she resigned from her job as lecturer and manager at Temasek Polytechnic to better focus on being an elected MP. But she did make her mark even as an NCMP. A video clip of her speech in Parliament during the April 2007 debate on ministers' salaries, when she argued against pegging the pay to top private sector earners', went viral early this year, much to her surprise.

'I was quite taken aback by the breadth of the transmission,' she says. 'My students were telling me, 'Ms Lim, my uncle sent it to me', and even people from overseas (told me). It just shows you the power of the social media. I was really surprised that it (the speech) went through a revival.'

She's surprised, too, by the decision to review political salaries.

'I am glad the PM (Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong) finally decided to do this. It was necessary, as the benchmark of 2/3M48 became more and more unsustainable due to the widening income gap between the top earners and the median,' she says, referring to the yardstick : two-thirds of the median incomes of the top eight earners in six professions.

'The outcome I hope to see is political salaries brought down to a modest level, so as to foster a culture which upholds the intrinsic value of public service.'

A sense of public service, or at least of wanting to contribute and be 'helpful to society', probably took root in her even as a teenager, when she became a student councillor at National Junior College, and in her original career choice: she wanted to be a doctor. But she failed to get into medical school despite good grades, and ended up studying law instead at the National University of Singapore.

'So I went to law school and I had a lot of issues after that because I was trying to see how being a lawyer would help make people's lives better. It was quite a big issue with me. So I was thinking very hard about how I could find a career which could marry legal knowledge and public service - and the police came to mind, because I'm also very interested in crime and criminal justice. And one day I was driving along the PIE and it was raining, and I saw this policeman in a yellow raincoat directing traffic. Then I thought: 'Yes! This is what I must do!' Because, you see how helpful he was to people in the rain?'

Her father didn't like the idea and thought that packing her off to London to do her Master of Laws might change her mind about joining the police force, 'but it didn't', and she became a police inspector for three years in the early 1990s. She then did litigation at a local law firm for four years, handling both criminal and civil cases, before joining Temasek Polytechnic in 1998.

She hasn't yet decided on her career options next, she says.

'Right now I'm still holding on to one or two writing contracts which I have to finish anyway. I'm working with a colleague on a volume of Halsbury's Laws of Singapore, which is a lawyer's reference, on criminal procedures. We did the first two editions, so this will be like an updated version. That is something I consider flexible.

'I foresee that in the next few months, because of the start-up of the town council, quite a lot of my time will be spent on those things, so I can't really take on anything heavy at this point.' She has been approached for law practice work, 'but I'm a little hesitant because I can't go the full way - like I don't see myself doing trials or anything like that during this period. So maybe if I do some ad hoc work, on a part-time basis - that might be one possibility.'

Ms Lim joined the WP in November 2001 - a decision that was 'a cathartic moment' - after the 'one-sidedness' of a snap general election (GE) that year that saw only 29 out of 84 seats contested, and became party chairman in 2003.

For all the focus on Aljunied, going into the 2011 GE, for her it was 'a lighter burden' this time compared to her first contest in 2006 when she was leader of the WP's Aljunied team. 'My job this time was to stand next to (leader) Mr Low (Thia Khiang) and look credible,' she quips.

There was also a certain peace of mind, she says. 'Partly, it was a sense that we had done all we could already, because we had been doing our ground visits to the homes in Aljunied GRC since 2002.' There was a bit of a scramble, after the new electoral boundaries were announced in February, to cover the newly drawn-in Kaki Bukit. The WP team also found that certain precincts in the old Hougang and Aljunied areas where they had been working the ground, covering some 29,000 voters, had been carved out.

And with the risk of boundary changes 'always there', it 'makes sense for us to concentrate our groundwork, off-election, in contiguous areas - so that no matter how they cut, at least we have covered some of the areas. So we'll try to concentrate right now on the neighbouring areas - the East, North-East, and we're also interested in Tampines; we have always been.'

The party is against the NCMP scheme but 'you have to think . . . is it right for us to totally throw away the chance to at least contribute something?' she says. 'We have to calculate the costs of spending five years outside Parliament, when you could be speaking up for Singaporeans, albeit through this route.'

Her NCMP stint has been useful for the opportunity 'to engage in some sort of debate, especially with the ministers, over certain issues' but what she has found particularly rewarding has been to see certain inputs taken up, in the drafting of bills.

But this happens at the earlier public consultation stage, rather than when the bill is already before the House for a second reading. 'I had actually quite a good experience of this - for example, during the Criminal Procedure Review. I have some knowledge of this area, so when they first put up the bill, not to Parliament but for consultation, I studied the bill in great detail because I have great interest in this area, and I wrote a submission to the Ministry of Law. To their credit, they were very objective in looking at it and adopted some of my suggestions.'

She is 'quite looking forward to the next few years', she says. 'It's a milestone for us. And the eight of us (Opposition MPs) in Parliament - it's actually quite an interesting mix of people, in terms of age, background, life experiences. I think a wider range of issues will be canvassed.'

Meanwhile, she hopes to return by June to her wing chun class, which has been a side interest apart from running, music and wine - 'not necessarily in that order'.

She has missed the Chinese martial art lessons, which she started in 2009, since the new electoral boundaries were announced, she says.

'I was inspired by the film Ip Man, but that would not have clinched it for me, if not for the fact that I discovered during a lunch with an old friend that he was a wing chun sifu! Wing chun is suitable for women, as it emphasises self-defence through technique rather than strength. It is also fun sparring with people of all ages and sizes - though at times embarrassing when teenagers pulp you.'


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