By Richard Lim

OPPOSITION MP Chiam See Tong holds his weekly meet-the-people session in the void deck of Block 108 in Potong Pasir. He sits at an old table behind a cheap folding screen that is set up between two adjacent pillars. The residents who come to see him wait for their turn on the few concrete benches nearby.

Like an old-school family physician, the man who has been the ward's MP since 1984 will take his time with each petitioner, listening to him or her, as he writes down slowly in longhand the petition which he will send to the Government on the latter's behalf.

In May last year, while Singapore was still in the grip of the Sars crisis, a group of three women, one of them wearing a Garfield teeshirt, came to see him. It was about cats.

One of the women kept six cats in her HDB flat, but was recently told by the Housing Board to get rid of them, after a neighbour whose motorcycle was scratched by her cats had complained to the board.

The HDB does not allow residents to keep cats, and those who do can be evicted. But the woman insisted on keeping her cats, and blamed the neighbour for parking his motorcycle in the void deck where her cats could get to it, instead of doing so in the car park.

The three women pointed out to a sympathetic Mr Chiam that they had rounded up at least some 30 stray cats in the area and got them sterilised, on their own initiative.

They then went on to complain about the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority's recent stepped-up culling campaign of the island's 80,000 stray cats.

These women were not alone in their complaint.

In the week that they went to see Mr Chiam, animal-rights groups had made the culling campaign a public issue, with letters to the newspapers and a joint press conference held by the Cat Welfare Society, Action for Singapore Dogs and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

They were disappointed, they said, that they were not being informed or consulted about 'such a drastic action that involves the lives of thousands of stray animals in Singapore'.

They wanted the stray cats spayed and not be put down. Their argument was that sterilisation was a more humane and effective method of controlling the stray population.

The AVA maintained that the culling campaign was part of a larger national programme to clean up the environment, especially in areas around hawker centres and markets, and improve public hygiene. It had nothing to do with the fear that cats were transmitting the Sars virus, as the animals' groups insisted that it was.

Although it launched a sterilisation programme in 1998, and worked closely on it with the animal rights groups, AVA had been culling stray cats for a long time, and still does.

While other Singaporeans were more concerned with human lives - the Sars threat did not go away till May 31 last year when the World Health Organisation declared the country free of the dreaded disease - the animal rights group continued to fight their case.

One group, the Animal Lovers League, suggested that the strays be sent to a shelter in Johor, which brought forth a response from Johor Menteri Besar Abdul Ghani Othman: 'We already have enough stray cats in our towns,' he said. 'We don't need Singapore to add to the problem. We will not allow Johor to become the dumping ground for their stray cats.'

Poor Dr Vivian Balakrishnan. Then a newly-appointed Minister of State for National Development, he had to do some quick damage control.

The whole episode ended with the AVA setting aside five plots of land in Pasir Ris for use as pet shelters. Animal welfare groups could bid for them at half the market rates.

QUICK RESOLUTION

IF YOU were to ask writer Catherine Lim how the new Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong would have handled the cat episode, she would probably say that unlike Mr Goh Chok Tong, he will treat it as so much noise and a nuisance, which he will wait out as he concentrates on the real business of making Singapore prosperous in a new world of rapid change and intense competition.

The welfare of stray cats - a 'touchy-feely' issue at best - will concern only someone like Mr Chiam.

Mr Lee gave a speech at the Harvard Club's 35th anniversary dinner in January this year, which many took to be his roadmap as the incoming prime minister.

Ms Lim, who had written a couple of controversial articles on his two predecessors, took the opportunity to deconstruct the speech and gave her take on what the younger Lee's leadership style would be like, in a piece which The Straits Times published a week after it had carried the text of Mr Lee's speech.

The gist of her piece is that Mr Lee will be as driven by the economic imperative as his father was and that, like him, and unlike Mr Goh, he will want the emotionally charged issue of Government-people relationship out of the way as soon as possible. He will not tolerate political dissent, although he will make 'small offerings that will add zest to the life of society...'

