The Singapore We Want
Thank you Mr Speaker. Sir, I would like to ask about the Concept Plan 2011. Every 10 years, we have a collective look and ask ourselves, what kind of Singapore would we like?
In the past, this sort of question would have had fairly definite answers – in the long term, we will have this many people, we will aspire to the Swiss standard circa 1984 of living. We have aspirational goals defined in material, objective and realistic terms.
Now, we do not quite have such a concept of Year X. Now, there are new rules and new paradigms. In fact, now Concept Plan 2011 does not appear in 2011! I am hoping that we will get to see it sometime in 2012. But of course, the question still remains – what kind of Singapore do we want?
But the answers are vastly different. More complex, more intriguing, yet in a way, more urgent then ever before.
Sir, each year, the Budget is the way for our country to put its money where its mouth is. To make real its dreams and vision, to make substantial commitments to plans and predictions. Budget 2012 has seen a significant shift of focus and approach to cover older Singaporeans in particular and to also include the middle- income group.
As we push for inclusive growth, as we push to improve and increase the social mobility of all Singaporeans, we should not forget that we need to keep an eye out on growing our economy and ensuring as high a employment rate for all citizens, and in the process, strive to improve job and wage prospects for all.
In laying out its vision for the concept, the Minister for National Development had pointed out the five key ideas below:
An endearing home where people have a strong sense of belonging to Singapore.
In a sense, these five have always been the key issues for us – economy, work, happiness, prosperity, progress. But moving ahead, I ask the government to consider three key changes that needs to be taken into account for the future.
Sir, one key thing I feel we ought to do is to take a broader, more enlightened and tolerant stance in policy-making. It is the notion of satisficing rather than satisfying.
Let us talk about floods for instance.
First, one key piece of data provides perspective – the PUB has done an incredible job of reducing the flood prone area from 3,200 hectures in the 1970s to 56 ha today and only 40 hectares by next year. This means that only 0.0005 per cent of Singapore, or an area the size of the Night Safari, is at risk of being flooded.
Now how much risk is there of us being flooded? A typical risk matrix is that “risk is defined as a combination of probability (likelihood) and consequence, thus: Flood Risk = Probability of Flooding x Consequence of Flooding.” In other words, high risk can occur either from frequent floods that have relatively limited consequences or from rare floods that have great consequences. The first are the sorts of floods in Singapore last year, wet stores and feet for half an hour in Orchard Road; and the second, far more disastrous, with severe costs in life and homes, such as the 2005 flooding in New Orleans.
It is true that Singapore may be “high risk” under this calculation but to just trust the final number without appreciating the type of risk is a mistake. Singapore may have a high probability of flooding, but with relatively small consequences. Surely the preparedness – both in terms of infrastructure and psychology, needs to be different.
Sir, we might benefit from an alternative perspective, which is the need to increase citizen resilience. Given the random nature of floods and the near impossibility of total prevention, what level of protection do we want, and what level of discomfort can we tolerate? Is $750 million too high a price to be paid for what we went through last year?
Singapore, of course, will have to be prepared to bear with something not quite the ideal. It is satisficing – a function of our imperfect knowledge and limited resources.
Roads are another area we need to review. A commentator Eric Jaffe wrote in an article for Atlantic Cities in December last year “Many designers size a road or intersection to be free-flowing for the worst hour of the day. Sized to accommodate cars during the highest peak hour, such streets will be “overdesigned” for the other 23 hours of the day and will always function poorly for the surrounding community.”
Sir, I am a driver, and I hate jams as much as the next man. Sometimes, I curse [quietly and to myself of course] and I wish there were wider roads. But I may have to accept that this is the price to pay for larger parks, better homes and for large trees and the fantastic biodiversity we have.
Do we need to design roads that completely address the problem of congestion, or can we learn to live with some traffic jams during peak hours? Of course, we can have more roads, or we can have fewer cars. The latter seems a better alternative. Perhaps it is time for us to tackle more on the oversupply of cars, rather than the undersupply of roads.
2. From solving problems to negotiation
Sir, even as we recognize that there are increasingly tighter limits for decision making, the process of how decisions are reached must change. I must say that I admire the assorted “political watchers” and “pundits” who always seem to have a brainwave about how to tackle issues – while the rest of us, opposition MPs included, work the ground, scratch our heads and hold our residents’ hands as we try and work through seemingly hopeless situations late into the night at our MPS.
Some problems are really intractable. And once decisions are made, rules are set, the cost of opening up the discussion, of undoing what has been done – that is not easy. Sir, our policies are blunt instruments by and large – they do mostly good, but they can also be a little hard to a very few.
Taking a micro- very micro-view, a mutual gains, negotiation effort, can help. For example, parking problems in any private estate. Let me relate what happened in one of the private estates in my constituency. Many residents were upset as parking spaces are limited, and whenever people try to sneak into an illegal spot, the traffic police are called and summon issued.
Perhaps it was due to intolerance, inconsiderate parking; perhaps due to new residents who moved in and did not know other long time residents well enough and so ties with community and neighbors there were not so strong. Perhaps all that was needed was for everyone to seek to understand each other’s perspectives.
