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17-10-2022, 03:24 PM
In the pocket of Melbourne’s CBD around RMIT, where a smack in the mouth after a skinful at the Oxford would once have been a more common prospect, you can now buy authentic Xing Fu Tang “boba” bubble tea just like in Taipei. Busy Singapore-style kopitiams have sprouted up and young mainland Chinese, in a triumph of cash over culture, are running sushi trains. With its influx of foreign students, this one-time urban wasteland — like its counterparts in other Australian cities — projects something of the dynamism of downtown Seoul or Kuala Lumpur.
Few of those foreign students spend more liberally than the 6000-odd Singaporeans who study in Australia each year, arriving from one of Asia’s wealthiest nations. In splashing their cash, they’ve contributed to the $40 billion bounty enjoyed by Australian colleges and universities in return for educating some of Asia’s brightest.
Curiously, these Singaporeans are unlikely to have been such good earners for Optus, the Australian telco they ultimately part-own. Like citizens and taxpayers back home, they help buttress the state-owned corporate colossus known as “Singapore Inc.,” which owns Singtel, Singapore’s dominant telco and Optus’s parent. No, they haven’t suddenly joined Australia’s horror at Optus’s mishandling of its customers’ intimate information: the company appears to have been cancelled by Singaporeans long before embattled chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin became a household name.
These Singaporeans come to Australia knowing their leaders back home in Singapore are champion snoopers and might like to keep an eye on them even when they go abroad. For many Singaporeans, studying in Australia gives access to the intellectual liberties fundamental to our centres of learning: open debate, pluralism, privacy, an untrammelled internet and freedom of speech, some of the stuff Singaporeans don’t get profound experience of back home.
With its Singapore Inc. ownership, though, Optus’s reach creates a Hotel California for some Singaporeans. They might be able to check out of the island state any time they like, but if they choose Optus for their digital needs they may never really leave official Singapore’s reach. There’s never been any evidence of Optus snooping for Singapore, but its critics take no chances, choosing anyone-but-Optus for their SIM cards in case the tentacles of the regime catch them doing, saying, reading or studying something self-preservation dictates they don’t risk back home.
A lot more at https://www.bannedsite.com/forum/current...gapore-inc
Surveillance has helped keep Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party in uninterrupted power for sixty-three years, and being monitored is presumed a part of daily life in the highly wired city-state. Singaporeans have normalised this intrusion, assuming their autocratic government tracks their movements, their contacts and calls simply because it can, in a circular system that advances efficiency and suppresses dissent because it sees dissent coming.
Few of those foreign students spend more liberally than the 6000-odd Singaporeans who study in Australia each year, arriving from one of Asia’s wealthiest nations. In splashing their cash, they’ve contributed to the $40 billion bounty enjoyed by Australian colleges and universities in return for educating some of Asia’s brightest.
Curiously, these Singaporeans are unlikely to have been such good earners for Optus, the Australian telco they ultimately part-own. Like citizens and taxpayers back home, they help buttress the state-owned corporate colossus known as “Singapore Inc.,” which owns Singtel, Singapore’s dominant telco and Optus’s parent. No, they haven’t suddenly joined Australia’s horror at Optus’s mishandling of its customers’ intimate information: the company appears to have been cancelled by Singaporeans long before embattled chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin became a household name.
These Singaporeans come to Australia knowing their leaders back home in Singapore are champion snoopers and might like to keep an eye on them even when they go abroad. For many Singaporeans, studying in Australia gives access to the intellectual liberties fundamental to our centres of learning: open debate, pluralism, privacy, an untrammelled internet and freedom of speech, some of the stuff Singaporeans don’t get profound experience of back home.
With its Singapore Inc. ownership, though, Optus’s reach creates a Hotel California for some Singaporeans. They might be able to check out of the island state any time they like, but if they choose Optus for their digital needs they may never really leave official Singapore’s reach. There’s never been any evidence of Optus snooping for Singapore, but its critics take no chances, choosing anyone-but-Optus for their SIM cards in case the tentacles of the regime catch them doing, saying, reading or studying something self-preservation dictates they don’t risk back home.
A lot more at https://www.bannedsite.com/forum/current...gapore-inc
Surveillance has helped keep Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party in uninterrupted power for sixty-three years, and being monitored is presumed a part of daily life in the highly wired city-state. Singaporeans have normalised this intrusion, assuming their autocratic government tracks their movements, their contacts and calls simply because it can, in a circular system that advances efficiency and suppresses dissent because it sees dissent coming.
