Opening Remarks by Minister Desmond Lee at the MND EDGE Scholarship Ceremony 2022
Jun 6, 2022
Good afternoon to parents, grandparents, our scholars, both undergraduates and postgraduates, colleagues, friends, delighted to see you all in-person.
I’m sure you are very happy to be able to witness your children and grandchildren join us today, as they take that first step towards becoming part of the bigger MND family.
If you have a little bit of time after this ceremony, we have got a wonderful exhibition at the next building at URA Centre. The Long-Term Plan Review, is an exercise we undertake once every ten years. And our aim is not to look at tomorrow or the year after. But the goal is to plan for Singapore, 50 years ahead of us.
Why? Because our pioneers, our earlier generations did it for us way in advance. The fruits that we enjoy today, many of them are no longer around to enjoy them. Or they are more senior, and today see the fruits of their labour, many decades before, for their children and grandchildren, i.e. us, to enjoy. And in turn, it is our responsibility as stewards, to plan for our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
So do go by the exhibition, it will take you about half an hour to one hour, to browse, contemplate, think, reflect and then share with us your thoughts and your emotions, so that this plan for Singapore, 50 years from now, can take shape on the right trajectory.
First, let me begin by again, congratulating our 35 MND EDGE scholars. We have got 24 bright young men and women join us as undergraduate scholars and 11 of our colleagues taking on the postgraduate scholarship.
We are very excited that you are embarking on this journey and that you have chosen to join the MND Family. This is a decision that you will certainly not regret. In fact, I think you will blossom and do well, all round. MND Family needs your diverse skills and perspectives.
In my speech later, I will tell you a little bit of our plans for the future. We hope that as you undertake your studies and go overseas and widen your horizons, or you study locally and take a sabbatical, that you contemplate what Singapore’s challenges are, what opportunities there can be, and then bring ideas back to Singapore, back to the MND Family, so that we are enriched by your learning, that your experience both locally and overseas in your studies, help to strengthen Singapore as our home, and as a future for the next generation.
So, as I promised, I will just spend a few minutes, to outline not just for our scholars, but also for our parents here today, a bit of the immediate as well as the longer-term priorities of the MND Family, so that you have a sense as you undertake your studies, what you are preparing yourselves for.
Things of course, are dynamic and will change, but some of the longer-term trajectories, challenges, opportunities that we want to seize for this one and only sovereign city state in the world, can take shape.
First and foremost of course, is housing. MND is synonymous with public housing, on many respects. We are tackling the after-effects of COVID, the impact to construction, the impact to workers. There are many people waiting for their keys, and we need to work hard to deliver homes to people who have been impacted as a result.
But beyond addressing immediate needs, we also want to provide housing for our “echo boomer” generation – these are the children of our baby boomers. So the baby boomers is a big generation, the children are the baby boomers are that demographic bump up for us. They are now coming of age, getting married and starting their families and we want to provide homes for them.
As you would have read from the papers, between 2021 to 2025, over these five years, we intend to build up to 100,000 homes for Singaporeans. And that is a major endeavour, requires us to coordinate very closely with the planning agencies and infrastructure agencies to provide for that.
But we are actually bearing in mind, the longer-term trends of society, and Singapore is changing, is evolving. In the past, multi-generational families were the norm - 3-Gen families, 4-Gen families - while we still see such families today, but increasingly we see many, many more nuclear families, 2-generational families, and for seniors, many of them prefer to stay on their own, enjoy their golden years. They want to live near their children and not necessarily with their children, because our seniors are also active and independent, having contributed to raising the next generation, they too want to have their own space and time for themselves.
So as a result, we see a greater demand for housing, legitimate demand that we must meet. But we also recognise that even in our homes, we want to reconfigure our homes to meet our evolving needs. Some of us are working from home, some of us are caregivers. And so I did announce a few weeks back that HDB is studying possibilities for flexibility in the floor plan of our housing, so that Singaporeans can reconfigure and customise their flat, for their own needs. So that is from the housing perspective, the infrastructural task ahead of us.