What I did was to round them all up and together with my grassroots leaders, engage all in a few dialogues initially via email and then a face to face meeting at one of the owners’ home.
We shared openly the issues at hand, implored all to listen and better appreciate and understand each other's perspectives - that there was no right or wrong. But we all agreed that as a community, we could take the first and most important step to help solve our own local problems. So, we drew up a list of ground rules for these residents to agree and adhere to.
So, calls to Traffic police will only be made as a super last resort and also by the internal neighborhood committee. We exchanged and collectively drew up this set of rules. We hope to implement these by March and we will in fact be having a street party soon amongst the residents there in that street and I look forward to joining them at this street party soon, on 10 March. The solution is nothing new – I told them this was called ‘neighbourliness’!
I adopted the same approach with another group of residents in another private estate, also regarding parking issues about a year and a half ago and thus far, the outcome has been positive and the neighborliness spirit better than before.
Sir, we have a background set of rules and regulations designed for parking offences – but to enforce them, all the time without regard for nuances of relationships and interests at hand is unhelpful. Besides, if we call the traffic police out for every little disagreement, I can imagine the state of the Home Affairs Budget the next year!
Likewise, lift upgrading. Some flats are designed such that to provide full lift access, it creates 'problems' for others such as blocked views. I engaged each block of residents who are affected to have dialogues with them, explained and hope as a result all of them have a better appreciation of the problem and difficult issues confronting the desire to provide full lift accessibility for all residents in their block. I think I have about 8 such blocks requiring 8 separate sessions.
In some cases, I had to have 2-3 follow up dialogues. It is time-consuming but it is necessary and useful. I do not know if it will all turn out well - they are all different and some are still pending but we would want to work out some solution which will not satisfy everyone but which they will all hopefully understand.
This is what I call satisficing – some satisfaction, some sacrifice. And I think by and large, we are understanding and reasonable when we are engaged and have all the information needed to make decision.
With this negotiation and open conversation concept, we can also make the point, without moralizing, that Singaporeans can take ownership, responsibility for things which they are accountable for, It could be about pet ownership abandonment, leaving dog poo all over the place, leaving a disused bicycle in the void deck, high-rise littering, parking properly, giving way to elderly. We make mistakes, we admit them, we apologise and we help each other along.
3. Hard infrastructure and the limits of growth
Sir, the Singapore we want can be created in our minds and hearts, but the reality is still some some 700 square km we have to work with. Sir, the URA takes 6.5 million as a planning parameter. We are not yet at 6 million and already feeling the heat. We are cheek to jowl, and fighting and scrambling for what is yours or mine – jobs, homes, a seat on the bus.
At the same time, the “community” approach that has served us so well in the past may not work now – as we develop discrete and fragmented identities – it has recently become a zero sum game, in part borne out by a sense of deprivation at the rising inequality. Sir, inequality is an insidious and creeping problem and I will address this more fully in my MCYS cut. In my mind, if we do not reduce this scourge, it will poison everything else that we do.
But for now, I want to concentrate on the notion of limits. Are we reaching the biophysical limits of growth and do we want to stop at a certain point?
This is an important question because end of it all, we come back to the most important question: what kind of Singapore do we want? This Government through this budget, has made some significant moves and signal its intention to have more inclusive growth and build a more inclusive society. It is and will continue to be work in progress.
The limits are biophysical as I have said, but in a sense they are also a function of the complexity of society today – not just in Singapore, but the world over. In the analysis of the Challenger tragedy in US, in the Enron collapse, and in the recent Western financial crisis, we see the fragility of complex systems. There are, what Yale professor Charles Perrow called “normal accidents” – accidents caused by the way minor events interacted to produce major disasters.
“Normal” does not mean routine or frequent, it just means that it can occur within the normal functioning of a complex system – as journalist Malcolm Gladwell says, when accidents of these sort happen, there is “no one to blame, no dark secret to unearth, no recourse but to re-create an entire system in place of one that had inexplicably failed.” Well, he is wrong about the lack of recourse of course – the most obvious and yet most difficult – is to recalibrate our response to disasters.
Sir, I have spoken about the need for resilience above. I was trying to come up with a figure – is $10 million enough to grow a stiff spine? Twenty? Thirty? A billion dollars – the same amount we spend on a new garden by the bay? Sir, how do we ensure a good response to a crisis? Given what I said earlier about over provision, I hesitate to name a figure.
Sir, the main reason for not having a figure is that this sort of policy needs to be embedded within many others. And I feel, in fact I know we are going in the right direction. For sure, there are still many moves and policy refinements and overhauls that will come up going forward. I have in my address highlighted some of the aspects that need to be studied in greater detail.
Sir the kind of Singapore we want is a rationally imperfect, complex one, in which accidents will happen, and which satisfaction is mixed liberally with sacrifice. Sir, it is not a platonic world, but it is our home, and if no homes are perfect, at least ours will be one that is warm and safe; and where we are all part of a family.
Sir, I support this Budget.