He will continue to use the strong arm of the Government to smack down recalcitrant critics, 'but at the same time, taking the trouble to justify the action through calm, patient, clear and rational explanations, to present an image of a reasonable, transparent government'.

Unlike before in the case of her earlier pieces, Ms Lim did not get a scolding for being boh-tua-boh-suay (out of line) this time. Mr Lee did not respond.

It was just one point of view, he perhaps judged, from someone who was an engaged Singaporean, with no sinister motives. So be it. He will let other Singaporeans judge him for themselves.

The cat episode may have been under the charge of the Ministry of National Development, but trust Mr Lee, as Deputy Prime Minister, to have paid it enough attention.

He did not wait it out. It was resolved, perhaps not to the complete satisfaction of the animals rights groups.

Mr Lee would have been party to the decision to parcel out land, the size of three football fields, at subsidised rates for use as pet shelters. If he were not involved in coming up with the proposal, it would nevertheless have required his approval, and Mr Goh's.

In the late 1960s or early 1970s, when the monkeys in the Botanic Gardens started spilling out into the roads to harass motorists and their passengers at traffic stops, all Mr Lee Kuan Yew or one of his ministers then had to do was simply issue an order to clear them.

And that was that. There were no emotional outbursts, except from those Englishmen who still saw Singapore as perhaps the last outpost of romance in what had been the British Empire.

At the time, Singaporeans were more concerned about food on the table - and no, Chinatown towkays sucking out monkey brains from holes knocked into skulls of the squealing animals is just an urban legend.

But Singapore has been transformed. The challenges today rarely respond to direct, straightforward answers. Mr Lee knows well that whenever he has a new policy, he has to take it to market, sell it and make changes to it if necessary if the responses demand it.

Of course, the strategic direction will be kept firm.

There will be more groups like the cat lovers', fighting for attention and space, on behalf of others and for the larger good, even if sometimes misguided, as well as groups seeking to protect and entrench their own interests.

There will also be the opposition parties: Mr Low Thia Khiang's Workers' Party is not content to stay a small player. Mr Chiam has Mr Lee's respect, but age has caught up with him and he will leave politics as he had come in, a one-man-show.

Singapore society will be a more clamouring one, and there will always be some untidiness at the edges.

That is as it should be. Singapore is, after all, a maturing economy.

In 1985, after the PAP suffered a steep drop in majority votes in the 1984 General Election, Mr Lee Hsien Loong, then 33 and a newcomer to politics, was part of the party's election post-mortem committee.

He wrote the post-mortem report which, in many ways, became the roadmap for the PAP government in the 1990s.

Mr Goh Chok Tong who, of course, had a hand in the roadmap, stuck to it fairly closely, even as he put his personal stamp on it along the way. The changes were incremental, and so were almost imperceptible.

Government has been rolled back, so that people can learn to become more self-reliant and there is room for more individual initiatives.

Contrary to the end-of-the-nation-state pronouncements by the likes of Japan's management guru Dr Kenichi Ohmae, less government requires a strong, not weak, government.

The people, the foreign talents and the cross-national corporations - all of them - still want to see and feel, clearly and palpably, that there is a government in charge, that it is not leading from behind, and that it is sovereign and accountable.

Expect Mr Lee to push for less government, even as he strives to build a stronger government which can reach out to the post-independence generation, who will form the majority of the population come 2007.

The pace of change may be quicker under his watch, for the temper of the times demands it, and it is also in his nature to move fast.

In the intensely competitive environment that Singapore operates in today, the new prime minister would probably say: 'We cannot wait for the last man to change before we make the change.'

Do not expect him to wait out noise and nuisance. Clamour is engagement, is passion, is the staking-out of a place in Singapore.

Mr Lee will see it as excitement, as challenge, and dealing with it, as the rewarding part of his job.