Speech by Minister Lawrence Wong at Kent Ridge Ministerial Forum

Aug 11, 2016


Creating a distinctive Singapore for the next 50 years is an endeavor that all of us have to be a part of. When we think about what we want to do to make Singapore distinctive, how we want to build Singapore for the future, we do have to take into account the realities of our external environment, the world around us, and understand the realities that are happening in the global external environment.

When I think about this, I am reminded of the significant changes that had happened over the last 25 years since the time I was in university, like all of you. I was in university in 1991, and studied abroad in America. At that time, there was no internet, there was no Wifi, there was no smart phone and not even mobile phone. It sounds like the stone ages – that was the reality 25 years ago. I had a girlfriend who was studying in Singapore, and we were separated by distance. The only way to keep in touch then was to write letters to one another. There was no SMS, there was no Whatsapp, there was no Skype, and there was no email. Mailing letters from America to Singapore took two weeks, and you wait in anticipation for the return letter, hoping that it would come. I wrote two to three letters a week, which means there were hundreds of letters; and, that was the only way to keep in touch. On very rare occasions, we made phone calls. In those days, a few minutes on the phone could rack up hundreds of dollars in phone bills. It was extremely expensive, and my parents did not give me any money. In fact, they would not have been able to send me overseas if not for the fact that I had the good fortune to get a scholarship. No money for phone calls, and what do you have to do? You just work during spare time to get extra pocket money. So I did all sorts of odd jobs. It also happened that my American roommate and I played the guitar and we both played the Blues, and we went busking. We busked on State Street - the main street in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes, we got twenty to thirty dollars and fifty dollars on a good night. As I got older, I took on more serious jobs like grading papers for the undergraduate classes, and being a tutor for freshmen classes. All these helped me in getting extra pocket money. 

But that was 25 years ago. Since then, the world has changed many times. The last 25 years was a period of relative stability in the global market; it was a period of globalization, with many countries entering the market economy. Remember that the Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989? This was the end of the Cold War. Countries were getting into the market economy; trade and investments were growing, and economies were getting more integrated. There was rapid proliferation in technologies with the Internet, with IT, with automation and with social media, and all of us have experienced the benefits of the last 25 years. That’s why we are here today. 

But the last 25 years have also seen several major downsides – there have been challenges, and it has not been a smooth ride. For example, firstly, you have new security threats. The Berlin Wall may have fallen and the Cold War may have ended, but new security threats have emerged. You read reports of terrorist attacks almost on a continuous basis now, in Europe, in the Middle East, and even in Asia. We know that in Southeast Asia, we are vulnerable; Singapore is also targeted. Just a few days ago, you would have read reports of a group in Batam, Indonesia, planning to carry out a rocket attack on Singapore. You don’t even have to be on Singapore soil to plan an attack. That’s a new threat that we all have to confront.

Technology is improving our lives, but is also causing major disruptions, and this is quite common. We love Grab and Uber, and we think that they are the best things that have happened to our taxi industry in a long time. But taxi drivers are getting the hard end of the stick, livelihoods are been disrupted. That’s why you see protests against Uber in countries all over the world. Technology can be a benefit, and it can also be a major disruption to people’s lives. Uber is just one small example; it is affecting lives in many other industries.

You see globalisation has been a big benefit around the world, but it also has its downside. The excesses of capitalism led to the global financial crisis in 2007, and that was the worst crisis since the Great Depression. Even after eight years, countries are still reeling from the impact of the crisis. Economy is still very slow. People talk about secular stagnation. People around the world are worried about jobs, stagnant wages and high unemployment. You see that frustration being expressed in the recent Brexit polling, and you see fragmentation of politics being pushed to the extremes. You see in the news politics of anger, the politics of nationalism, sometimes even outright racism. You see these also ongoing in the American presidential election campaign. You see these in many other countries, and even in our part of the world. Just last year there was a major protest in Jakarta with thousands of people descending on the streets, unhappy with the slowing economy, stagnant wages, unemployment and high inflation. 

These are the challenges we face – that’s a reality of the world. It is a lot better than it used to be. There are many benefits that we enjoy but it has its share of challenges. As a small, open economy, we have to understand these realities because we will be exposed to the vagaries of an uncertain and volatile world. 

But we should be confident going forward, because we in Singapore are fortunate to be starting out the next 50 years on a strong base, that has been put in place by our pioneers and founding leaders who came before us.

I am going to share four areas where I think you can see remarkable changes. If you think about the plans we have going forward, there are even more things we can do to make things better.

