Speech by Minister Desmond Lee at the MND Family National Day Observance Ceremony 2022

Aug 8, 2022

Colleagues from the MND Family, good morning to all of you.

It is good to see so many of you here, joining us in person. And to our colleagues are who tuning in virtually, greetings to all of you too. Let me start by greeting all of you and wishing you all a happy National Day one day in advance.

Since independence, we have come a long way, to become this green and vibrant city that we call home. We have many people to thank for this, including our MND Family colleagues like yourselves, as well as officers from the past who have contributed so much to building up the city.

We have had ups and downs all along the way, and the COVID crisis has been particularly difficult for all of us in this present generation, a big test.

Over the last two years, I recall meeting many colleagues across the MND Family who spent a lot of time and effort fighting the pandemic as part of Team Singapore. Some of you doubled up as Safe Distancing officers; I remember catching some of you at the lobby of URA Centre having a discussion while you were putting on your armbands and heading out to persuade Singaporeans in different parts of the city to take precautions and to take care of themselves.

I also spoke to some of you who were working very hard to run our SHN facilities, having to adapt and adjust frequently to changes, but with lots of stoic strength, pressing on.

I recall visiting colleagues at the BCA Restart Support Centre at BCA Academy. I saw how you worked around the clock, handling not just people’s queries on the phone and email, but also people who walked in. I saw how you partnered a very stressed industry to address the many challenges on the ground – construction stoppages, supply disruptions, manpower shortages, questions about almost everything.

I also visited HDB’s BTO construction sites, which were impacted by COVID, and learned how our HDB colleagues worked closely with the contractors and consultants to overcome the delays.

And I visited some parks where our NParks officers were demonstrating how they used drones, cameras and artificial intelligence to enable Singaporeans to get out in the open to enjoy the outdoors for respite during COVID, while keeping everyone safe.

Many of you have also had to quickly adapt to working from home, which brought its own stresses and strains. I spoke to some of you about having to balance work online, and not having the ability to interact with colleagues and bosses. I also met some of you who had to deal with work, plus caring for your children – primary school home-based learning, kindergarten or childcare-going children at home – and having to care for parents who could not go to their daily activities. And you pulled through all these, while worrying at the same time about the health and safety of your parents, children and loved ones, and of course, yourselves.

But despite all the challenges, you persevered, and you did your best to serve Singaporeans through one of the worst crises that we have had for many decades. And so, on behalf of the management team of the MND Family, I would like to thank all of you, for your hard work, commitment, and sacrifice. Thank you very much.

Today, I would like to share with you about some of the major streams of work that we are doing, across the MND Family. I promise you I will find another occasion to paint a fuller picture of all that we are doing and planning to do. Let me give you a broad picture.

Major Efforts of the MND Family

I talked about the pandemic and how we dealt with it.  But even through the pandemic, our MND agencies continued our work to build this endearing city and home. Importantly, even as each organisation pursues its own mission, we have also found many ways to work together as one MND Family, and support one another’s priorities.

One example is HDB. HDB is ramping up flat supply significantly, to meet the strong housing demand. From 2021 to 2025, we are prepared to launch up to 100,000 new BTO flats to meet Singaporeans’ needs – this is a massive, massive undertaking.

Through this major effort, HDB is not just building for its own mission, it is using its scale as the largest housing developer in Singapore, to help drive the transformation of our Built Environment sector. So HDB is pursuing its mission, but also driving other changes.

And this is a key priority for BCA – to encourage industry partners to digitalise, build more productively, and reduce our overreliance on foreign manpower. And so HDB is increasing the standardisation of its building components, while pushing to do more precast production locally. This is so that contractors can use more automation and prefabrication in their building processes, and our Integrated Construction and Prefabrication Hubs have the pipeline of work to sustain and improve their operations, and in so doing, help us to sustain local production.

Second example, URA. URA has worked on the Long-Term Plan Review – we do this every 10 years, to chart what Singapore would look like 50 years from today. And this is important because we are a small city state, we have to continuously look far ahead. You should check out the exhibition at the URA building or at one of the roving neighbourhood locations. Go around, take a look at the exhibition.

