Mr Speaker, Sir, from 1959 to 1990, I was responsible for appointing all Judges of the Supreme Court. Like all my other appointments throughout the Government, the statutory boards, the civil service, these Judges were appointed strictly on merit. The main attributes that I looked for were integrity, ability, qualifications and suitability for the job. If I had indulged in nepotism and cronyism, Singapore would not be what it is today, with a government, civil service, a police force, a whole structure of an establishment which is acknowledged, not just by businessmen but even by foreign correspondents who do not much favour us, to be 'squeaky clean' - in other words, honest, efficient and fair, where rules cannot be circumvented by gifts, and money politics does not exist. When appointments are for life, as with Judges, I take the utmost care to make sure that the men and women to be appointed do not fail for lack of character, integrity or independence of mind and judgement, for having been appointed for life, they will become serious problems with effects on our social development and our economic growth. Sir, I appointed the first Singaporean Chief Justice of Singapore in 1963. The person I appointed, Mr Justice Wee Chong Jin, was already a High Court Judge appointed by a previous Governor, and he held his appointment by Letters Patent from the British Queen. So his qualification to be a judge was not based on my criteria but on the Governor's criteria in the days before elected governments. I elevated him from the Bench to the Chief Justiceship. He stayed on as Chief Justice from 1963 to 1990. Many judgements went against the Government. He was never removed. He reached retirement age; I extended it twice because there was no suitable alternative. I had planned to resign as Prime Minister at the end of 1990. One of my most important last appointments before I retired was to appoint the Chief Justice to succeed Chief Justice Wee Chong Jin. I weighed the merits of several candidates. I discussed the matter with all the Judges, separately. Each of the Judges listed for me the three best persons he considered suitable for the office, always excluding himself. With each Judge I separately went through the list of members of the Singapore Bar. I considered several outstanding lawyers from the Malaysian Bar, and looked at a few possibles elsewhere, including Hong Kong. I re-discussed the matter with the four judges who knew Mr Yong Pung How well. They all rated him the best of the possibles, excluding themselves. They were: Mr A P Rajah, Mr Punch Coomaraswamy, Mr L P Thean, and Mr S K Chan. Finally, there were four Judges of the Supreme Court who knew him and knew all the other Judges and knew all the members of the Bar who were suitable for the job. And without hesitation, they said that this man, in their view, was the most suitable. I finally decided on Yong Pung How because I was going to make an offer to a man who was at the top of the Singapore banking community. We were fellow students for three years at the Cambridge Law School from 1946 - 50 years ago. I knew his quality of work and his meticulous standards, and I knew them well. I had borrowed his lecture notes for my first term in 1946 in Cambridge because I had missed them. I had gone off to the London School of Economics and missed the first term when I decided to change from London to Cambridge. He returned and practised law both in Malaysia and Singapore for 20 years. In 1970 when he was already the head of one of the largest law firms in both countries (Singapore and Malaysia), Shook Lin and Bok, which had been started by his father, himself a lawyer, he decided to leave the law for banking. He became the head of the merchant bank, SIMBL, and later a Director and Vice-Chairman of our largest local bank, the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC). In April 1981 Dr Goh Keng Swee, then doing a special job for me to form the Government Investment Corporation (GIC) - and he had Mr Lim Kim San as the first Managing Director - decided to ask OCBC to lend Yong Pung How to the Government Investment Corporation as Managing Director. He had known him separately as a banker. Later he became also Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore because his competence was beyond doubt. As Chairman, GIC, I could see from his work that he was the same Yong Pung How I had known as a student: thorough, meticulous, and scrupulously fair in his presentation of the alternatives for investment projects before expressing his preferences. That is a very important quality for a judge. He had his preferences, but he presented the various options scrupulously and fairly, so that if the Board decided to take a different view from him they could pursue the merits, in detail, of the other options. In June 1983 he left both GIC and MAS and returned to OCBC as Chairman. Sir, in 1976 I had offered him an appointment as a Judge of the Supreme Court. He was then Vice-Chairman of OCBC. He declined. In 1989, when I asked him to consider the office of Chief Justice, telling him that this was my last appointment before my retirement, he asked for time to consider it. If he agreed, he would have to take up an appointment as Judge of the Supreme Court for a year before he took up his appointment as Chief Justice. Sir, as Chairman of