In a bid to downplay Singapore’s dire economic situation, there was marked concurrence in commentary about the unravelling of Singapore’s economy by the three most significant actors in economic policy: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, and the Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Heng Swee Keat. Below we describe and analyse the development of their rhetoric as the crisis unfolded. Analysing its reception in Singaporean public opinion, however, presented a challenge unique to the case studies in this volume.

Official censorship of the Internet, media reporting and newspapers was the primary obstacle to gauging public opinion. Although the Singaporean Constitution provides for freedom of speech and expression, it permits official restrictions on these rights. In practice, the government has significantly restricted freedom of speech and freedom of the press (US Department of State 2009:2a). High-level censorship and lack of credible opposition parties in Singapore ultimately had the effect of limiting, and possibly skewing, publicly expressed opinion. Although the Straits Times (Singapore’s highest-selling newspaper), Channel News Asia and Business Times were consulted as sources of information, it must be noted that the government has a significant influence on the printed, electronic and televised media in Singapore; thus, these three news media sources could be only loosely consulted as general indicators of public opinion.

The nine speech acts were chosen based on the grounds that they addressed the main stakeholders or, in the case of the Singaporean budget speech for 2009, provided a template for other meaning-making processes. The speech acts were analysed in accordance with the volume’s analytical framework (see Chapter 2)—that is, considering their representation of the severity and causes of the crisis, the allocation of responsibility for the crisis (and its handling) and the articulation of its policy implications. In using the heuristic of the political crisis exploitation game, the degree to which the three key actors’ credibility was affected by the public reception of their crisis rhetoric is also assessed. Finally, the policy crisis exploitation game was used to assess the possibility of a shift in policy away from the status quo as a result of (un)successful framing of the crisis by the three key actors.