Questions have become very political

I was quite disappointed with some of the questions thrown by the MPs in parliament because any one can see that some of the questions are GE questions and are just repetition of the answers already given in the written form. Some thoughts:

1. Certification of payment is different from approval of payment. Certifying a payment just means that the OIC is certifying that goods / services have been delivered so payment can be made. AGO audit did not uncover any instances of mis-certification of payment
   
2. Comparing the cost of the PAP town council system against their system is comparing apples vs oranges. The PAP town council system is established, used by many town councils and have economies of scale. If you need to build a system from ground-up and its only used by a couple of town councils, obviously it's going to be more expensive. Moreover, with all that talk, that company that manages that town council system did not even make a bid. The comparison is useless.
   
3. There was only one instance of overpayment which was acknowledged by the chairman of WP. Just because a system is more expensive than the other doesn't mean that they are being overcharged.

It's precisely due to these kind of thinking that have driven down the cost of technology products. Everyone think that systems are easy to build and should be cheap. Well... My challenge to them is to ask them to build a cheap system and get a good third-party quality and security team to scrutinise the system.

Quality doesn't come cheap. Missing functionality is different from quality of the system.