Therefore I would like to give him a chance. So, so that likeability centres around, centres around things like being authentic, right? That's right. Which is, which is very different from, from populism. That's right. And also demonstrating care by listening. That's right. Shutting up sometimes and listening. That's right. Things like qualities like that, right? Now, I think what l've observed, I think in this question of the fear of losing a cabinet minister in the past, having an anchor minister in the GRC, people would probably, vote for the GRC because they want to keep the minister in. But I've noticed, a maturity in voters and that they're actually assessing each candidate. So that could be the downfall of the GRC system, in the sense that an anchor minister will not be enough for the party to win votes immediately. So l'm noticing, that trend in assessing each individual candidate, all five of them, all four of them, among younger voters especially. And I think that's why, even young, even the new face candidates are being put under scrutiny. And it does seem like singing competitions helps, but, it's not the end all and be all to win votes, especially among young voters. Yeah. And actually there was a commentary from someone from PSP, you know, I think yesterday or today that actually the party has the final say as to whether you deploy a minister in a GRC or not. Right. So it's your decision. You can choose not to deploy a minister in a GRC. If that minister, for example, is very, very important, then you don't want to subject the minister to such a risky situation, risky proposition,you know. So, there are various sites to this picture. We have 25 minutes left. So l'd like to put this to the panel as well as the audience. Right. This issue of free right? It's politically expedient for us to say we want to give this free and so on. This is the government's view. The government. And I don't think it's wrong. The government has the right to ask you, look, where are you going to get the money from? And it's a financial and fiduciary prudence of the government that has allowed us to amass the reserves that we today have, that has given us the latitude to do a lot of things during national crisis situations such as Covid epidemic and so on. But other countries struggle and we don't even think twice. We have the money. It's a question of whether we make the decision to take the money out and use it or not. In many countries, you don't have the money to actually to begin with. Right. So I think the question of where does the money, where, how is it going to be funded is a very fair question. And we need to, l'd like us to, talk about that. The second issue is what you brought up housing, for example. Housing is a hot issue and it will remain so right now, some parties have talked about take the land cost out of the cost, the price for the public housing. Take the land cost, because that sort of skews the outcome, skews the number right now. How do we solve the housing problem? If you can talk about these two things, right Since we talked about GRC and so on, the principles. Let's now, let's now hunker down to talk about specifics. So first l'd like to hear your views on where do we get the money from. Right. One is obviously reserves and there are restrictions on how you dip into reserves. Number two, you can talk about, generating funds, generating income specifically for something, right? But more importantly is the fundamental question that has been raised. If we put everything for the future, what's going to happen to the people who struggle in the past and who are struggling now? What do we do with them, with some of us who belong to that category as well? We are actually at this instant overtaxing. Right. ¹ Overtaxing. That is why after giving out two billions dollars plus of vouchers, we still have 4 billion dollars as in surplus. We have no problem with that. It's a overtaxing problem, right? That's number one.
² Number two, I think PAP has said this, that this generation should finance this generation's needs with the tax revenue. But we should not eat towards the future generation. That's what it says. But look when they tax us increase the waterborne tax by 30%, 30%. 9 What did they tell us? Our population, not population. Our consumption of water will be increased, doubled by 2065. And we need to build the infrastructure. Then why are you taxing us to build an infrastructure for the future? It doesn't make sense, right? This is problem.
