Bar for President raised to bring qualifying criteria up to date
SINGAPORE — To ensure that future Elected Presidents are well equipped to handle the demands of his office, the qualifying criteria for candidacy will be raised, while the Council of Presidential Advisers (CPA) will be strengthened to ensure that the system does not rest on the judgment of a single person.
Steps will also be taken to ensure that an Elected President comes from one of the minority groups, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told Parliament yesterday as he announced these “three broad areas” that will be reviewed as part of efforts to keep the office “a robust, an effective institution in our political system”.
The review of the three areas will be undertaken by a Constitutional Commission chaired by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon. The Prime Minister noted that there had been calls from the public to revert to the old system, where Parliament elects a President.
However, Mr Lee said: “The President has a role. It’s a difficult system to get right but we have to adjust it and try and get it more right than wrong over a period of time and not abandon the project altogether and leave ourselves naked and defenceless against all the difficulties which the elected president (enables) us to avoid.”
The Constitutional Commission to be set up will include distinguished jurists, academics and corporate executives. Their recommendations, which will also take into account views from the public, could be made to the Government by the third quarter of this year and legislative changes could be tabled within this year, said Mr Lee.
On reviewing the qualifying criteria of the Elected President, Mr Lee noted that the concept was to peg it at people with high senior management competence and experience. Among other things, a candidate is required to have had experience in running large and complex companies with more than S$100 million in paid-up capital.
While the principle underlying such criteria remains valid, “the details may need to be brought up to date”, Mr Lee said. For instance, based on inflation alone, S$100 million in 1990 would be equivalent to S$158 million today.
Handing out a table to the House, Mr Lee noted that the nominal government spending was S$11 billion in 1990, compared to S$68 billion last year. “But it’s much more than inflation … because, over 25 years, our economy has grown, government spending has gone up, government’s reserves have accumulated, and the size and complexity of the organisations which are subject to the second key of the President have grown manyfold,” Mr Lee said.
On strengthening the CPA’s powers, Mr Lee noted that it is an “integral part” of the two-key mechanism as the council assists and advises the President in exercising his powers.
Quoting Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong, Mr Lee said the President and the CPA would play the role of “a goalkeeper together with a team of defenders”. As the new institutions establish themselves overtime, Mr Lee said the Government should consider if the CPA’s advice “should come to count for more” in the decisions made by the President to make the governance system more stable. “We have to strike a delicate balance,” he added.
Currently, the President has to consult the CPA on decisions relating to supply Bills or key appointments. “ ... But this arrangement does not apply uniformly when the President exercises custodial powers in other areas,” said Mr Lee. He added that there is also a need to examine how minorities will have a chance to be elected as president.
He noted that Singapore has not seen a Malay president since the Elected Presidency was introduced in 1991. There was only one Indian President, Mr S R Nathan, from 1999, who served for two terms with distinction.
“But in future, when presidential elections are more likely to be contested, and even hotly contested, I believe it will become much harder for a minority president to get elected,” said Mr Lee.
Referring to the Group Representation Constituency system, which is meant to ensure a minimum representation of minority-race MPs in Parliament, he added: “We should consider a similar mechanism for presidential elections, to ensure that minorities can be periodically elected if we have not had a particular minority as president for some time.”