A large part of the exhibition focuses on future developments, on how we live, work, play and sustain. But a major thrust of the exhibition focuses on how we balance urban development with nature conservation, using case studies like the Springleaf masterplan to illustrate our approach. This, in turn, raises public awareness of NParks’ efforts to grow Singapore into a City in Nature, by weaving nature much more closely into our urban fabric.

So the Long-Term Plan Review is not just about URA and urban development, but also looking at nature conservation. And in turn if you do attend any of NParks’ OneMillionTrees tree plantings across the island, our NParks officers always mention the Long-Term Plan Review. So even though you are planting trees, why not take a look at the overall picture. We are really operating and working as one team.

Just last week, our colleagues from the Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC) hosted the World Cities Summit, where more than 60 city leaders from around the world came to Singapore, shared ideas and best practices on building liveable and sustainable cities, and also looking at what Singapore is doing.

The learning that we gather from other cities informs our agencies’ work in turn, such as URA’s city planning efforts and HDB’s public housing programmes; you see the linkage. The Summit also helps to connect our local companies in Built Environment with these city leaders from abroad, to explore business and collaboration opportunities, which supports BCA’s industry development efforts.

All these examples show that we can multiply and amplify one another’s efforts when we work together as one MND Family. And when we can do that well, we can then do that with the rest of the government and operate even more seamlessly as whole-of-government, not just pursuing our own organisation’s goals, but also proactively supporting one another, so that we can have a much greater impact as an MND Family.

And there are plenty more examples from other agencies, such as CEA and the real estate agencies. Whenever we attend a CEA or real estate agency event, like I recently visited Huttons for their annual congress, we took the chance to share about what MND is doing, share about what the whole-of-government is doing, and we hope that the real estate agents amplify the message, and in turn also bring feedback from their clients back to us.

Or whether it is MSO’s work on municipal issues which cut across almost every agency in government. Or the programmes of Gardens by the Bay; you visit Gardens by the Bay and you see a big thrust they are pushing on sustainability, and of course, nature-based solutions.

Minister's Award Winners

It is therefore fitting that this morning, we celebrate 15 teams of our colleagues who have received the Minister’s Award. They have embodied the spirit of collaboration and partnership that I talked about, and adopted innovative approaches to push through new initiatives that support MND’s mission.

Let me just briefly highlight a few examples. First is URA’s Long-Term Plan Review, which I mentioned earlier. Over the past year, our URA colleagues and partners engaged more than 15,000 Singaporeans, as well as many public agencies, to formulate planning strategies for our future city.

Next, BCA worked closely with industry and union partners, in a tripartite collaboration to refresh the Built Environment Industry Transformation Map. This sets out a systematic roadmap for partners across the value chain to work together, and make the industry more integrated, productive, and sustainable.

HDB engaged widely with Singaporeans in launching the new Prime Location Public Housing (PLH) model, which seeks to make prime locations like the city centre more inclusive and accessible to diverse Singaporeans. Otherwise, as you will see in other cities around the world, powerful social and economic forces would tend to make these parts of Singapore a lot more exclusive, expensive – domains for the well-to-do, and this will further stratify and fragment society. So this is an infrastructure policy driving social objectives.

Our colleagues from MSO launched the OneService Kakis network, to engage and strengthen relationships with more than 2,800 community stakeholders, who can then help to explain our policies to the wider public, and encourage better civic-mindedness and neighbourliness in our housing estates.

NParks colleagues partnered nature groups and researchers on the Ecological Profiling Exercise (EPE), which uses a science-based approach to understand the ecological role of green and blue spaces across what would otherwise be urban Singapore. This helps us to better understand which spaces are the most important for nature to thrive across our island, and supports our efforts to integrate nature into city planning.

And finally, Gardens by the Bay worked with many agencies and industry partners to design the Bay East Garden, an important community space that will house the Founders’ Memorial. Bay East will tell the story of our journey from Garden City to City in a Garden to City in Nature, and will feature innovative technologies to improve sustainability.

Please join me in congratulating all the winners of the Minister’s Award.

