The words might well have summed up the leadership of the island state’s great PM, Lee Kwan Yew; three decades in the top job that today has Singapore as the third most prosperous country on the planet after Qatar and Luxembourg.

There is much to admire about Singapore and its 5.8 million inhabitants; nearly two million of whom filed passed LKYs body or gathered at community centres to pay tribute when he died in 2015; very much the benevolent dictator in many ways, how our nation could do with LKY’s ilk now.

We first visited Singapore in1978 en route to the UK on a working holiday having disembarked from a Russian CTC Lines’ one-class passenger ship ex-Perth that served as a national service training vessel for the USSR Navy. We have been back three times, the last this month, and apart from its tourism (especially its wonderful gardens) it is LKY’s legacy of government that excites me, not to mention its national service program, cleanliness, transport, education and discipline of law. It will not be our last visit.

There is only the national parliament – no state or local government. The national parliament currently has 87 elected and three nominated MPs and the constitution allows for a maximum of 99 MPs. There is no upper house or senate.

Compare this to Australia’s 224 federal politicians and senators plus 612 state and territory MPs (a total of 836 MPs) - and that’s not counting local government - for our 24.13 million people.

There are 27 electorates in Singapore of which 12 are single-seat constituencies and 15, in the more dense residential areas, which have multi representation of from three to six MPs of the same party or as a group of independents, one of which must represent the local Malay, Indian or another minority ethnic group. The Chinese community is the largest at 70 per cent of the population.

The column suggests, with some sarcasm it is admitted, that we should pile our current crop of MPs into an RAAF Hercules for a political learning experience in Singapore where LKY’s son, Lee Hsien Loong, is now the country’s third PM.

Some years ago the column suggested the idea of nominated MPs (in Singapore the nominations stem from the President through the executive council) which might have allowed organisations like the CWA especially or regional development committees to be nominated with a direct input into the federal parliament.

This is the far-sightedness of LKY and his People’s Action Party (aptly named), Australia so desperately needs. Readers have increasingly spoken about the uselessness of the current federal senate and in those states still persisting with an upper house, where political wheeling and dealing is rife, daily. Australians talk about constitutional change, but that’s all our MPs do, talk.

About education in particular, Janetta Gilbert, of Kirrawee, in The SMH’s letters page wrote: “When will it (the Federal Government) trust the teachers and provide adequate resources and support so they can get on with their job of educating the students in their care?” It came under a heading, “here’s an idea … let the teachers teach”. Indeed!