WHEN the Malaysian government recently cancelled its projected 'scenic' or 'crooked' bridge on the grounds (or at least pretext) that its southern neighbour was being overly greedy in their demands for a quid pro quo of sand and airspace for military flying manouevres, it suddenly struck me what a very long time it has been since I'd heard or read anything positive about Singapore.
Since its dollar reached parity with Australia's years ago, my own compatriots seem to have largely lost their former enthusiasm for shopping trips there, and seldom seem to pay it much attention any more. And the people of Malaysia, persisting in their sibling rivalry with the island that was originally part of their new post-colonial nation - hence the addition of 'si' into its old name, Malaya - seem to bad-mouth the city-state at every opportunity.
"Boring, lah, nothing to do and too many rules" seems to be the common consensus among Malaysians I talk to. And they never tire of the well-worn witticism, "Singapore's a fine place: sooner or later you'll be fined for something."
Which indeed you will, and savagely, for a wide variety of infractions including littering, a habit that many Malaysians appear to consider their God-given right if not outright duty, and jaywalking, which back in my days in Hong Kong seemed to be the then colony's most popular outdoor sport. Nor is it very long since chewing gum was prohibited in Singapore, ostensibly, as I was told, because children would use the stuff to block the electric-eye apertures in the doors of MRT trains.
And it wasn't many years before the gum ban that foreign males arriving in Singapore wearing their hair longer than collar-length were denied entry unless they submitted to the shearing of their locks to an acceptable length by barbers standing by at immigration for the purpose.
But if Singapore feels like 'Singabore' for those of us who are averse to what we see as too many rules and regulations and overly-ferocious fines for breaking them, it's more like 'Swingapore' for people caught hanging around there with trafficable quantities of drugs.
Of course, nearby Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand have the death penalty for drug-dealing too, but so rampant is corruption among at least some of the laughably-entitled 'law-enforcement' agencies in these countries, that I suspect the cash-rich can cheat the executioner or even get off scott-free if, as frequently occurs, the evidence goes missing, presumably sold at considerable profit by the officials who confiscated it in the first place.

Tiny population
Which brings us to the first of the strongly positive sentiments I personally feel about Singapore - it may be Singabore, but at least it's Singapure. Squeaky-clean not just litterwise compared with most trash-strewn Asian countries, but letter-of-the-law-wise too. In fact Transparency International rates it as one of the least corrupt nations in the world. Several places in front of Australia, for example, where we like to think we make an honest effort to keep things straight, and streets ahead of most other locations in Asia.
This situation, or at least the inspiration for it, is very much to the credit of Lee Kuan Yew, who stands out as a moral and ethical saint compared with many of his contemporaries who've headed emerging Asian nations, like Marcos of the Philippines, Suharto of Indonesia and others, who've enriched themselves, their relatives and cronies beyond the dreams of avarice at the expense of their impoverished populace.
What a pity, I've always thought, that Lee has had such a comparatively tiny population on which to bestow the benefits of his fierce fiscal honesty. When he came to power, war-shattered Singapore was pathetically Singapoor. With no natural resources, no industries to speak of, not much commerce and little surviving infrastructure. Not even enough water, which - even though when it rains in Singapore it Singapours - has to this day to be purchased and piped in vast quantities from Malaysia.
Under Lee Kuan Yew's lion-hearted leadership, Singapore's made so much Singaprogress in the past half-century that today it's one of the most Singaprosperous nations in the whole region, and even ranks respectably worldwide in economic terms. Its achievements also include one of the world's busiest and most efficient container shipping ports; an amazingly user-friendly airport; and one of the best airlines on the planet.
But on the other side of the coin, unfortunately, its progress in the areas of economic success, law and order and cleanliness have been at the expense of human rights and freedoms. In other words, Singaporeans are permitted and even exhorted to work themselves to exhaustion, shop till they drop, and even, if they have any time and energy to spare from these core civic duties, to relax and enjoy themselves in a variety of acceptable pursuits.
But let them step out of line politically, by poking fun at ruling-party politicians, criticising the government in public or in print, staging unauthorised protest meetings or marches, standing for Parliament on behalf of opposition parties or voting for opposition candidates in sufficient numbers to gain them seats in their electorates, and they're in trouble.