But beyond infrastructure, remember that housing is also social policy. Many of our young scholars would think that you are joining an infrastructure agency, that you are joining a Ministry that builds for people – that may be so.
But actually, MND is a social agency, whether it is housing, whether it is the Long-Term Plans, whether it is nature or conservation, we are ultimately in support of people, in support of society, and therefore I consider ourselves ultimately as a social agency.
There are many facets of housing. I talked about housing and families, housing and aspirations, there is also housing and inequality. Recently we launched the Prime Location Public Housing model, so that we can build HDB flats in some of the most premium locations of Singapore, they weren’t premium in the past, but today, they have become very valuable because of Singapore’s progress, because of our prosperity.
We want to make sure that those areas remain diverse and inclusive, and if we leave them entirely to market forces, as you see in many other cities and countries, they end up becoming very stratified.
Some parts of Singapore being for the wealthy, some parts of Singapore being for everybody else. Now, to fight against that, some people say that it is foolish, because in other societies, that’s just the way it is, societies become stratified. But we are determined to fight against those socio-economic forces, the invisible hand, that pulls society apart.
So what we are doing is not just building homes, we are actively building homes in order to tackle inequality and social stratification. It is not an easy policy for people to understand or necessarily accept, but we do hope in the long term, as it pans out, we start to see less inequality, less stratification.
We don’t want to go to certain areas and say this is the rich person’s area, this is the poor person’s area, this is the middle-income area. We want to make sure that all parts of Singapore are inclusive.
And that is why out of the 9,000 homes that we are going to build in front of Sentosa in Keppel Club, two-thirds of them – 6,000 out of 9,000 will be good quality HDB homes that will be affordable on first sale, and affordable all throughout its lease. So that is housing and tackling social inequality.
Then there is housing and active ageing. We recently launched our Community Care Apartments, with housing and care coming together, housing and active programming, we are doing more. We have the Yew Tee integrated development, following Kampong Admiralty, where we put senior housing on top of a whole suite of services – food, care, healthcare, gardening options.
And then there is housing and helping the low income achieve social mobility. MSF and MND are coming together to bring ComLink as an engine of social mobility to help the lowest income Singaporeans living in rental housing.
So in rental housing, we have some of the lowest income Singaporeans who may be struggling with certain challenges, they live in rental housing, but we don’t want it to be just a home, or a flat, or infrastructure.
We want to assure the families, who need a bit more assistance that housing comes with social support, and with a whole mechanism that is coming in place, we will help these families and their children achieve stability in their lives, then be able to stand on their own two feet, achieve self-reliance and ultimately social mobility. If not them, if not their children, their grandchildren, to be able to see opportunity, to grasp it and to rise.
We have housing and preventive health, we have Queenstown Health District, which my colleague Kiat How is leading with some colleagues. We are looking at how we can design future HDB flats and inject infrastructure and thoughtful planning, coupled with good programming, so that our homes can be places for preventive healthcare.
Where we can exercise regularly, where we are incentivised to make healthier food choices, to have the programmes there to keep us active. We want to be a society where we are healthy, rather than a society where we take care of people who have fallen very sick. We need to do both, but better tackle health issues upstream rather than downstream.
And then there is housing and sustainability. You know that the weather is getting hotter and hotter and the rains are getting more torrential. We need to make sure that public housing, where 80 per cent of Singaporeans live, is green and sustainable. So we are actively putting in measures to make our homes a lot more energy efficient, smarter, and contribute to climate action and contribute to a brighter future for Singapore through the Singapore Green Plan.
Now, all these are very significant endeavours and that is why you can see that MND policies are not just about infrastructure and buildings and roads, but it is really about society, it is about people, it is about planning for society in future. Nevertheless, to be able to achieve this, we must have a solid foundation to build on.
Our built environment sector – our developers, architects, builders, suppliers need to form a strong value chain. So that we build our homes, build our estates, and grow our parks in a sustainable way. Some of your children will be joining BCA. They will be actively involved in transforming the entire construction industry, end-to-end, using technology, 3D modelling, and automation in order to push ahead to make our sector much more manpower-lean, less reliant on foreign manpower, and create better jobs for Singaporeans.