Distinctive Global City

Having an attractive and distinctive global city is important as this helps us stay competitive; it enables us to attract investments and creates jobs for Singaporeans. Look at this photo of the Singapore River in 1976. This was the central node of economic activities in Singapore in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The river was heavily polluted, and there was not a lot of economic infrastructure, but it was bustling. Over the years, we have made it better. Look at the Singapore River today – first-class modern infrastructure and economic infrastructure. We restored the shophouses and cleaned up the river. A lot of these were done through long-term planning over the years, and even decades. The plan is not only for this area; instead we anticipated our needs beyond the area. As the Central Business District (CBD) was getting more congested, we were already planning the next phase in the 1970s.

We started land reclamation at Marina Bay in the 1970s because we anticipated that we would run out of space, and we would need more space to expand our CBD. Today, we have the Marina Bay, and all the business, commercial and recreational activities around the bay area. 

What do we have for the future? In fact, there is still a lot of potential for us to go even further and we have not reached our limits yet. Some of you may have heard that we have plans to move the ports and container terminals in the city area and Pasir Panjang to the west where we are reclaiming land. We are consolidating the ports in the western part of Singapore at Tuas, and they will operate more efficiently due to synergy from consolidation. The move will free up significant prime waterfront land which we call the Greater Southern Waterfront. It is three times the size of Marina Bay, and will allow us to expand our existing Downtown in Marina Bay to an entirely new area. It can be prime space for residential development, commercial activities, and all sorts of different activities. That’s potential development for years and decades. 

We have other plans beyond the city centre. We are planning to take the CBD beyond the Downtown area and create a second CBD in the west, which we call the Jurong Lake District. Some of you would know that Jurong in the 1960s was swampland. Dr Goh Keng Swee, one of our founding leaders, pushed for the development of Jurong into an industrial estate. Factories were started there, companies came in, and Jurong became our manufacturing centre in the west. Today, the Jurong is a thriving area with commercial and industrial activities, and we are expanding on this. The golf course up north, which we have acquired, will be the site for our new High Speed Rail terminus. It will be built underground, so that it will free up land at grade for development. The High Speed Rail will link Singapore to Kuala Lumpur; which means in the future, you can get to Kuala Lumpur in 90 minutes without taking the budget flight. The site itself will be well-connected with our domestic train lines – apart from the Jurong East MRT station, there will be the Cross Island Line and Jurong Regional Line. A High Speed Rail terminus well-connected with our own domestic train lines, and potentially the site of a new CBD surrounded by the Jurong Lake Gardens which have beautiful greenery and waters, it will be an attractive gateway to Singapore, and it will be the biggest regional centre outside of our CBD. These are just broad strokes of plans that will enable us to continue making Singapore a distinctive global city that is dynamic, vibrant and providing opportunities for all of us with jobs for Singaporeans.

Endearing Homes for All

Next, I will go on to how we are building homes for Singaporeans. This is what it used to be like in the 1950s (referring to a photo of Kampung Amber), my grandfather and my mother used to stay here. Kampung Amber is a Malay village along Amber Road where Parkway Parade currently is. There was no electricity and no water, and we used to have to collect water from the well. This was the way of life in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, the Housing Development Board came along and built homes for Singaporeans. This is where my parents moved to in Marine Parade (referring to a photo of HDB flats built in 1970s), and where I grew up. It was a world of difference. This was the kind of HDB flats we used to have in the 1970s – quite basic, but it provided high-rise living for Singaporeans who moved in from squatters and slums.

We are continuing to enhance the HDB experience. If you look at Punggol town, a new HDB town – it is very different and is beautiful with lush greenery and waters, and has amenities and facilities, and dedicated walking and cycling paths. It is a beautiful place to stay, and we are going to make it even better. Punggol is already developed - residents have started to move in, and we are expanding the town further north to Punggol North. Punggol North will be the site where the new campus of the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) campus will be located, and it will be integrated with a business park. SIT is set up as an applied university with a much stronger work-learn environment; so it makes sense to develop the campus in an integrated fashion with a business park, so that they can share facilities including incubation spaces and spaces for start-ups and entrepreneurs, and there can be more exchanges between the businesses and the university staff and students.

There will also be new BTO flats coming up. We have started selling Punggol Northshore flats sitting along the nice waterfront. The first phase was sold last year, and subsequent phases will be released in the coming years. If anyone of you, Singaporeans only - are looking at buying a flat, you can consider one of these – beautiful HDB living in a new town right next to Punggol town.

If you are not in the market yet, and you want to wait a few more years, it is okay. You can wait for the next new town in Tengah, in the west. Currently, it is just lush greenery, like a forest, and we are going to make use of the natural landscape to develop it into a Forest Town. It will have a green corridor which will link residents to the Western Catchment and the Central Catchment areas. It will be a beautiful setting linked to Jurong, near the Jurong Lake District, the second CBD which I have mentioned; we are going to start selling the first batch of flats from 2018 onwards, and progressively from then onwards. So there’s still time for some of you who are going to graduate and are thinking of settling down, having a family and getting a flat. 

