SINGAPORE: If elected as a Member of Parliament, new People’s Action Party (PAP) candidate Poh Li San plans to respond to public scrutiny with her actions.
“Serve from your heart – people can tell you’re sincere,” she said, on how she would handle being in the public eye.
Speaking to CNA on Monday (Jul 6) during what would have been her dinner break before heading off for more door-to-door visits in Sembawang GRC, she added: “No one is perfect, so don’t take yourself too seriously. If people want to criticise, then let them be, I can’t please everyone.
“More importantly, I must make sure my residents are taken care of.”
If elected, Ms Poh will take over former Minister for Transport Khaw Boon Wan’s seat in the five-member Sembawang GRC. She is contesting alongside Minister for Education Ong Ye Kung, Vikram Nair, Lim Wee Kiak, and fellow new face Mariam Jaafar.
READ: GE2020: PAP team led by Ong Ye Kung to face NSP in Sembawang GRC
When the 45-year-old former search and rescue helicopter pilot with the Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF) began volunteering with Mr Ong in his Gambas ward in 2018, one incident proved to be eye-opening.
Ms Poh Li San has been volunteering at grassroots activities and meet-the-people sessions since 2018. (Photo: Jeremy Long)
Ms Poh encountered a family whose flat had been completely destroyed by a fire sparked by a personal mobility device battery that exploded.
Two young children escaped death when they were rescued by civil defence officers, and the family was housed in a rental flat for about two weeks while the Town Council helped with renovations.
However, the fire also triggered a dispute with the family’s neighbours upstairs, whose flat had been damaged. Ms Poh stepped in to mediate, and a legal claim was eventually avoided and the families made up.
This took many phone calls and long hours of talking to both sides. But Ms Poh felt happy to have helped avert a bad dispute that would have affected both families for as long as they lived there, she told CNA.
“Imagine, they had just moved in about one year ago, and for the rest of their stay there, if you enter the lift and you see each other as enemies – I think that would be really terrible,” she said with a light smile.
“So I am glad that I am able to do something. And that experience also taught me how important it is actually for the community to stay close and united, and for us as grassroots leaders, as volunteers, to assist our residents when they have difficulties.”
BALANCING HER JOB AND GRASSROOTS WORK
Ms Poh’s first volunteer experience was almost 15 years ago, as a counsellor with the Southwest Community Development Council (CDC) for about three years. But her job with the RSAF meant she often travelled and trained overseas, she said, so she could not continue volunteering.
In 2017, she was invited to tea sessions with the PAP after being scouted as a potential candidate. She went on to volunteer on the ground, starting with meet-the-people sessions which she described as a “humbling” experience.
“People have difficult issues that they cannot solve on their own,” she said. “I felt like, wow, somebody you don’t know is prepared to sit there and air their challenges in life. And (for) some, you can tell, it’s really a struggle.
“So I felt like, I think I can do something, I can contribute more.”
As the vice-president of Changi Airport Group, Ms Poh is also involved in planning for the upcoming Terminal 5. Balancing her day job and her volunteer work has been “quite hectic”, she said.
“That’s why I think my hair greyed a lot in the last few years,” she added with a smile, pointing at her roots. “Time is always a premium, time is tight and my work has quite a bit of travelling.”
Ms Poh, vice president at Changi Airport Group, may consider becoming a full-time MP if she feels she “cannot cope” juggling both roles. (Photo: Jeremy Long)
To save time, she opted for long haul red-eye flights and made “personal adjustments” to her own free time. This has allowed her to spend most weekends and four to six weeknights a week at the Sembawang PAP branch.
“I wanted to plunge in as deeply, as much as possible, to let myself have a chance to experience the life of an MP,” she said of the past two years.
Her thinking behind this was: “If I can’t even do it as a volunteer – and I’m just joining Minister Khaw for all the activities, I’m not even doing the work behind the scenes – and if I cannot take it, then I think I’d better not do this.”
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Ms Poh said she has maintained a “very good balance” between her job at CAG and at the grassroots, and credited her teams at work and at the Sembawang PAP branch for supporting her.
But juggling the two roles “can be very consuming”, and she knows that it’s “not fair to either party” if “both sides are half baked”.
Ms Poh has considered becoming a full-time MP if elected, and may do so if it reaches a point where she “cannot cope”.
“Or I feel that to do my job as an MP well, because this has an impact on many, many families and many lives, then that might be a trade-off I have to make at some point in time,” she said, adding that the priority now is still to win her seat first.
MORE LEADERSHIP POSITIONS FOR WOMEN AT WORK
If she is elected as an MP, flexible work arrangements and opportunities for more women to take on leadership positions at work are some of the issues Ms Poh wants to raise.
Observing that it is “very, very tough” for women who work and take care of children, she said that “the best thing we can do … is to give them additional help”, even as she noted the many improvements “in the last 10 to 15 years”.
Ms Poh thinks more women in leadership positions in organisations can help shape HR policies to be more pro-family. (Photo: Jeremy Long)
The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that working from home “can be done”, said Ms Poh, and this would give women room to manage their time better. “At the end of the day, it’s the output, the quality of what you do.”
“The other area is having opportunities for more women to take up leadership positions, because then they are more likely to shape policies – HR policies or work policies – within different organisations to be more pro-family,” Ms Poh said.
“So that takes time. But we are a very small country, we have only a few million people – and if we want to really harness the potential and abilities of our people, we need to have many different types of support structures, both at home and at work.”
STAYING COOL IN STRESSFUL MOMENTS
As she posed for photos outside the branch office, a helicopter flew overhead and Ms Poh easily identified it as a Super Puma – the type of craft she used to fly for search and rescue missions out of Sembawang Air Base.
With a tinge of nostalgia, she admitted that she missed flying and that it was nice to be near the air base, even though she last donned a pilot’s uniform more than 10 years ago.
The pressure that came with her former job in the RSAF helped her learn to compartmentalise her time and focus, and to stay “calm and collected” in stressful moments, said Ms Poh.
She enthusiastically recounted her very first mission – flying out to sea with a more experienced pilot to rescue a casualty on a container ship, and having to keep the helicopter stable above the moving vessel.
After dropping off the casualty at Singapore General Hospital, they flew back to Sembawang Air Base with a tank low on fuel. If the mission had been extended by just half an hour, they wouldn’t have made it back, said Ms Poh.
“I think the exposure to challenging, complex situations, sometimes near death situations, has helped me stretch my patience, kept me cool. So I tend to stay fairly chill most of the time.”
When asked how she would react if a resident shouted at her during a meet-the-people session, she was quick to stress that MPs cannot flare up at them.
“You must remember, they must be under a lot of stress; if not, they wouldn’t come to you. Sometimes (when) they feel frustrated, they cannot get help after repeated tries, and they shout at us for example, you cannot be shouting back at them.
“We have to just take it and help to comfort them, and cool them down, and give them hope,” she said. “I think giving people hope is very important.”
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