GE2025, ISLAND EDITION

Pulau Ubin's elderly voters and their election stories

- Shawn Hoo

Lifelong Pulau Ubin resident Ong Kim Cheng, 67, loves his island idyll and is happy to forgo most of the urban conveniences that Singaporeans enjoy. But the one municipal concern he brings up ahead of the general election proves that Ubinites are not that different from mainland urbanites after all.

The former quarry worker would like a covered walkway built between Changi Point Ferry Terminal—where the bumboats from Pulau Ubin dock—and Changi Village Hawker Centre, where he buys his groceries twice a week. Right now, he says, in the wake of a recent monsoon surge, he gets drenched whenever it rains.

Mr Lim, a fellow Ubinite who declined to disclose his full name, has a fraught relationship with the teeming forest surrounding his home that will sound familiar to city dwellers. The 81-year-old and his wife have, in recent years, been besieged by an overpopulation of feisty macaques, which gobble up their durians, leaving nothing but empty husks.

Neither Mr Ong nor the Lims have found a solution to their woes despite raising them with the various authorities. Still, they and about 30 senior residents choose to live on Ubin, where amenities are minimal and some problems intractable because they are used to their disappearing way of life.

For Mrs Lim, a retired cleaner, the "outside world"—what Ubinites call the mainland—is a less-than-genial place where "everyone shuts their doors and is anonymous".

Mr Ong, a bachelor who drives the occasional tourist around in his PU-licence-plate taxi van, relishes the stress-free life.

"We live day to day," he says.

Like every other Singaporean, Ubinites will go to the polls on May 3. Part of the fiercely contested East Coast GRC in 2020, the island is now part of the newly formed Pasir Ris-Changi GRC in the upcoming election.

To cast their votes, residents here will have to pay $8 for a round-trip ferry ride to the mainland—up from $6 in pre-Covid-19 pandemic times.