Friday, June 25, 2010

Typical Govt Strategy - Silent or Window Dressing Statistic

From high ranking ministers to even low ranking adminstrators, their identification tag as government officials is the typical strategy they employed when things don't work in their favour - refrain from making statement nor answer the question posed or present window dressing statistics, hoping to get away with it.

Our PM silent on the 2 recent major incidents regarding the train vandalism and Orchard flood shows us how he 'leads' by example.

There are many instants of window dressing statistic being dish out for public consumption. My own recent experience is with S'pore Environmental Agency (SEA) regarding their sleeping over the Green Movement for years, which resulted in the tremendous increase in environmentally unfriendly plastic carrier bags being used.

They responded by saying they will be extensively promoting a rebate strategy for shoppers to bring along their own carrier bags. If such strategy works, NTUC would not have been dragging their feet over it for years. (note :NTUC already has a rebate strategy but only implement it on Wed)

If rebate strategy works, Ikea would not be charging their customers for bags(which has been effective and meet with success).

But typical of government officers, they will insist on their way. So SEA avoided the questions posed to examine if rebate strategy would work, but instead answered by saying that NTUC FairPrice has saved more than 43 million plastic bags since 2007 when the rebate scheme was introduced.

They inflated the figure to make it look impressive by taking 3 years statistic. Sigh...typical of window dressing statistic. But they remain silent when question further as to what percentage is this figure compare to the number of bags issued to shoppers over the same period ? Likely the number of bags issues would be shocking figure many times over the 43 millions !

As NTUC only implement this carrier bags rebate once a week and they save 43 millions bags, how many bags have been issued for the remaining 6 days! Besides, we have not taken into consideration other big chain supermarkets like Cold Storage, Giant, Carrefour, Shop n Save......

Unfortunately they often get away with it as many people are too preoccupy with their daily routine to question statistic presented to them.

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