OCBC, in the first six months of 1989 he earned $1.3 million from his salary, bonuses, and pay in lieu of leave. In other words, if he had stayed on in OCBC, he would have earned $2.6 million for the whole of 1989. The previous year, 1988, he had earned $1.3 million; because it was a less prosperous year for the bank with smaller bonuses. These were cash payments, excluding his entitlements to share options. As a Judge of the Supreme Court, he would receive, and, in fact, did receive, for the second six months of 1989 the princely sum of $0.177 million ($177,000) - less than one-seventh of his OCBC remuneration for the first six months. He considered it carefully for a month and told me that he would accept the appointment. He left OCBC and was appointed a Judge of Supreme Court on 1st July 1989. In September 1990 when Chief Justice Wee Chong Jin retired, I appointed him Chief Justice. Mr Yong Pung How's integrity, ability and standing were already well established amongst bankers both in Singapore and internationally. He is not an unknown person, like Mr Francis Seow. He is known to people who deal in billions of dollars of investments, as a man of honour. And in London, he is amongst London bankers a respected figure. In the last five years, he has earned the respect of the Bar, not as my friend, but as the Chief Justice. More than 200 of his judgements in the last five years have been published in our law reports. They are there for all to read and to judge. It is absurd for anyone to suggest that a man would give up his position as Chairman of our largest bank, earning more than $2.6 million a year, to become a compliant Chief Justice for less than one-fifth the salary. He undertook the job as a matter of duty. Of course, money did not matter to him so much because he had inherited some properties from his parents and so was not deterred by the loss of income as a banker. However, Singapore cannot in future depend on finding a Chief Justice who happens to be good and bedecked with ability, integrity and judicial temperament who also happens to have inherited properties from his parents. Hence, I urged upon the Prime Minister the need for a fundamental revision of salaries from the President downwards, including the Chief Justice, the Judges and the civil servants, so that they are now earning 60% of their market earnings, of their peers in the private sector and, in the longer term, two-thirds of their market earnings. If Singapore is to remain squeaky clean when that revolutionary generation that threw me and my colleagues up cannot be reproduced, this is the only way. Face the alternatives and we will avoid the discomfiture of many other countries. We are not South Korea, we are not the Philippines, we are not Taiwan, we are not Thailand. They are the countries lauded by the American press as examples for us. I shudder to think that Singapore travels that road. Because unlike them, we do not have that hinterland to pay for such excesses. Every time your constituent asks you, why should the Minister be paid so much, tell him the Minister handles in billions of dollars. One signature from the Minister can make or break a company, not just a man. Therefore, he must be a man of that quality, that standing, that integrity. And if he is not worth 60% of what his private sector counterparts are getting, he should not be holding that job. Settle for Francis Seow or Dr Chee Soon Juan - all you need do is to pay for his wife's postage to send the PhD thesis for correction. It is cheap. I have never needed the Courts to deal with troublesome problems which I can deal with by executive decision under the law. As Prime Minister, I reserved executive powers in the Internal Security Act and the Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Act, both inherited from British times, which I did not repeal, in order to be able to act against subversives or criminals like drug traffickers, against whom there is insufficient evidence for a court of law, without having recourse to the courts. In other words, I was my own carrier of a hatchet. I needed no hatchet man. All those who have dealt with me know that I have never flinched from going into a dark street on a dark night and if it happens to be a cul-de-sac, no outlet, either the gangster or I will come out alive. I have done this a few times. I am prepared to do this again. But when the Government, including me, takes a matter to court or when the Government is taken by private individuals to court, then the court must adjudicate upon the issues strictly on their merits and in accordance with the law. To have it otherwise is to lose us our standing and to lose us our status as an investment and financial centre. Fortune magazine is owned by Time Warner. We have restricted Time magazine for refusing to publish our replies. We are no favourites of Time Warner. But they carried out two independent surveys and they rated Singapore No. 1 investment centre. The interpretation of documents, of contracts in accordance with the law is crucial. Our reputation for the rule of law has been and is a valuable economic asset, part of our capital, although an intangible one. It has brought to Singapore good returns from the MNCs, the OHQs, the banks, the financial institutions, and the flood of capital to buy up properties in Singapore. A country that