Policy commentary
Shorter pieces, written roughly once a month since December 2024. This is where I work out in public what I have not yet worked out in private. Some of these questions I have come back to more than once.
The questions underneath the work
Policy design
Who a rule reaches
Policy as it is received rather than as it is written. A scheme can be published, funded and available and still not arrive. These are about the distance between a rule and the person it was written for.
Participation
Who gets a say
Whose voice counts, and who was in the room when a decision was taken about them. Whether being heard is the same as being served.
Civil liberties
Where the line on dissent sits
What a society permits to be said and done, what that costs and who pays it. Two of these compare Singapore with the United States directly.
Institutions
What makes a commitment last
Incentives, funding and durability. Whether anything holds once the attention moves on, and what makes a government or a platform keep to something when keeping to it becomes inconvenient.
About Them, Without Them
Australia locked under-16s out of social media, and adults debated the wellbeing of a generation that was not in the room. The question was who got to decide.
The Silence of the Majority: Why Young People Hold Back, and What It Costs
She wanted to speak. She decided not to. About eight in ten Singaporeans take part in no civic activity regardless of what they know. The barrier is not information.
Who Gets to Tell the Story?
A Utusan Melayu executive said checking on the government was not the newspaper's role, plainly and without discomfort. What emerges is not a lie. It is a gap.
The same question, wherever policy lands
The region
A vantage, not a subject
Singapore, Australia, Nepal, India, Malaysia, Pakistan.
A CPF form at a constituency office. A voting age argued in Parliament. Nepal’s prime minister resigning in 48 hours. India’s farm unions. Malaysian media ownership.
Read separately, posts about separate countries. Read together, one person looking at the same problem from inside a region rather than reporting on it from outside.
Policy
Followed past the argument
From what a rule says, to whether it reaches anyone, to who pays when it does not.
From Chalkboards to Change asks what a demonstration policy could not anticipate. Two years later, When Protest Goes Digital returns to it by name and asks what actually moves an institution.
That is implementation rather than opinion, and it is only visible if the two are joined.
Institutions
What holds, and what does not
Incentives, funding and the gap between a promise and its delivery.
The Algorithm Decides Who Gets Heard revisits its own assumption and lands on incentives rather than rules. Talking to the Machine reopens an earlier post and finds the divide was never access.
Both end where the durability question begins: what makes anything hold once the attention moves on.