K. Shanmugam calls Leong Mun Wai's past comments racist

Non-Constituency MP Leong Mun Wai's past remarks show that he does not put much value in the Government's multiracial approach to policies, said Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam on Feb 5.

The minister pointed to prior comments that the Progress Singapore Party (PSP) NCMP had made in the House on the Singapore-India Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (Ceca), and on social media about public housing.

Mr Shanmugam noted that when questioned in Parliament on September 2021, Mr Leong had accepted that some PSP members had found his statements on Ceca to have targeted the Indian community. "Mr Leong was good enough to say there will be some people who will think that there is a racial undertone to his statements," he said.

Mr Shanmugam was replying to a parliamentary question Mr Leong had filed on whether the Government plans to review the Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others (CMIO) framework.

He referenced a Facebook comment where Mr Leong had mentioned Singaporeans "condemned to living in HDB flat", as part of a discussion on the PSP's housing proposals.

When the comment was raised in February 2023 during a parliamentary debate on public housing, Mr Leong said his words were taken out of context, though he offered to retract them.

"If anyone has taken offence by my choice of language, I retract the use of that word, but the quote... is out of context," he had said then.

On Feb 5, Mr Shanmugam said that the two statements, taken together, showed that Mr Leong does not value ethnic integration in Singapore's housing estates.

Conversely, the Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP) is a key plank of the People's Action Party's policy to ensure that people live together and are integrated, said Mr Shanmugam. "We put a lot of value in making sure our housing estates are well managed, because we care for Singaporeans, and the CMIO is a key plank of those policies," he said.

In response, Mr Leong said he wanted to put on record that the PSP supports the EIP. What it takes issue with is that the EIP has an economic cost to minority-race home owners, he added.

"We have recommended in this Parliament that we should compensate the minorities for that economic cost that they have incurred," he said. "So that's all we say. We are not against the EIP at all."