has no rule of law, where the government acts capriciously is not a country wealthy men from other countries would sink money in in real estate. Sir, one of the difficulties of getting good men on the Supreme Court was the meagre salaries paid to judges compared to their earnings at the Bar. And it was only in recent years, after the Ministerial and Judicial salaries were revised, that it has been possible to fill the vacancies on the Supreme Court Bench with men and women of the right quality. Most of the appointments to the Bench have been from the private practice because many in the Government service had left when the pay was grossly inadequate. The Government is therefore presently revising Legal Service salaries so that the Service will be able to retain good officers who can, in due course, be promoted to the Bench, and we can maintain a balance between Judges and Judicial Commissioners promoted from the Legal Service and those appointed from private practice. How has the present Chief Justice filled up the vacancies? He has combed through the Bar list before he made recommendations to the Prime Minister, Mr Goh Chok Tong, for 10 appointments as members of the Supreme Court Bench and eight as Judicial Commissioners. Some were appointed to the Supreme Court after a term as Judicial Commissioner. He has been careful, meticulous and thorough in his selections. When he became a Judge in July 1989, he met a large cross section of lawyers, leading members of the Bar. He found out who were the highly respected. From these discussions, he settled a list of 60 possibles, both from the Legal Service and the Bar. Within a year, before he became Chief Justice, he had shortlisted them to 20. He based his selection on the academic background of the person, what the market and the Bar assessed a man to be, and from his knowledge of and conversations with the person, including his appearance before him in the courts. He then sought out the views of each of the Judges and the Judicial Commissioners on the overall integrity, legal ability and likely "judicial temperament" of these persons. Then he sounded out the candidate as to whether he would be interested to have his name considered. From 1992, he refined the selection process by a quiet poll every 12 to 15 months. Each Judge and each Judicial Commissioner would list three lawyers in order of preference, for their competence in civil work and, separately, in a different list for competence in criminal work. The Judges had the advantage of close observation and interaction with those who appeared before them, and also from their personal knowledge of their peers when they were practising at the Bar. From these rankings, the Chief Justice obtained a rough assessment based on how many Judges and Judicial Commissioners nominated a particular candidate, and also a more precise points score, giving three points for a first place nomination, two for a second place nomination and one for a third. Then he assessed the suitability of each candidate in separate discussions. The Chief Justice used the same method to select the judges he recommended for appointment to the Court of Appeal. Each Judge and Judicial Commissioner named two of themselves they considered the most suitable for promotion to this senior appointment, with a third name in reserve. The two who are appointed were the unanimous choices of all the judges. These appointments to the Supreme Court, and the changes the Chief Justice has made in the administration of the courts in the last five years, have raised the morale, efficiency and effectiveness of the officers of our courts. The transformation has been nothing short of remarkable. Our courts have been brought up to date with the use of Information Technology. The large backlog of cases when we used to wait four, five, six years for trial whilst they were on the court's list, has been cleared. The courts can now keep pace with the work volume of a financial centre like Singapore. The lawyers know the judiciary has come from the best amongst their ranks. They know who has been chosen. They have dealt with them either as partners or as adversaries in the courts. Now the lawyers complain of the pace of work in the courts and it is they who want time to catch up with their work, which is as it should be. These facts, Sir, have to be placed on the record. When Members read Human Rights groups in America, foreign correspondents who quote these Human Rights groups and their reports, or opposition parties seeking to attack the Government, by attacking the Judiciary, remember that they are out on a campaign to debase our system. They are not interested in investigating the truth. They are carrying out a campaign. Remember that the Singapore Chief Justice and Singapore's Judges on the Supreme Court have established reputations and enjoy the respect of the Bar. Otherwise, the World Economic Forum and PERC would not have come to that conclusion. They canvass, they poll, they meet lawyers, they meet businessmen, to find out whether they have got confidence in the system. The Chief Justice has not given up his Chairmanship of OCBC in order to debase himself and become a hatchet man for the Government. And in any case, as I have said, I was always my own hatchet man. I have never needed somebody to carry my scabbard for me. He has discharged