Speech by SMS Desmond Lee at Green Thumbs 2016
Sep 24, 2016
A very good afternoon, we have very good weather today, and lots of people here at the Green Thumbs at Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park.
Our City in a Garden Journey
Most of us as we drive, or you take a bus, or when you walk here, you would have passed many of our majestic rain trees and beautiful Bougainvilleas along our streets. And certainly in this park, you can see the greenery pervading all around you. We’ve come a long way in our journey to become this City in a Garden.
Our greening journey these past 50 years was not an easy one, and there were competing needs in the early days – needing to build good homes to house Singaporeans, creating new jobs, developing industries. But our founding Prime Minister, Mr Lee, made the deliberate effort very early on to make and to weave greenery into the nation-building DNA of Singapore, right from day one. And that remains in our DNA to this very day.
Landscape Professionals – the Backbone of our City in a Garden
Each of you, and your predecessors – the pioneers of our landscape industry – played a very important part in this journey. And you will continue to play that important role in the years to come as the backbone of our City in a Garden.
Each of you is highly skilled in your own domain. Your skills were on display this morning during the various competitions throughout the park. I was particularly impressed by the diversity and high standards. I am very encouraged to see young Singaporeans taking part in landscape design and landscape horticulture.
But as our garden grows, so must our gardeners. We can upskill, become more productive, and therefore be better rewarded for the important work that we do in our City in the Garden. The Government is committed to supporting all of us.
Last year, we launched the Progressive Wage Model, or PWM, for the Landscape Industry. And this PWM is meant to help Singaporean landscape workers improve their skills, pick up new ones, and see their incomes grow in tandem with their capabilities. That is the intent of the Progressive Wage Model.
We are encouraged that about half of our Singaporean workers in our sector have already gone for training to acquire more advanced skills. This would certainly not have been possible without the strong support of our landscape employers.
Let us push ahead, and try to have all of our local landscape maintenance workers upskilled by June of next year, so that more of them can benefit from our Progressive Wage Model. So, targeting for next year in June, it is a big target, but I think it is doable, let us work together – industry together with NParks, and get this done.
Now while we upskill our local workforce, we also need a more productive foreign landscape workforce. I am happy to share that the Landscape Industry Association of Singapore (LIAS) and BCA have recently developed a new pathway for upgrading foreign landscape construction workers, and we should be able to announce this early next year. So for those of you in this sector, please keep a look out for this. By early next year, we will announce this pathway for our foreign workforce.
The Future of Our Landscape Industry
As we strengthen the professionalism and capability of our landscaping workforce, we also need to evolve and transform the way we green. The world is going to be quite different in the next 50 years, as it was in the last 50. But the transformation and the change will be even greater. There are new technologies are on the market; new business models and innovative ideas will change how things are done – all around the world, including in Singapore.
So the challenge for us is how to green more productively and effectively - that is, how do we do more with less, and maximise the use of smaller spaces. What is that game changer that we can leverage on, in order to achieve this seeming change in paradigm.
By using technology, by automating and mechanising, we can also create new niche areas and certainly opportunities for our Singaporean landscape professionals, especially our younger ones. The first stop in my visit to Green Thumbs was to meet many young students from La Salle, from ITE, our polytechnics, from some special schools, all using their green thumbs to put what they learnt to good use, in a practical way. And we see them flourish as they get more involved in landscaping. These are not easy to achieve, but we are here to walk this journey with you.
In 2013, a few years ago when I first joined MND, I announced the Landscape Productivity Grant, or LPG, which is a co-funding scheme that helps our landscape companies to defray the cost of purchasing equipment. The LPG must be seen in the context of a whole stream of things that NParks and LIAS do together with the industry to help us stay on top of the game. So I understand that NParks will organise some trips to bring some of our landscape industry partners overseas to see some of the best-in-class technology and business models. When they come back, the partners can then say ‘I would like to consider this kind of equipment, this change in business model – in the way we do things’, and then they will get help from the LPG to fund the purchase of some of these high tech equipment, that can help them do value added work, and then we also provide the training for them.
