highcirrus
I agree totally – maybe the interviewer(s) should have asked these questions, rather than give LKY a further platform for an easy bash at the pilots. I’d be interested to see the same subject matter come up in an interview similar to the recent BBC Hard Talk interview with Tim Sebastian when the SM showed himself to be as churlish, brittle and petulant as ever, when called to account (this time over Singapore’s own “royal” succession).
I’m sure Sebastian would have a field day pressing him to explain why his following words do not clearly indicate that it is he who is playing the game of bluff and brinksmanship, rather than the pilots, by threatening (again) the effective closure of the airline and it is he who is implying that he will use the draconian apparatus of his totalitarian State by again threatening internment under the Internal Security Act (bequeathed by the Brits, so it’s their fault as well as the pilots’) for the “'the same captains who were adversaries in 1980 (and who) are behind this new group”. Captain Mok, meanwhile, is mildly attempting reconciliation with SIA, in the hope of attaining a rational negotiating environment.
Sebastian would certainly be able to wring out of him the additional twin admissions that SM himself started this current “crisis” and that if the large number of pilots he mentions (the experienced captains, rather than the young cadets he talks about when he says "It costs between $500,000 and $700,000 to train a pilot"), were released from their bonds and did indeed leave SIA, he himself would start to look foolishly like the “emperor with no cloths”, or, perhaps, Nero, fiddling while the Rome he set fire to, burns to destruction. Whichever one, the unmistakable impression of an obsessive old man, from a long past era, would indelibly print itself on all our minds.
Quote of LKY’s words - 'Of the 55 per cent who will leave, I think we are prepared to see half go... or even if worse comes to the worst, all go. Can they find jobs somehow? Six hundred pilots suddenly looking for jobs?
'So let's be realistic. Let's sit down, this is not a game of bluff.
'This is a very serious game of brinkmanship we are playing. We are prepared as a government to go to the brink,' he said.
Harking back to the last time he stepped in to resolve disputes between Alpa-S' predecessor and SIA management, he said: 'I went to the brink the last time in 1980.
'I'm still here, I'll go to the brink again and clean up this problem.' – Unquote.