Forward Singapore

Looking ahead, we continue to face a challenging and uncertain environment. I think all of us in the MND Family need to focus on what the road ahead will be, the bumps and uncertainties around the corner, and work together.

Geopolitical tensions has played out during the last few days, dominating the headlines. The Russia-Ukraine war continues to have repercussions across the world.

Rising costs of living, significant interest rate hikes and a potential economic downturn.

Global threats like climate change, existential for Singapore; and domestic trends like our ageing population.

We will have to address these issues together, not just across the MND Family, but across all of government and all of society.

That is why we are embarking on the Forward Singapore exercise which DPM Lawrence Wong launched very recently, to bring Singaporeans together even as we get more diverse, bring them together from all walks of life, to take stock of where our society is today, our aspirations going forward, our fears, our worries, and then refresh our social compact for the journey ahead.

Now as society changes and evolves, we will have to continuously refresh the compact, and then the policies will take reference from this. Our social compact is our shared understanding across society, of what our roles and responsibilities are toward one another, and how different groups should contribute.

Now it is not just about what the government or what MND or any agency needs to do, but what we as individuals should do, families, corporates, professional bodies, secular and religious organisations, community groups, and more. Across different segments of our society, and across different generations, thinking not just of our interests today, but also the long-term interests of Singapore and future Singaporeans.

Now, during this COVID crisis, we relied a lot on our reserves. In a way, the reserves are savings by our earlier generations, whose practice and discipline we continue to this day.

And we ask ourselves, why did our pioneers and earlier generations save when they had so little for themselves in the first place? That is because there has been a social compact all these generations set by our forefathers, that we will not use the resources just for ourselves, but keep them for generations not yet born. And that is a powerful conviction driven by a social compact forged many decades ago.

So in turn, it is our responsibility to take stock of where we are, and remember this is a social compact and not social contracting. There is a key difference.

Now, how will the Forward Singapore exercise take place? It will be organised around six pillars so that we can wrap our heads around various discussion topics: Empower, Equip, Care, Build, Steward and Unite.

Due to the broad scope of our work in the MND Family, I am glad to say we will be supporting every pillar in some way. But it is the Build pillar that we are most responsible for, and that we will help to lead, to renew our social compact on issues like our homes and housing, and the growth and development of our city; the use and rejuvenation of our land, our green spaces, our memories and so on. Remember the Build pillar is not just about infrastructure, about brick and mortar.

We will partner Singaporeans closely, to crystallise what more we need to do, and chart the way forward.  Because we stand the greatest chance of success when we can bring everyone on board and work as one; easier said than done, we will have to try very hard. And as we face tighter constraints on various fronts – land, finances, resources, manpower – we will face more intensely difficult trade-offs in time to come, which we need to manage together as one society, each of us making some compromises, to make room for one another, and to keep in mind the needs of generations who are not yet born.

We will soon reach out to Singaporeans to drive the Forward Singapore exercise, and we hope that all of us here will participate actively, both as members of the MND Family, by supporting Forward Singapore in our daily work, and also as individuals with your own hopes, fears and aspirations for the future.

Please share your ideas and views with us, and encourage your friends and family to do so too. Now this is an opportunity for all of us, to help shape the next bound for Singapore, set the social compact for future generations, and ensure that our policies keep up-to-date with the expectations of the social compact. And in so doing, build a better home and city for ourselves and our future generations.

Conclusion 

Let me sum up. I have talked about the COVID crisis and how we pulled together. I have talked about the broad pieces of work that we do, weaving the different strands of MND Family’s work together in harmony, in synchrony. Lastly I spoke about the Forward Singapore exercise where we play a major part not just as an infrastructure agency, but as a social agency as well.

As an MND Family, you are pushing hard on many fronts, to improve our city and home – through city planning, housing, parks and greenery, the transformation of our Built Environment, and much more. We continue to face many challenges, but there are also many bright spots out there, exciting projects that we can do together, with energy and passion.

And as I said, through Forward Singapore, let’s bring fellow Singaporeans along this journey. I am confident that as long as we work together, have regard for one another, support each another along the way, we can build a better Singapore for all of us.

So on that note, as we celebrate National Day together, I wish all of you good heath, happiness, and warmth for your families.