SINGAPORE — A day after the Leader of the House Grace Fu slammed Workers’ Party (WP) chairman Sylvia Lim’s refusal to apologise or withdraw her “test balloons” allegation as “deplorable”, Senior Minister of State for Finance and Law Indranee Rajah revisited the issue and reiterated why Ms Lim actions did not measure up to the “honourable conduct expected of MPs”.

In a Facebook post on Friday (March 9) titled "GST Hike: An Honourable Course of Conduct or Not?", Ms Indranee sought to define what she termed as the bottom line of the matter, which has been on the bubble since last Thursday when Ms Lim said that in the run-up to the Budget, the Government had floated “test balloons” on a goods and services tax (GST) hike that showed an adverse public reaction to any increase.

Ms Lim then said she suspected that if not for this, the Government would have announced an immediate hike in the GST, instead of the 2021-2025 timeframe stated by Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat in his Budget statement.

Her comments prompted rebuttals from Mr Heng, while Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam called on her to withdraw the accusation, which he said amounted to a charge that the Government had behaved dishonestly. Over the next few days, Mr Heng, and then Ms Fu, asked her to apologise and withdraw the allegation, but she refused.

In her Facebook post, Ms Indranee said it was “fair enough” for the ppposition Member of Parliament to “originally have been under a mistaken impression” that the Government had intended to raise the GST immediately.

But, she concluded: “…after the facts have been made clear by four ministers, after it had been shown that her suspicion was wrong, after she herself admitted that she may have been wrong, and after her own leader Mr Low said it is clear now the Government had no intention to raise GST immediately, shouldn’t she have withdrawn the allegation and apologised?

“Yet Ms Lim did neither. That is why the Leader of the House said this was not the honourable conduct expected of MPs.”