Day 1 August 8th Auckland-Singapore-London

The man at Wellington Airport sniffs at my flight itinerary. "Only two hours at Singapore? You should really stay there for longer than that!"

I have spent a few days in Singapore. It was a junket when I was working at The Evening Post in 1998. The free trip was to cover Singapore Airlines' launch of the on-flight individual video system, the one where you can choose your own film/TV show - something that is now widespread on long haul flights.

Of course this was not a subject that The Evening Post regarded as front-page news and it was widely seen as a reward for me for my work. I took the opportunity as much as I could to get out of the various functions and look around.

But here was the thing. Journalists from all around the world had been flown to Singapore at the expense of the airline, which was and is owned by the Singapore Government. I think there were about eight of us New Zealanders so you can only imagine how many people from Britain, the US and so on were taken there. On the first day there was a huge presser in this large hall which hundreds of people attended. The Deputy Prime Minister and an airline executive spoke, at length. Questions were allowed but were batted off with platitudes - no follow-ups allowed. They took maybe five questions and then the presser was closed. It was made clear that they were definitely not available for further questioning. No-one else was either.

This made it difficult for me - who had not reported on aviation matters before - to do anything but a puff piece and I found the subject a bore anyway. The rest of the time was spent on dull functions with lots of speeches.

The conclusion I came to was that this wasn't a great place to be a reporter.

Anyway while I was in Singapore on my brief stopover there, I picked up the Straits Times. The big political story was about the current Presidential election. There the Law Minister had made a major speech emphasising that the President was a head of state role equivalent to the Queen, and so could not take an active role in politics. He was speaking because some of the candidates are making it clear that they will try to take an independent role on policy matters in a country where the ruling People's Action Party has been in power since 1959 and currently holds 81 of 87 seats in the Parliament on 60 percent of the vote.

Now some of the independent Presidential candidates had criticised the Law Minister's comments. The Straits Times had given 75 percent of page three to the Law Minister responding to that criticism. This long long long article gave just two sentences to the critics. Just in case that wasn't enough, the op-ed section devoted an entire page to reprinting the Law Minister's original speech in full. And on page four, half  a page was given to the news that the Government's preferred candidate Tony Tan had been endorsed by the Tan Clan. In the very last paragraph of this half-page story, the reporter said they had asked Dr Tan about his view of the role of the President and he had replied that it was too complicated a subject for him to discuss with a reporter.

Singapore has a strong economy and a liberal market environment. Why do they feel they cannot put up with the normal rough and tumble of a democracy? Singapore seems to want to madly mimic Western-style democracies but seems afraid of giving its people true democratic choice of which a free media is a part. It doesn't make me keen to return there.