³ The third thing is because of fiscal expenditures are not controlled. Look at Changi Airport's Terminal 5 used to be 3 billion dollars. Then it increased to 5 billion dollars. Now, it's increased to 10 billion dollars. So the fiscal discipline lies with the spending not only for the taxation. So you want to talk about fiscal discipline. You have to talk about expenditure, right. One MRT station. How much does it cost? It costs half a billion dollars. And you are building a train line of 30 stations, 40 stations. How much will it cost us? No, but what has that got to do with not having fiscal discipline? Because they built this for the future. Because at this moment, the Thomson-East Coast MRT line have very low density. They are going to lose money by virtue of maintaining this line is given. Well, we don't know. We don't have all the facts and I'm not comfortable talking about that at this point in time. No, we don't know. We can't make those assumptions. Okay. Maybe we'll go on to the last thing you were saying. What's the last point? Public Housing. For our party, it's very simple. You want to solve the problem, you cannot crash the market. It is right. That means you cannot take off the land cost immediately for all, right? Right. But the only way of doing this is to have a segregated market. What does it mean? It means we focus on the young first timers under 30 years old. If they want to buy to form a family unit, they do not have cash because they are just at entry level. So we build a 2.5 room without the cost, it will cost less, less than most likely about $80,000, right? But when they want to sell, who did they who would they sell to? Those retirees they want to downgrade. When they sell that they have to give back the land cost. Okay That's the very simple thing. That's part of your manifesto. Yes, that's part of my manifesto. So we do not crash the market. Right, I have said this repeatedly. And people. Some of them are sceptical, but I have said this repeatedly. You can fund free education, free health care. Without having to tax Singaporeans any extra. And without dipping into the reserves, all right? About taking the difference in the CPF annualised returns. That amounts to about 13.5 billion dollars a year. Then you have the special transfers and let me say something. The PAP is speaking out. Speaking out of both sides of their mouth. On one hand it says you've got to save for future generations. But on the other hand, it says every generation has got to be responsible for its own expenses. All right. How do you square that? You know, and I think the situation is even more acute when you realise that we have a disastrous TFR of only 0.97 currently. So despite the massive TFR is total fertility rate. Total fertility rate. So despite the massive immigration over the last 20, 25 years, since year 2000, bringing in foreigners, it has actually not improved the TFR. The TFR keeps going down, all right? So you are now asking present generation Singaporeans to save for future generations who are not even really locally born Singaporeans. Now, you may accuse me of nativism. You know what, whatever. But I think every locally born Singaporean has the right to expect that the reserves which emanate from them should be used for their benefit okay. And finally, I touch on another point. And this is something that the PAP is just fixated on. It tells us that we can only use 50% of the NIRC, the net investment returns contribution. The remaining 50% must be salted away.
(salt away
verb
1. To save or preserve (e.g. money) for future use (as if food, preserved in salt).
2. Keep or lay aside for future use.)
Why are you so fixated on 50%? Why can't you use 60%, which will give you an extra 5 billion dollars , all right? And so when you combine the 25 billion dollars special transfers and you combine the 5 billion dollars, you have more than enough. You have more than enough for free education, free healthcare that wil drastically, significantly reduce the cost of living. And it will encourage young parents to have more children. So l love this debate about, the different political opposition parties have about the different policy proposals that they have in terms of spending for healthcare, in ←
Transcript
1:09:0 terms of how to
deal with public housing. As a kind of academic, I would
just like to zoom out a bit more and I would like to think, a little bit more about how other countries deal with it. Right.
I think by zooming about it, about, zooming back more, I think we would hope that in the next, last two more days of campaigning right. The different opposition parties or the PAP themselves, could better clearly articulate philosophically what is, the ideology that they stand for? What is the vision of the country they stand for, which undergirds for them proposing these particular policies? Right. So, for the People's Action Party. You could say that for them it is, they are fiscally conservative, and they are doing a lot of planning and meticulous planning for, to plan for the future, right, to make sure that the future burdens are well taken care of. Right. Whereas for other opposition parties, maybe they could say, well, that is all right. But, maybe present concerns are more important and there needs to be a trade off to be made, to be shifted. Right. To say that, okay, we need to, be more of, say, like a welfare state, right? To provide security for our current citizens.
Because if there's no current citizens, there's no future citizens, right? So I would, amid all the debate, which I totally love, right. I would hope that, the different opposition parties, the different political parties can, maybe try to articulate in one or two or three sentences what their vision of future for Singapore is. It's an excellent point, and I'm sure you'l agree it's extremely well put as well. And that's that's
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