the duties of his office with distinction, and he has helped to select for the Supreme Court some of the best and most respected members of the Bar. All those connected with the administration of justice, the legal officers, members of the Bar and there are now over 2,500 members, lawyers in actual practice, the judges, the media, meaning our media and indeed even the foreign media, although they may not wish to report this, watch the Leeson case. When he attacked Singapore and said that he did not want to be extradited because he would not get a fair trial, the International Herald Tribune and the Asian Wall Street Journal plastered it on the front page. When Leeson decided that he would face trial in Singapore and said he apologised for saying that he never had confidence in the Singapore judiciary, not one word was published, not even in the inside pages. Freedom of the press! Are we intimidated? The Judges and Judicial Commissioners who have been appointed since November 1990 by the present Prime Minister on the recommendation of the Chief Justice have brought credit to the Singapore Bench. They have maintained the high standards established by the few who had accepted appointment when salaries were inadequate, and who had been holding the fort until salary changes made it possible to get larger numbers of practising lawyers to accept appointments. I may add that rather than appoint lawyers who were not amongst the best at the Bar, I deliberately left the vacancies on the Supreme Court Bench unfilled. Because it was not in my nature and I knew it would be unwise to fill up those seats with inadequate men. They were lifetime appointments. I am happy to observe that our Judges have not been intimidated by the baseless attacks on their integrity from the foreign media, from doing what their conscience and the law requires of them as Judges. Their conduct of cases in open court, their judgments published for the record, their character all bear the closest scrutiny. If it was nonsensical, absurd, preposterous, if Dr Lingle had not committed contempt of court and the IHT had been wrongly convicted, they would have torn the judgments to strips. There were arguments in open court on both sides by the Attorney-General and lawyers amongst the best from the Singapore Bar and they could have brought in Queen's Counsel from London. And if the judgments could not justify the findings, then the judgments would have been torn to strips. So what is all this about? From time to time since 1987, American Human Rights groups, like Asiawatch and through Asiawatch, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, have made baseless and scurrilous allegations that our judiciary is not independent. It all started in 1987 over the Marxist conspirators' arrest, when we were not intimidated by their attacks on us for using the Internal Security Act. We refused to yield. So they went on a vendetta and a crusade. They got the American Bar Association of the City of New York to come here and did a cursory talk around and came out with a report. So we are intimidated? Now, the SDP, through its Secretary General, Dr Chee Soon Juan, has endorsed these allegations, cleverly using - so he thought - what Francis Seow and Christopher Lingle said at the alternative panel discussion at Williams College. He did not utter these words. He just happened to be present. But he denied other things which were untrue like chewing gum with a $1,000 fine or smoking marijuana carrying the death penalty. That is untrue. There is a Latin tag which says expressio unius est exclusio alterius. When you list out the items which you say are untrue, by implication, all the others are true, because you have brought your mind to bear on it. The trouble with him is that he is too clever by half. He always forgets what he said in his last letter. But it is not Dr Chee we are beating up. We are beating up, in the argument, the people who want to make use of him. Can he change this system? Is he ever likely to get an alternative group of men to put forward to Singapore a shadow cabinet that the people could vote in? Is anybody of any quality joining him since his hunger strike in 1993? Who then are we bugging? American Human Rights groups, the American media who think that we ought to change. We have succeeded by the free market system which they espoused. We have benefitted from the system of laws, the stability which they have ensured. Therefore, we must be the ideal development country. We should not deviate and form a different kind of system. They want the whole of Asia, and eventually the whole of the world, to be ideal societies like them. They argue, they fight, they contend. They have marches where the blacks gathered in Washington, one million strong, and demand justice for all the horrors inflicted upon the blacks for hundreds of years. That is democracy. We prefer to approach our problems in a different way. We have our difficulties. We have our minorities who lag behind. We do not deny it. But our solution is to solve it in a realistic way, not by argument and debate. We will end up in riots. If Utusan Melayu and Lianhe Zaobao everyday agitate for their particular cause, would we be here to debate and discuss these things with such academic calm? Those of you too young should look at the footage of film clips, long before