I know I’m at risk of sounding like a property agent, but this is what MND does. We build homes for Singaporeans. I know it’s a concern for many young Singaporeans - so our assurance to Singaporeans is we are building more HDB flats and they are in beautiful, well-designed estates, and we will always keep it affordable for Singaporeans only. So you will be assured of a home to live in if you are in Singapore and you will have a beautiful home to stay. So that’s what we can do - we have done this in the last 50 years and we can do this for the next 50 years and do it even better. 

City in a Garden 

The third area is greenery. We all know that Singapore is a Garden City. This was something that our founding leaders had emphasised, that is, to make Singapore green. We take it for granted sometimes, but you only need to travel overseas to know how green Singapore is in comparison to many other cities. It wasn’t always like that in the past. When ECP was under construction, it was not that green. But the ECP today is very different. We took great pains over 50 years, led by our founding Prime Minister Mr Lee, who made it his personal mission to transform Singapore into a Garden City - having tree-planting every year and greening Singapore in a very systematic fashion. That’s why we have what we have today.

We are continuing further; there’s scope to go further in our greening efforts. For example, we can go vertically up. We have plants and trees all around Singapore but we can be a leader in vertical and skyrise greenery. And that’s what we are doing, to get greenery in buildings and to have more vertical greenery in Singapore. There are already such buildings in Singapore, and you will see more over time.

Beyond greenery, we can also do a lot more to enhance our biodiversity. Singapore is a city-state, a modern city but you will be amazed at the extent of biodiversity we have. And we are taking great efforts to protect and preserve our biodiversity. Kranji Marshes, which is Singapore’s largest freshwater marshland, is home to 170 different bird species, including several critically endangered species. It’s next to Sungei Buloh, and that’s a huge area of natural habitat and we are making great efforts at biodiversity and bio-conservation.

Our conservation efforts are not just within mainland Singapore but also on Ubin Island. There’s a group called the Friends of Ubin Network (FUN), who are working hard at biodiversity, protecting our greenery and the flora and fauna in Ubin. In Pulau Ubin, we have a species of otters that is different from the “Bishan 10” otters. They are the oriental small-clawed otters. It’s not the same as the “Bishan 10” otters. This species is critically-endangered. So we are making efforts to protect and preserve them, and even going to build homes for them. We have set aside spaces and make sure that they are protected and safe. So in MND we not only build homes for people, we build homes for animals too. And that’s one way in which we can enhance our environment, keep Singapore green, and go beyond greenery to enhance our biodiversity. I think it’s an important part of being in Singapore. We can be a modern city, but we can also be a modern city that is green and friendly to the environment.

Our Shared Culture and Identity

Finally, the fourth area is about culture and identity. I think that is an absolutely important part of what makes Singapore home for all of us. It’s not just about economic or social development but it’s also about the cultural aspects and the soul of our nation. If you look at how far we have progressed, I think we can be proud that Singapore, as a young city and nation with only 50 years of independence, has an emerging distinctive sense of Singaporean culture and identity. You will see more and more Singaporean movies, like Ah Boys to Men, than there were 30 or 40 years ago.

In terms of Singapore music, our local bands are becoming quite popular and they are having their own reach now. When just about 10 to 20 years ago, you would be lamenting that there was a lack of Singaporean bands. In the 1960s, local bands were very good. This was before the Internet age and the tyranny of distance was much greater. We had bands that were topping the charts higher than The Beatles. Some of the local bands in the 1960s, like The Quest, topped the charts and were more popular than The Beatles. Then the music scene slowed down and it was very difficult to find Singapore bands with the same popularity.

But I think now we are seeing a renaissance, a resurgence of Singaporean music. Of course, in the 1970s and 1980s, we had our Malay rock, Pop Yeh Yeh and xinyao. We had some of these occasional blitz where we had some Singaporean content. It’s very hard because we are such a small market. We are not like the K-pop, where there is a big market, sharing the same language and homogenous culture. It’s very different in a small market like Singapore to sustain quality, local content and it’s even harder if it’s English-speaking. For the Chinese-speaking, Korean-speaking and Japanese-speaking markets, it is easy to appeal to the domestic markets in your own language. But it is not so easy to attract the English-speaking audience. But I think we are starting to see some of these bands gaining confidence, reaching out to audiences within Singapore, selling out concerts, and going beyond Singapore. And I think that is something we should be proud of. 

And, of course, you can’t forget Singaporean food. It’s distinctive and unique. Our hawker centres are wonderful and some of them have even been recognised in the Michelin guide. So it’s internationally-recognised and something to be proud of. This is culture that is uniquely Singaporean and it’s something that we should be proud of.

