From the Straits Times
29 Dec 2006
WORKERS’ Party (WP) chairman Sylvia Lim found herself being stopped in the street by strangers more often this year.
They chat to her about issues like estate upgrading and about parliamentary debates, and ‘expect me to have views on everything’, she says.
She came into prominence during the general election, where she led her party’s ‘A’ team against the People’s Action Party incumbents in contesting Aljunied GRC.
The WP got 44 per cent of the vote there, making it the highest losing team and giving Ms Lim, a 41-year-old Temasek Polytechnic law lecturer, a seat in the House as a Non-Constituency MP.
Under the NCMP scheme, introduced in 1984, the highest-scoring opposition losers are admitted to Parliament if there are fewer than three elected opposition candidates.
‘I guess I’ve become a bit more hardworking,’ she says.
‘I have to put aside time to read up, to consult people… there is more demand on my time.’
She has been boning up on a range of issues, from health care to economics and, during the haze, the environment.
There have also been unexpected, even unusual, experiences, she recalls.
Not long after the election, she received a letter from a long-term inmate at Changi Prison, who wrote to say he had been praying for her since he read about her involvement in the WP in a magazine.
She found it ‘very touching’ that he was plugged into wider events outside and took the trouble to write.
They still correspond a little, she says.
There is another encounter she laughs off: A baker refused to sell her mother bread when Ms Lim was in the limelight as an opposition candidate this year.
‘I found this a little bit amusing, but a bit sad,’ she says, adding that her mother felt incredulous that the baker was turning down a sale.
Having entered the House, she has learnt more heartening lessons about politics.
Among them is not to take to heart what one’s political opponents say, especially during the heat of the election, she says.
‘I used to think, ‘How can this person say this?’ Then I realise that maybe that’s part of the whole game plan of the party,’ adds Ms Lim.
‘If I see them in Parliament, we can still talk and just be quite friendly in a way.’
But the greatest change, she reckons, has been to her previously held view that Singaporeans are a politically apathetic bunch.
‘This GE has shown me this is not so,’ she says, citing the votes and support the WP received – from supporters who gave their Progress Package to the party, to those who offered to be polling and counting agents for the manpower-strapped party.
‘It’s something that shows they do care about political participation,’ she adds.
For now, she is enthusiastic about the ’surprise’ opportunity she got this year: Be an NCMP.
‘I used to help Mr Low (Thia Khiang) with his preparations for parliamentary debates… Now, I can actually raise some of those things myself,’ she says.
‘That’s quite exciting for me.’