video, of how a picture of a Dutch girl who had been converted into Islam, sent by a British judge to a convent pending a custody suit between the adopted mother and real mother, a Dutch woman and a Malay woman, caused a riot in which the Singapore Police Force, which was largely Malays, was inert for 72 hours, and British troops had to come down from Malaya to restore law and order. But we are authoritarian. When we do this, we are like the dictatorships, just slightly better. As Dr Chee says, we are not as bad as the Soviet Union. I am grateful. They are not going to retreat because they want us to change. If we are going to change for the better, I would say we would be stupid to stay put. Will we change for the better? As the Prime Minister said in his National Day Rally speech, let us give 10 years. In fact, we may know even earlier, in five years, whether the course taken by the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, of a free rambunctious press where anything goes, brings about enlightenment and progress. Or whether our more sedate but truthful presentation of news and facts, without stirring up emotions, leads to more rational conclusions about what we should do for ourselves in the future. If we were a crook outfit, a rogue outfit, if in fact the Chief Justice is a crony of mine and all the Judges are his cronies who will do his bidding, would we bring this debate into this House and air it? We will be hiding in a corner. But the appointments made can bear scrutiny. What have we to be ashamed of? I am not ashamed of Singapore. I am not ashamed for having arrested Francis Seow or sanctioning his arrest under ISA to discover and confirm that an American diplomat had egged him on to get a group of lawyers to contest the elections and get into Parliament and break up the monopoly of the PAP. He did that in the Philippines. He proudly told our Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials how he helped Mrs Aquino to get into power. Good luck to the Philippines and Mrs Aquino, but do not do this in Singapore. We have managed our own business. We have not done so badly. We are making progress. Please leave us alone. Our people are not stupid. When they vote, they know that if they vote wrongly, and they really vote out the PAP Government and vote in the Opposition, what would happen to them. I think it is perfectly legitimate for the PAP Government to say the choice is yours. But they want us to follow their system where every step you take is contested and contended. The US President cannot pass his Budget because the House of Representatives says they want to cut some $350 billion to trim the Budget. The President cannot appoint 17 or 18 Ambassadors because the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has decided to hold all appointments hostage until there is a cut in certain items which he desires. So the PLO is unable to get $500 million. This is from the latest news I was listening to on BBC at lunch time. They have to close down their offices. Every day is a tussle between American sumo wrestlers in the legislative arena. America has survived on that contention. But I suggest to this House that we do a lot better because we are differently constituted. I am convinced that at the end of 10 years we will be doing a lot better despite all the troubles we will get from Asiawatch, Association of the Bar of the City of New York, or the Harvard Law School giving a postal address for Francis Seow. You may impress Americans with that postal address, but you have not changed the nature of Francis Seow and who he is and what he is with Singaporeans. So I have noted with great interest that Dr Chee distanced himself with Francis Seow. He did not go on with him on the same platform. He wanted to keep his distance. He did not want to be treated like Francis Seow. He knows that that carries no credits, no votes, in Singapore. If Francis Seow were a Nelson Mandela, how different it would be. We have invited him, the Prime Minister in his letter through the Ambassador, to come back. We want him back, face his charges, maximum a few months' jail. A fighter for freedom to change the whole system, intimidated by a few months' jail, which will make him into a martyr and rally the masses behind him to overthrow the system? Instead, he sends little letters to the press from the safety and refuge of America. I believe we must expect this to continue and we will do well every time we read it, and after a while, I believe also that our neighbours have taken note of what has happened, as indeed you can see from the newspapers, editorials from Bangkok, from Jakarta, that when William Safire was invited to Singapore for an open debate, he chose not to come. So was Dr Crane. I had always been under the impression that they were the ones who were for an exchange of views. Who did they want to convince? Williams College students about the future of Singapore? Or Singaporeans about the future of Singapore? That is what is at stake. So let us not forget that in the midst of this debate, we are talking about our future. We are not interested really in how America is run, but we are profoundly interested in whether we are making the right steps forward for ourselves. I believe it is not in our interest to have it said that our judges are compliant and corrupt. [Applause].