Wong Souk Yee v AG
[2019] SGCA 25
filled. On this basis, the Appellant urges the court to adopt the Appellant’s
Interpretation.
75
This argument ignores the fact that Parliament, in debating the
amendments to the Constitution and the PEA to put in place the GRC scheme,
had specifically considered the risk of minority representation being diminished
in this situation, and had decided that this risk was an acceptable trade-off for
preventing a Member of a GRC from otherwise being able to hold the rest of
the Members of that GRC to ransom (see [53] above). To accept the Appellant’s
argument on this point would run contrary to Parliament’s intention by
importing into the GRC scheme a risk that Parliament had explicitly intended
to avoid, in exchange for removing a risk that Parliament had explicitly
expressed its willingness to accept. Such a reversal of the policy choice that
Parliament had expressly made strikes at the heart of the concern behind judicial
legislation, and would result in our overstepping our constitutional role. It is not
for us to debate the best policy to enshrine minority representation in
Parliament, much less when Parliament itself has already chosen a particular
model for this, with all its attendant risks. We therefore reject this argument.
The implied right to representation in Parliament
76
The Appellant’s argument based on voters’ implied right to
representation in Parliament relies on the decision in Vellama at [79], where we
said that “the form of government of the Republic of Singapore as reflected in
the Constitution is the Westminster model of government … [t]he voters of a
constituency are entitled to have a Member representing and speaking for them
in Parliament”; as well as the decision in Yong Vui Kong v Public Prosecutor
[2015] 2 SLR 1129 (“Yong Vui Kong”), where, at [69]–[70], we noted the
contention that the right to vote might be part of the “basic structure” of the
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