Yahoo! Singapore News, 25 May 2011In 1994, that social compact began to move towards a commercial contract when Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Senior Minister then, made the deeply divisive move to come out with a formula that would peg ministers' pay to that of top private sector employees.
He wanted to "remove the need to justify pay revisions every few years as adjustments based on income tax figures could be made automatically each year". He was hoping that, over time, it would become a non-issue.
How wrong he was. The issue became a punching bag for the Opposition during every general election after 1994. The ground simmered as citizens began to talk of the kind of salaries the PM and his ministers were getting. The last publicly-available figures (for the year of 2009) showed Mr Lee Hsien Loong earning $3.04 million and an entry-grade minister making $1.57 million a year. Full story
