By: Barry Soper | Monday, October 08, 2012 6:00 AM

There'll be a lot of glad handing around the Beehive today. Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's in town and we've all been invited for a look and apparently a look is all we're going to get.

There are several opportunities for the media to get a glimpse of Singapore's first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's eldest son but we've been told throughout the three day programme that we can take pictures but we're not allowed to talk to Mr Lee.

It's the Singaporean way where the media doesn't have a say. It's a model that some of our Prime Ministers would love to adopt, keeping the muzzled media at arm's length. Certainly State Homie John Key would have loved to have been able to do that over the past couple of weeks.

The most effusive of our leaders though about the Singaporean system, other than Muldoon that is, was Big Jen Shipley. After her meeting with Mr Lee senior in the late '90s, she lamented about how easy it was to control the media in that country and how she would have loved to have been able to do the same here.

It was her battle with the media about the media that was eventually her undoing when she said she'd made up the million dollar figure of former TVNZ newsreader John Hawkesby's departure package. Clearly she'd made it up, it was well short of what Hawkesby got.

She'd been on a telly interview programme and was quoted in the green room afterwards saying she'd made up the figure, adding to the couple of journalists present that they do it all the time. In fact one of the journos was none other than our own Mike Hosking who's now hooked up with Hawkesby's daughter Kate!

So the Singaporean Prime Minister will leave God's Own thinking that our media are as tame as his, that is if we abide by the "photo opportunity only" directions we're expected to follow during his visit.

Fortunately we're not a compliant media, we live in a democracy.

Perhaps then Mr Lee should be asked why he's clearly incapable of answering questions!

Photo: Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (Getty Images)