The take up for the scheme, the LPG, was very encouraging from 2013 to today. Since then, we have committed $3.6 million to support more than 50 companies in our sector. These companies were able to buy productivity-improving machinery such as wood chippers, ride-on mowers and tractor-mounted hedge-trimmers. You may not be familiar with this, unless you are in the industry, but you see the equipment at work, and you compare that with the traditional way things used to be done, and you see the tremendous transformation in the effectiveness of the work in this sector. Each of these machines that I just articulated earlier reduces the time needed to complete a task by at least half, if not more. For instance, you have a wood chipper allows landscape companies to deal with landscaping by-products on site, such as leaves, branches, tree trunks even, without needing to bring them and transport them elsewhere to process.
Now, the wood chipper has already been on the market for a number of years. There are leaders in the industry that have gone even further, by using this grant to invest in the newest technologies on the market. One example I give is Ho Eng Huat Construction Pte Ltd. They did their research, and were in fact the first in Singapore to buy a wireless remote mower. The machine is remotely controlled by a trained operator. In the past, they needed six workers to manually mow all the lawns. Now, the same work can be done by one single trained, Singaporean, tech-savvy worker.
These new technologies can change the nature of landscaping careers. It allows our professionals to move into higher value-added functions, and also makes the workplace safer since operators can work with some distance.
I am pleased to announce that we are enhancing the Landscape Productivity Grant even further so that more landscape companies can benefit. Now, a couple of ways.
First, we are topping up the grant by another $3 million, because the uptake is good, we want people to invest more. It is not just increasing the grant, but we are secondly, tripling the funding cap from $100,000 to $300,000 per company. This will allow companies to purchase better and more-productive machines. Now third, of this $300,000 assigned per company as a cap, we will set aside $100,000 out of the $300,000 granted to each successful company for the LPG for innovation projects. Not just machinery, but in innovation – allowing them to collaborate, industry with academia, or other industry partners, to come up with new solutions altogether. You buy equipment, but we also want you to invest and innovate, work with industry partners, work with academics and transform the whole industry. So that we are not just a City in the Garden, but a leading light in the world for green technology and greening solutions.
Last and most importantly, we will now allow companies to hire-purchase equipment, rather than to buy them outright. This is because we understand that even with a grant, some equipment are be very expensive, especially one that can transform the productivity matrix altogether, and not all our industry players, especially our smaller members, not all of them can afford the upfront cost. So by funding by higher-purchase, co-funding, that will help in the uptake of technology. I encourage all to tap on the enhanced LPG, so our sector can make greater strides in productivity.
Safeguarding Lands for our Nurseries
Before I end, I would just want to address concerns raised by our nursery operators. I understand that there is some anxiety as some of your leases may be coming to an end, some as soon as early next year. Land in Singapore is scarce, everyone wants land, and there are a lot of competing needs.
But we know how disruptive it can be to move a business. So I have asked NParks to work closely with LIAS, to extend your leases as much as we can, to minimise the disruption. I am happy to announce that leases of nurseries in Sungei Tengah as well as Neo Tiew Crescent will be extended to early 2019.
This extension will give you more time to bid and move to new sites, so take this time to make the move and settle in. We have set aside a good amount of land for long-term nursery needs. We are a City in a Garden, and a City in a Garden needs good nurseries and high value-added ones. These parcels of land will be launched in phases from mid-2018 onwards, and this process will be managed by NParks, and we will work closely with our nursery sector. NParks will brief you on the details very soon. We are able to do this because of this close partnership between NParks, with LIAS, with all of you, to make this happen.
Let me end by saying that our City in a Garden vision cannot be achieved by the Government alone, obviously. It needs a whole-of-community effort, partnering with industry, partnering with community gardeners, and with that we will make this flourish for many years to come. Thank you.