Heritage is also a key part of our identity. You need to know your past in order to be able to move forward into the future. A big part of heritage is in the built environment, in the spaces that connect with us emotionally and makes this place home. So you would see that even as we build our city, we are taking pains to preserve and conserve historical buildings, like the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall in the Civic District. It is gazetted as a national monument. It’s been recently refurbished so it looks beautiful. The lawn outside the Concert Hall is a public space which holds concerts and is open for picnics. Next to it is the National Gallery that was the site of the former Supreme Court and City Hall, which has been converted into an art gallery. 

Besides preserving the built environment, infrastructure and the hardware, we are also enhancing content and programming to make it attractive to Singaporeans. We’ve made museum entry free for Singaporeans. We want to make it accessible for people to visit, see, share, learn and immerse in our history and our shared culture. Of course, we should also take great pride in the fact that we have the Singapore Botanic Gardens (SBG) which is our first UNESCO World Heritage site. And it’s quite an achievement. There are 1,000 World Heritage sites in the world, which is 500 million square kilometres big. World Heritage sites are sites that are of outstanding universal value, and are worthy for humanity to preserve. I think it’s quite an achievement for Singapore, a little red dot of 700 square kilometres, to have one of a thousand heritage sites in the world. We should be proud of it. It’s a commitment for us to preserve and protect the Botanic Gardens for all of humanity, forever and ever. And that’s what we will do. 

But Botanic Gardens is not just a World Heritage site, it’s also something very precious for Singaporeans, because it was our first paktor site. Paktor means dating. In the 1950s and 60s, families would go there when they broker arranged marriages. The couples will meet there for the first time. They will go dating there and it was a very popular hangout in its time. Nowadays, people may go there to catch Pokemon, but it was a very popular dating site and many Singaporeans have special memories of this place.

In fact, in 1959, this was the place where we held our first People’s Variety Concert. We were in the beginnings of nation-building then, and were not even an independent nation. We held a mass concert at the Gardens, and that’s when our founding Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, said “Here, under open skies, Malays, Chinese, Indians will, I hope, discover the materials for a national art and national culture.”

That was the beginning of how we started evolving as Singaporeans. 50 years ago, we were just a diverse group of people from different backgrounds and with no sense of what it means to be a Singaporean. We should be proud of the fact that although we are a young nation and our national identity is still evolving, we have already developed something that is quite distinctive, an identity that is open and inclusive. Our founding leaders and pioneer generation had worked hard to develop a Singaporean Singapore. It’s a Singapore that is not just confined to any particular ethnic group or community, but a Singapore for all Singaporeans, for everyone who embraces our values and ideals, our way of life, and chooses to call this place home. That’s what being a Singaporean is about. It’s a very precious identity that we should uphold and cherish.

Developing a Singaporean identity will take time. It can’t be done in a top-down manner. It has to be organic and ground-up. It’s a process that will evolve over time and I am encouraged by the fact that there are many groups that are involved in this ground-up efforts. These are groups that are looking out for the community, contributing in different causes, helping to achieve a higher purpose beyond themselves. You can call it the gotong royong spirit, you can call it the kampung spirit but these are groups involved in wanting to make the community a better place. 

One example is a group called #SGEatWithUs. This is a group that started encouraging people to prepare home-cooked food, and bring the food together for a potluck and sharing session. So they use food - home-cooked food only - to encourage different cultures and to get together, to share, and to build stronger community bonds. This is just one of many examples. Last year, we had a whole wave of different ground-up movements because of SG50. Thousands of groups took part, each one doing their own thing and each one attracting hundreds, if not thousands of people in their own ways. And that’s what building our identity is about. It’s about organic ground-up movement and participation in society.

I’ve touched on four areas, which I think are four very important pillars of development - economic, social, environment and finally, culture. These are the four main pillars of development in any society and any country. I hope I’ve shown you how far we’ve come in the last 50 years and a glimpse of some of the plans we have going forward. These are just broad plans. They will not be realised by the efforts of the Government alone. It’s not going to happen if we’re just going to sit there and hope for it to happen. It will only happen if all of us work together. That’s what our pioneers did and that’s what we have to do in this generation – work together to realise these plans or to improve on the plans and make it even better. That requires us to unite and work together. It requires a will and perseverance to fight and overcome challenges and difficult odds.

So I will end with this picture of Joseph Schooling, who is going to swim tonight or actually early tomorrow morning. Do cheer for him because he could potentially be the first Singaporean to make it to the swimming finals and has a chance of medaling. But whatever the outcome, he’s come a long way and we should cheer for him. He’s shown tremendous fighting spirit just to be at the stage together with Michael Phelps and some of the world’s best swimmers. That’s the kind of fighting spirit we need to have, to make sure that we keep improving and strive for excellence, and take Singapore through the next 50 years. 

Our golden jubilee may be over but our golden age still lies ahead of us. It lies ahead of us and there are many opportunities for all of us in Singapore to work together and build a city of possibilities and opportunities, and to make this place an endearing home for everyone. Thank you very much.