No stain on Lee's great leadership
Thursday, April 05, 2007Greg Sheridan
Foreign editor
The Australian
NO Asian has had a bigger presence in the Australian mind for longer than Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, who is visiting Australia at the moment, among other things to collect an honorary doctorate from the Australian National University.
This is thoroughly deserved. Naturally, it aroused opposition from the usual suspects. That Lee can still stir the blood pressure in the fading ranks of the parlour pinks is a tribute to his extraordinary success over so many decades.
In an editorial remarkable for its churlish, childish and patronising tone, The Sydney Morning Herald opposed the award under the heading "A university dishonours itself". The SMH even attempted a joke: "Why confer respectability on Singapore's dark side with an honourary law degree? Could it not have been in something more appropriate, like psychology, accounting, aeronautics or perhaps Dr (Allen) Hawke's doctoral specialty, plague locusts?"
Herald editorials are often difficult to interpret (and few readers try) but this presumably compares Lee's rule in Singapore with a plague of locusts, which just goes to show you that no matter how dopey a thought is, it is not too dopey to find its way into print.
The note of the patronising bully is repellent. How often has the Herald ever referred to a leader from, say, mainland China, which really is rough on human rights, in anything like so insulting a tone?
The reference to Allen Hawke comes from his being chancellor of the ANU, and reportedly defending the award by remarking that in Lee, the good outweighs the bad.
Hawke's is a perfectly sensible way to measure the quality of any political leader, but it is worth noting by just how huge a margin the good outweighs the bad in Lee.
Lee was elected prime minister of Singapore in 1959, before it became independent, and he retired from the position in 1990, becoming senior minister in the cabinet and then minister mentor. Lee was succeeded as PM by Goh Chok Tong, who was in turn succeeded by Lee's son, Lee Hsien Loong.
Singapore when Lee took over was about as wealthy, per head of population, as Bangladesh. Today it is about as wealthy, per head of population, as Australia. If you think that's easy, ask yourself how many other countries have done the same.
Of course, Lee has his faults, and his rule of Singapore was not perfect. But surely in 2007 in Australia we can make an appreciation of a giant figure like Lee in the round?
But Lee has always particularly annoyed the bien pensants of Australia. There is no good reason for this, or rather the reason lies with Lee's critics rather than with Lee himself.
As Owen Harries, the distinguished Australian international affairs analyst, once wrote: "In a world that has no shortage of murderous politicians, Lee has never killed anyone. In a world that is full of corrupt politicians who have plundered the coffers of their countries, Lee has been singularly uncorrupt. In a world where contempt for laws and constitutions has been flagrant, Lee has always taken great care not to transgress legal limits. He may have bent and stretched the law, may have been vindictive and intimidating in its application, but he stopped short of breaking it. Again, during a period when most leaders of new countries sacrificed the welfare of their people to vainglorious ambition and ideology (when they were not just busy robbing the till), Lee has been outstandingly successful in raising the living standards of his people to heights that seemed impossible when he first assumed office."
There have been human rights abuses in Singapore, but they have been fewer and more moderate than in any other country in Southeast Asia. In recent years Singapore has changed greatly. It is much more liberal and relaxed and this is possible because of the affluence that Lee created.
Lee started his political life as a left-wing activist in coalition with the communists seeking independence from the British. As succeeding Australian cabinet papers have shown, Canberra made the mistaken assessment in the 1950s that Lee was in effect a communist. They were darkly suspicious of an independent Singapore, thinking it was highly likely to go the communist way.
In all of the 20th century, Lee is one of the very, very few national leaders to have been in coalition with communists and then defeated them in the contest for power.
Communism, with Nazism, was one of the two most evil ideologies of the 20th century but it is really Lee's consistent anti-communism that was important in the 1960s and '70s, which earned him the undying enmity of Australian progressive opinion.
Singapore is still a bad place to be fundamentally opposed to the Government. But it affords its citizens virtually every other freedom. There is absolute freedom of religion, freedom of commerce, freedom of personal behaviour - though the welfare state is limited and designed to reinforce the intact family - and absolute freedom to leave. Given that Singapore's citizens are the best educated in the region, this is not an empty freedom. If Singaporeans were groaning under an oppressive government they could easily move somewhere else. And Singapore's elections are clean, so that if citizens felt the government were illegitimate, they could throw it out.
But Lee's fame and standing rest on much more than just the success of Singapore, critical though that is. Throughout Asia no one has ever had his reputation for strategic sagacity. In the memoirs of US presidents and secretaries of state it is remarkable how often, when they want to demonstrate that a policy is particularly shrewd and hard-headed, they will rhetorically call Lee to their side.
Years ago, Lee used to read us occasional lectures about our shortcomings, famously saying that we were in danger of becoming "the poor white trash of Asia". This was an unusually blunt and rather impolite way to talk to us, but it can be compared with Paul Keating's statement in 1986 that we were in danger of becoming "a banana republic" if we did not hasten economic reform.
Lee had the same purpose, he wanted us to reform so that we would be more dynamic and be a better partner for Singapore. And he was successful: his astringency was a part of our national debate in the '80s and early '90s. And he recognises how successful that reform has been, and how successful Australia now is.
I opened this column with a big statement. You could certainly say Mahatma Gandhi has a more pervasive place in the Western, including the Australian, mind than Lee. Or perhaps Mao, though his was primarily a negative genius like Hitler's. But no other Asian leader has had such an intimate dialogue with Australia as Lee. No one else knew us as well.
As has the rest of the region, we have benefited immensely from his leadership.