Over time, we will see our sector, much leaner, much more productive, much more high-tech – a sector that can power our infrastructure plans and goals for Singapore in the years to come.
Some of you will be joining us because you have a deep interest in nature and conservation. Some of you will be joining us in NParks, Gardens by the Bay and so on. And you have a love for nature and greenery. I think it is a good place to be in, in the MND Family, because here, national development is not just about buildings. It is about integrating and striking the fine balance between development on one hand, and conservation on the other.
Look at all the other countries in the world. We are a sovereign city state. One city - and the city is the country. Other cities can place all the other necessities that you don’t like far away from you. Your incineration plants, your waste disposal, your airports, your seaports. Look at any other cities in the world. they put these undesirable necessities far away from the cities, far away from where people live.
But in Singapore, we have no such privilege. Everything that the country needs to fully function – even if we don’t like to live near them – has to be within the boundaries of the city.
How do you strike that kind of balance, how do you deal with such intense challenges, and at the same time, be able to have a City in Nature? How do you have primary and secondary rain forests, mudflats and mangroves, rocky shores and intertidal floral and fauna - all within this very small city-state called Singapore?
And so if you’re involved in nature, and if you’re very passionate about biodiversity then join us and see how we strike this uniquely Singapore balance which we call City in Nature – be able to intensify greenery, be able to protect the plants and animals that live and thrive in our city, and then be able to live not very far away from such beautiful green and blue spaces.
And so, if you join us in URA, and some of you are Planners coming to join us in URA, you will be involved in coordinating and planning for all of this, both now and in the future. You will be involved in helping us to plan, 50 years ahead of us, plan in the shorter term and mid-term, and also be able to balance all the needs that Singaporeans have. Housing, recreation, mobility, work, ageing, education, religious needs and so on and so forth, within Singapore.
And strategies that you will develop to maximise and intensify the use of land, as you see in the exhibition next door – co-locating facilities together, so that you maximise the use of space, intensifying our buildings, so that you make good use of limited land, go underground and exploit the underground, so we free up space above ground for important things that Singaporeans want.
Redevelop brownfield sites like take over golf courses, and redeveloping those golf courses for housing and other needs; reclaiming land, including the potential of reclaiming parts of the south east. The Long Island plans are being developed as we speak, off East Coast Park, to reclaim land, in order to create opportunities for Singaporeans, but also better coastal protection so that Singapore is ready for the onslaught of climate change, when sea levels rise, Singapore remains safe.
Now all these are things that you will do, if you intensify and make good use of land in Singapore and be able to achieve our aspirations for our future generations.
Let me just end off by saying that apart from what I’ve just said, there are many other pieces of work that MND is doing.
Whether you are interested in addressing the daily pain points that Singaporeans face, through the work of the Municipal Services Office; or helping the real estate sector to transform, through the work of the Council for Estate Agencies; or helping to look far ahead and research and study Singapore’s challenges in the future, and also study ideas that other countries have put in place in order to bring them back to Singapore, the work of the Centre of Liveable Cities – all these are opportunities that your children are involved in, and I’m sure you will be proud of their contributions in many years to come.
So in closing, I welcome all our scholars onboard to the MND Family, I wish all our postgraduate colleagues, happy sabbatical. But I just have one request for all of you. Please keep in touch with the MND Family, through your studies, please enjoy being overseas, or if you are in Singapore, please enjoy your time as a student again. Refresh, energise yourselves, and be ready to hit the ground when you come back to MND for an exciting career ahead of you.
But in the meantime, keep in touch with us, your colleagues will be dropping you a link and from time to time, if you have ideas and issues you want to raise, please connect with us, so that when you graduate and come back, you will be familiarised with the challenges that we face and the future work that we are undertaking.
On that note, MND family congratulates and welcomes you, and I wish you all the best as you pursue your studies. Thank you.