Administrative law has seen burgeoning growth in developing countries over the last decade or so, and we are now getting used to examples of judicial independence and administrative-law reform cropping up in unlikely places, such as Indonesia and China.
As a generalization about administrative law in Singapore, I would say that it has displayed great activity but quite remarkable lack of development. The courts have proved very unwilling to question administrative decisions in most areas: compulsory purchase, taxation, citizenship, immigration, control of the press, to name but a few.29 By way of contrast, they have been willing to intervene with the decisions of tribunals and disciplinary bodies where natural justice has not been observed. But the cases have been few and rather insignificant.
As against the atrophy of judicial review and rule-of-law principles, administrative law in the narrower sense of regulatory statute law and meticulous enforcement has been developing rapidly. Hardly anything regarded by the Government as a mischief has been left without drastic regulation: adverse comment by NGOs, lawyers, church leaders or foreign journalists;30 blocking of refuse chutes in apartment blocks; failure by the elite to perpetuate their genes; smoking in public; drug-trafficking; firearms; strikes; silent defendants; traffic jams in the city centre; crooked lawyers; traditional Malay villages (kampongs); official corruption; litter; chewing gum; and even unflushed public toilets.31
In many of these things the Singapore Government's actions have been amply and loudly justified. However, the smartness of the legal mechanisms used does not extend to preserving from collateral damage a large number of fundamental liberties. The statutes are not sufficiently smart to be programmed to distinguish between activities which are simply anti-social, and activities which may have a combination of desirable and undesirable aspects, or which may be wholly desirable. For example, restricting traffic in the centre at peak hours and the size of the car population in general seems sensible (to this observer at least), the infringement of personal liberty being marginal. The restrictions on criticism by the press, the churches, and NGOs, however, the sign of a healthy, democratic society, may (for all I know) marginally increase foreign investment, in the sense that Singapore will be perceived as a stable business environment, but the cost in terms of freedom of thought and expression, which any entrepreneurial society, let alone an open society, needs, is very great,32 unless one sees the population simply as an unintelligent resource, obedient automata, or ``digits'', to use the word often used by Lee himself and other PAP leaders.