In dire straits
Dissenters adjudged truly dangerous are jailed without trial for indefinite periods under the draconian Internal Security Act, retained in Singapore, as also in Malaysia, since back in the 1950s when it was deemed necessary to counter the curse of communism.
Opposition candidates who stand for Parliament, in which the ruling party has never won less than 90% of the seats, are routinely sued for defamatory remarks they're alleged to have made in the heat of electioneering. Like the redoubtable Mr JB Jeyaretnam, for years the sole opposition in Singapore's Parliament, and still fighting at the age of 80 or so, these unfortunates are often made an example of by the courts and either impoverished or utterly bankrupted by being required to pay massive damages.
And electorates whose voters have the temerity to deliver victory to opposition candidates are officially and openly threatened and punished with deprivation of their fair share of government expenditure on infrastructure and services.
Small wonder then that supporters of human rights and democracy see the political machine that's run Singapore all these years, the People's Action Party or PAP, as performing admirably in the peace, prosperity and pick-up-after-yourself departments, but as otherwise serving the people with pap.
The same pap to which the strictly-controlled media treat their viewers and readers, to the point that I can't help thinking collectively of the principal Singapore 'newspaper, the Straits Times, and its government-owned Malaysian equivalent, the New Straits Times, as, with apologies to Mark Knopfler and his great 1990s group of the same name, the Dire Straits.
In fact so dire is the state of democracy in Singapore, and so Singaboring in its effects on the body politic, that the city-state seems to have lots and lots of brains but precious little heart or soul. So little soul, come to think of it, that I've heard only one single, solitary genuinely original Singaporean joke, and many years ago at that: 'Just like Christianity, this place is run by a trinity - the Father, the Son and the Holy Goh'.
Of course, Goh Chok Tong, 'the Holy Goh' who followed the Father as Prime Minister, has taken a back seat now in favour of the Son, Lee Hsien Loong, who recently led the PAP to victory by clinching 82 of the 84 or 96% of the seats in the Singapore Parliament with a somewhat underwhelming 66.6% of the popular vote.
What a pity
In my opinion, and in the opinion of many of the foreign newspapers and magazines that the Singapore regime suppresses by drastically restricting their circulations as punishment for publishing critical news or views, there's no longer any justification for this rigged and rigid political situation. In fact it's positively counter-productive.
Just as Singapore is a bastion of prosperity, efficiency, order and probity amid the chaos, incompetence and corruption that bedevil much of the rest of South-East Asia, it could also be a beacon of human rights and liberty.
A living rebuke to the uniformed bandits who run Burma, for example; to the politicians and patricians who keep the Philippines perpetually mired in poverty; and to Umno and its coalition partners who continue to keep Malaysians so unnecessarily under the thumb. But no.
Even Indonesia, still as agonised as it is in so many ways as a result of 30 years of Suharto's New Order - or, as some of us think of it, New Odour or New Ordure - is now, for all its prevailing problems, more vibrantly and genuinely democratic than Singapore, which seems content to represent no more to its troubled neighbour than a ready market for landfill and cheap labour, and a convenient mall for ridding Jakarta's mega-rich of their often ill-gotten rupiah.
What a pity that, realising its urgent need to reinvent itself as Bling-Blingapore, Singabore restricts itself to such projects as sanitising Bugis Street and old Chinatown, sprucing-up Sentosa, staging events like Mega Sales and an Arts Festival featuring largely imported talent, and now splashing out on a spanking new casino complex.
If only it could also see that the latent spirit of its people may be as vital to its continued prosperity and progress as their intelligence and industry have been. If only it could cease regimenting them to the point where they're seen - and even, I suspect, see themselves - as politically impotent, Singaboorish robots, programmed and controlled to within an inch of their lives, they may well become Singaborn-again into creative, free-wheeling, even fun-loving people. And the whole world might start seeing Singabore as something a lot more like Zingapore.

DEAN JOHNS is an Australian freelance journalist now living in Kuala Lumpur and a former occasional columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald.