An Economy of the Future that Works for All (Main Debate)

Mr Speaker : Mr Kenneth Tiong.

12.02 pm

Mr Kenneth Tiong Boon Kiat (Aljunied) : Mr Speaker, I move*, "That this House, notwithstanding the suggestions in the Economic Strategy Review on the future Singapore economy, believes: (a) in a more equal and inclusive economy, with opportunities for entrepreneurs to experiment, households and businesses to succeed, workers to thrive, and ideas and innovation to flourish; and (b) in an economic engine driven by dynamic local companies, healthy domestic demand, and Singaporeans and Singaporean capital venturing abroad."

[(proc text) * The Motion was also entered on the Order Paper under the name of Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim. (proc text)]

Why this Motion? Why now?

Singaporeans face a uniquely challenging set of circumstances. The major model of Singaporeans getting on the economic ladder has been jobs. Without a job, you are not able to afford renting a place or buying a Housing and Development Board (HDB) flat.

Without your own place, it is difficult to think about having children. And for these children, few dream of being entrepreneurs with nine in 10 working here, becoming someone's employee. For almost all of us, the jobs ladder is the main route up, with not many Singaporeans becoming entrepreneurs.

The reasons given are variously these: that the market is small and the cost of business daunting, that they lack social safety nets for risk taking, that not enough true growth capital exists for all the private wealth attracted here, that the biggest competitor to Singaporean startups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the Singaporean Government-linked Companies (GLCs). These we have the power to influence.

Property has been a lottery ticket to many Singaporeans, but with asset prices as high as they are, it is highly questionable if a new generation can follow this model without parental support, given initial conditions of wages lagging asset prices and declining employment prospects.

The persistence of property as a wealth vehicle breeds a rentier mindset. One generation's ideology hardens into the next generation's psychology. As inter-generational transfers come to dominate socio-economic status, they threaten to entrench inequity.

Let me recap why our job structure is threatened, though I suspect this is not news to many.

Our job structure rests on being the best place in the region for foreign companies to base themselves. We host many large companies but build few of them.

Singapore has three companies in the Fortune Global 500. All three are commodity traders. Two were founded elsewhere and moved here. Korea has 13. Taiwan has six. Theirs make semiconductors and ships. Theirs were built by their own people. Ours came here and can as easily go.

At the high value end, tariffs are pulling production home and to friendly countries, reducing the supply of marginal new investment available to Singapore. And less of what moves can be won on tax competition. For an increasing number of research and development (R&D) and manufacturing jobs, speed of iteration, equipping and supplying are decisive factors.

At the cost sensitive end, high business costs and slow manpower approvals accelerate offshoring to regional centres based in countries like Malaysia and Vietnam. The examples are not unfamiliar to this House. H&M moved its Southeast Asia Regional headquarters (HQ) from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. Tiger Beer has been brewed here since 1932. By the end of next year, it will not be. Heineken is winding down brewing at Tuas and moving production to Malaysia and Vietnam, and about 130 jobs go with it.

For a younger generation, they face a changed playbook. The high paying entry level tech jobs that many aspired to have largely dried up. Many entry level roles have been offshored due to the high cost of business. And capable artificial intelligence (AI) agents and models are set to reduce the need for entry level hiring. But whatever the cause, it is undeniably hard for young Singaporeans to find a job today.

What follows is adaptation. Entrepreneurship by necessity, rather than by choice, second and third jobs, structural underemployment.

In a high-cost economy, the work most likely to stay is work that cannot be done more cheaply somewhere else.

The standard answer for advanced economies has been R&D. Build what others cannot easily copy so that firms come here in spite of our costs. But after decades and tens of billions, not one local R&D champion has emerged worth more than a billion dollars.

Of course, we should continue to invest, but the upshot is that our R&D complex is sadly not ready to be our growth engine. And as individual Chinese provinces and groups thereof become increasingly fiercely competitive ecosystems, every economy will need to reckon with the necessary scale, energy availability and the cost required to compete.

Alone, it is difficult. That is why I believe we must have greater industrial coordination between Southeast Asian countries and engage in transnational industrial policy, as I elaborated in both my maiden speech last September and my Adjournment Motion this July.

These are structural challenges to the industrial underpinning of jobs. I acknowledge the Government continues to try to do its best under these circumstances. Investment into Singapore is holding up. The Economic Development Board (EDB) committed $14.2 billion of fixed asset investment last year, up from $13.5 billion the year before and $12.7 billion the year before that – so three years rising.

But for it, we get the opposite trend in jobs. In 2023, 20,000 jobs; in 2024, 18,700 jobs; and last year 15,700 jobs. The value added expected went from $26.7 billion to $23.5 billion to $18 billion. So, even on official statistics, the engine of investment to jobs is faltering.

Faced with such a panoply of problems, what can and should we hope for?

First, we need an updated growth model that cares not only about the headline gross domestic product (GDP) growth figure, but the structure of growth. If we truly believe this is a changed world, then our policies must change with it. The structure of growth matters, and growth and distribution are not two things to be done in sequence.

It is acceptable as an exigency to grow first and then redistribute by vouchers and rebates. But over the medium and long term, we should be building an economy where a fair distribution is produced by the growth itself, rather than repaired afterwards out of the proceeds. Pre-distribution over redistribution.

And that is why we need an economic engine driven by dynamic local companies, healthy domestic demand, and Singaporeans and Singaporean capital venturing abroad. Only when Singaporeans thrive and believe the ladders of opportunity are fair to all, can this country be open.

Second, we need honest measurement and prioritisation of what matters from growth. Let me offer three North Stars for the distributional aspect of growth.

One, the indigenous share of national income, which captures the contribution to national income of Singaporeans as workers, owners and entrepreneurs. Its internationally comparable cousin is the labour share – how much of what stays in Singapore goes to the people who work here. Ours, at about 40%, lags most advanced economies. We should resurrect the indigenous income series and measure the whole of what Singaporeans contribute.

Two, real income growth that keeps pace with productivity, not lag it. Overall, labour productivity has grown by 2.5% per year from 2016 to 2024. But over the same period, real mean income only grew at 1.3% per year.

Singaporeans have always been model workers. From 2016 to 2024, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), Singapore's output per worker grew 2.3% per year, outstripping major economies, such as the United States (US) at 1.6%, Israel at 1.6%, Hong Kong at 1.3%, Korea at 1.3% and Switzerland at 1.1%.

We need to repair this lag. Singaporean workers have kept their end of the bargain. Their compensation has not kept up with it.

Three, whether Singaporeans can still afford the city they built. Not how much we produce, but how much variety ordinary Singaporeans on an ordinary wage can enjoy. The diversity of services available, how much they can afford and the leisure they can afford to take.

The independent kitchen, the second-hand bookstore. We cannot in one breath lose our heritage businesses and our art spaces, and in the next tell Singaporeans that the city is thriving. Cities compete on the variety of things there are to consume, not only on what they produce, and high-amenity cities grow faster.

So, we should measure it. How varied the choices are and how many choices an ordinary wage can afford.

These three North Stars point us towards a more equal and inclusive economy, with opportunities for entrepreneurs to experiment, households and businesses to succeed, workers to thrive and ideas and innovation to flourish.

Mr Speaker, the various Members of Parliament of the Workers' Party (WP) will touch on eight questions to answer the challenges I have laid out.

First, I will discuss innovation under constraint. How do we foster a dynamic enterprise and innovation system that maximises value regardless of the high business cost and physical constraints?

Second, my colleague, Jamus Lim, will discuss dynamic local firms. How can we create a business climate in which dynamic local firms emerge as drivers of innovation and become future cornerstones of the economy?

Third, my colleague, Louis Chua, will discuss land and the roof over the household. How do we ensure that attractive affordable housing is available for every Singaporean household?

Fourth, my colleague, Andre Low, will discuss the start of a working life and ask how we ensure our tertiary students and young workers find meaningful opportunities and good jobs in a challenging economy.

Fifth, my colleague, Gerald Giam, will discuss pathways to a middle-class livelihood. Taking tradespersons as his exemplar, he will ask how we create accessible pathways for them to earn a middle-class livelihood.

Six, my colleague, Fadli Fawzi, will discuss replacement and re-entry and ask whether our system of continuing education actually works. The journey, the destination and the proof.

We close the WP contributions with our two most expansive views of the economic model.

Seventh, my colleague, He Ting Ru, will discuss the lesser measured parts of the economy, in the domestically oriented sectors and ask what parts of this economy our national statistics fail to capture?

And eighth, my colleague, Eileen Chong, will discuss venturing abroad. How do we empower Singaporeans to seize opportunities in the region and beyond?

Mr Speaker, beyond these questions, there really is one question. What does it mean to take a changed world seriously?

If we mean to rebuild the ladder of opportunity in this generation, the answers to these problems must be the centre-piece of our evolved economic model. In these speeches, my colleague will lay out in eight steps, structural solutions to structural problems.

Today, the problem I will tackle is enterprise and innovation under constraint.

For two generations, we have been good at bringing other people's companies here. We have been slow to put the same land that we own behind our people building their own. Why do we take a high land price as a law like gravity? Universal land pricing is a coherent and convenient accounting ideology, but in the last accounting, the people of Singapore need to decide if this ideology still serves them.

Families already know this. Tuition is expensive and no tutor can promise a good job 20 years out. We pay anyway. Investments require outlays. We do not ask a child for an immediate pay-off.

So, the proposition: Singapore should stop treating market land value as a natural price for every socially productive use of land. And the test: a university-centred special zone where state land is priced at development cost rather than market scarcity value.

What is our offer to the young? We should remake the system with the young as the first consideration rather than the last adjustment.

Today, we tweak – a discount on a co-living room, a grant, a priority band in a ballot. Adjustments at the edge of a system designed around somebody else in a different decade. Treating the young as a first order principle means the opposite. We design for the 20-something year old foremost.

This is a supply side problem of policy.

Before we can remake society to be young, we must remake society for the young. The bargain has four parts: a place to live, near where the work and the research happen; at a price a starting salary can carry, in service of something the country needs – more local enterprise and R&D – with the upside staying with the risk-takers and a say in the rules.

What we should create a special zone surrounding Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where the state land is charged as cost recovery rather than market scarcity value and takes its returns in the companies that grow there, rather than rent. This experiment will span land rates for both residential and commercial space, spanning co-living, local enterprise and R&D.

It must be centred around an existing core, a university – because one cannot rustle up a cluster from nothing. But one can take one that exists and play to its strengths. It will be zoned for organic messiness, a district that is pro-worker and pro-business, built around the needs of young people and young companies.

And this experiment is reversible. If it does not work, we can simply revert to the Master Plan. But surely, today's Singaporeans should have as much say over scarce land as the master planners of decades ago.

So, let me take the argument in this order: land, our tertiary institutions, then governance and money.

First, land. Thirty years, tens of billions in R&D and more again on fostering entrepreneurship. Both R&D and the ladder of growing local giants have underperformed. We are worldclass at marshalling inputs but commercial outcomes, in terms of Singaporean-grown companies, have not appeared at the rate the spending implies.

On talent, we want to attract the very best to work alongside a strong local core. On capital, we disagree about design but perhaps not ideology.

But there is a serious methodological point. The state runs on taxpayers' money. Prudence is its duty. Innovation requires the opposite: calibrated risk-taking. Which is why risk capital belongs in a policy investment bank rather than inside Government, as the Prime Minister proposes. A prudent-first posture is difficult to unlearn.

Where we do have an ideological disagreement is the price of land. My colleague, Mr Louis Chua will also speak about this later.

The Economic Strategy Review (ESR) organises itself around inputs to production: capital, labour, productivity. But land is an input distinct from capital. It is discussed as revenue and not as a cost – a constraint to live within and not as a lever to change. And it is not a small cost.

In December 2022, the Government put the development cost of that year's 13,506 completed flats at $396,000 each – $234,000 of land against $154,000 of construction. Land was 59% of the cost of a flat.

But of course, we can test and change this cost. We have been here before. The Centre for Liveable Cities, the Government's own urban research arm, records what happens when One-North was planned: "The idea of providing residential uses in the form of affordable housing was put forth. However, it was difficult for HDB to change its public housing policies for a single project like One-North. Therefore, the JTC approached the private sector."

National policy then could not bend for One-North. But it should have. What we need for R&D and entrepreneurship matters more than dogmatic inflexibility.

A high price homogenises. It prices out the independent kitchen and the lab with no revenue yet, and leaves to whoever can pay the rent – chains and franchises.

It also programmes space. And market scarcity rate, selects for what can be proven in advance – and nothing new can be proven in advance.

By definition, the novel has no track record. Thus, the experimental messiness of life is competed out.

A zone of lower commercial pressure is a zone for messiness, a zone where land is cheap enough for the young to make their own places and their own future organically – the first variable and not an accommodation.

If land pricing is an unnecessary drag on the young, on enterprise, on an R&D cluster, how do we test it? There is a formidable constraint: Singaporeans need land prices low – to start something, to live somewhere – and we need them high, because many of our savings sit in HDB flats and the state leans on land revenue.

To have both high land pricing and low land pricing simultaneously, we must do away with the constraint of universal land pricing. There are at least three ways to vary a price. First, across time, the island-wide price itself. Second, across a policy-targeted group, as the Build-To-Order (BTO) does for young parents. Third, across a geographic boundary – fence one area and change the pricing function inside, in service of agglomeration and enterprise, people and firms packed close enough to make each other more productive.

I believe that the third is the least disruptive theory of change if one believes that our land pricing assumptions need to be tested. And the question becomes where to test such a zone. For the young, for the R&D economy and for an entrepreneurial spirit. It belongs around our tertiary institutions. And looking at the map, I believe NTU is the obvious candidate.

Why NTU? The research cluster is already there. A large number of labs are sited on campus. And unlike the National University of Singapore (NUS), whose Kent Ridge and One-North districts have little room left, NTU can still expand. And yet, what is planned for Bahar and CleanTech Park, with 116 hectares adjoining NTU? It is another industrial park – the same answer the Party opposite has given again and again.

If we are to clear scarce greenery, the use case must be distinctive enough to be worth the sacrifice. I believe ours is, and another industrial park is not. That is something priceless and irreversible, traded for something cookie cutter.

Take Punggol Digital District. It is 50 hectares, JTC-developed and anchored on Singapore Institute of Technology's (SIT's) campus. It proves that the Government will build a district around a university. But it is more of the same we have done – a business park with a campus in it, on market terms.

If one accepts the first-principle case for a special zone, then two empirical facts must be dealt with.

First, the Jurong Region Line is being dug into NTU, with campus stations arriving at the end of the decade. Tengah's flats are rising beside it. Kept as separate plans, they make one more park that people commute into. The Jurong Innovation District, 620 hectares, holds in Bahar the next greenfield precinct, already zoned with the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) underway. The better bargain is a district for living, working and playing, and for enterprise, and this new district around NTU would be our last chance to run this sort of experiment. Whatever we settle on this parcel becomes how we price the ground beside every campus after it.

Second, the Johor Zone Agreement was signed in January 2025. It is an experiment we must try to make succeed. But for all our hopes on foreign economic policy, it sits in another country and carries the risk that comes with that. We can and should run these experiments for ourselves, by ourselves, if we can – and we can.

If we want to re-orient our culture towards the spirit of independent living, towards the spirit of risk taking, towards the spirit of collaboration, then we must provide the conditions for the spirit to flourish. We should not be distracted by procedural arguments that Bahar and Jurong are already zoned in a Master Plan. The experiment can be run as things stand. The question is whether we will.

So, NTU as a centre of a live, work, build district, distinguished by charging land for housing at cost recovery. By cost, I mean cost in the ordinary sense, with all scarcity value excluded – the actual cost of constructing, financing, servicing, maintaining and renewing the buildings, not the hypothetical market value of the ground beneath them.

What would that come to? We have a few indications. At NTU this academic year, a non-air-conditioned double room costs about $412 a month, and an air-conditioned single room about $657. At NUS, a double in hall runs about $494. Under the co-living scheme announced in late July this year, under the SG Youth plan, a room starts at $1,800 a month at 1925 Quarters; $1,950 at Coliwoo Boon Lay and $2,000 at Coliwoo Lutheran, before utilities and deposits – roughly 30% below the usual rate, with operators absorbing the difference.

The one at Boon Lay is about four kilometres from NTU and cost roughly five times what the university charges its own students. Is it affordable? I do not think it is. The median fresh graduate from our six autonomous universities earns $4,500 a month last year. After Central Provident Fund (CPF), about $3,600 in hand. The Boon Lay rate, plus its fixed utility charge, takes about 60% of it after the discount.

This is not treating our young as a first order consideration. Our young want space of their own and financial autonomy as a precondition for life, not as a byproduct of marriage.

And 30% below market is measured against the scarcity market. Before the discount, the same room took more than three quarters of a graduate's take-home pay. Affordability must be benchmarked against what a young Singaporean actually has to spend rather than market rate discounts.

So, what can we offer with a different basis?

On a cost recovery basis, a room comes to well under the half the going rate, closer to a third. Take one calculation that owes nothing to a university subsidy. A 500 square foot unit at $200 a square foot – above the construction cost implied by the Government's own 2022 figures, so, it is a conservative assumption and not a hopeful one – if you put three people in it and amortise over 10 years at 5%, it comes out to about $1,061 a month, or $2.12 per square foot, roughly $380 a head, with a sinking fund in. Stretch amortisation to 20 years and it is $1.32 per square foot. Other calculations land in the same place. The university's own rate, annualised over 12 months rather than the 35 weeks a term, actually runs, comes out to about $478 to $549 a room.

The universities are already housing people at close to cost. So, we can arrive at a figure between $350 and $550 a month a room.

I know the reply this will draw. All state lands form part of the reserves. Land must be sold at fair market value. Otherwise, the reserves are depleted. So, let us look at practice and not just theory. Start with an instrument we have already written.

The Land Betterment Charge (Concessionary Relief) Order 2022, waives the betterment charge on state lease university land, put to education and institutional use, and defines "university" as NUS and NTU. So, concessions already exist for the universities.

Nor is that the only place the state prices by decision. Land for a place of worship or a civic and community institution is already valued at half of full land value. On the Land Betterment Charge Table effective this March, this is about a tenth of what residential land in the same sector is assessed at.

That red line is not only for rates of places of worship. Educational and institutional use sits in the same group and is charged at three rates across the whole island, while every residential and commercial rate moves across 118 sectors.

For one class of use, the state already sets a price by decision rather than location. And in 2023, the Government moved places of worship from competitive tender to fixed price ballot, precisely because bidding had driven prices to levels that distracted religious bodies into fundraising. Prices fell. Apparently, nobody raided the reserves.

What can we surmise?

For the Party opposite, fair market value is already a function of the interest granted. It is not a single number attached to a plot. Once you change the use class, the fair market value changes with it lawfully, with the Chief Valuer still doing the valuing. The Government identified a market mechanism was pricing a use out of its own purpose, replaced it with an administered price, got a lower number and the Chief Valuer still called it fair market value. So, let us use the rules as they are. Let us create a use category for non-tradable restricted-tenure, mixed housing and enterprise land, and let the Chief Valuer value that restricted interest.

A clear valuation to build productive capacity for the next generation is not a raid on the reserves. It is the outlay side of an investment. It is what every family who pays for tuition for better economic prospects for their kids already knows: it is long-term economic foresight over short-term economic thinking.

How would the zone work if demand exceeds supply? We could ballot. Once in, the rent stays low once you are part of the zone – studying, working, building or serving it. A firm gets a fixed term and an option to renew and graduates out upon success. And a person who loses a job or whose startup dies, gets a year's of grace before the rent resets. And if the housing is rented, never sold, it does not become an asset to be traded.

Mr Speaker, the price of land matters greatly. But it is not sufficient on its own. You must get the other conditions right too.

On governance, an innovation district is a place where things are tried and most of them failed. That requires us to tolerate some untidiness. Most of what I am asking requires no new legislation. JTC let its land on contracts it writes itself – rent formulas, renewal test, quotas, carve outs, occupancy covenants. These are lease terms and not statutes with already existing latitude.

We should lift the Urban Redevelopment Authority's (URA's) planning circular, capping non-academic use of a campus at 5% of floor area or 30,000 square metres. We can hasten visa decisions for deep-tech researchers and for the people the enterprises need, and aim to have every major decision in such a zone made within two weeks.

We should aim to devolve operational decisions to the zone's own board, small and nimble, with the anchor university on it, able to make the bundled decisions on space, pilots, housing allocation, visas and procurements. And the board should be responsive to the people living in the zone who should have a say in how it is run.

On money, we should give this zone the ability to back its founders and enterprises. Lower rent is part of a draw. The bigger draw should be growth capital – the zone taking a stake in the enterprises that grow inside it.

Singapore and China established Suzhou Industrial Park in 1994. The zone grew its own investment arm, Oriza Holdings – state-owned, controlled by the Parks Administration Committee, incorporated in 2001, with about US$14 billion under management today.

So, while we are not involved in Oriza Holdings, a zone-based financing body is not unknown to us. Many financial innovations have come from zones. China's New Third Board, its national over-the-counter equity market for unlisted small companies, began in 2006 as a Zhongguancun Science Park Share Transfer pilot and went nationwide in 2013.

So, we should capitalise a zone authority that can invest while providing optimal conditions for its startups and enterprises to succeed, taking a capped equity or revenue stake, and allow it to appropriate a portion of the funds it generates to further develop the zone. A zone of lower immediate commercial pressure for these enterprises is a place where experimentation and diversity can flourish.

Speaker, the zone is one bounded, reversible way to try on available land at a price that takes nothing from the reserves, with land prices outside the zone exactly the way they were – a way to make more Singaporeans involved in enterprise and R&D, and not only employees.

So, the ask is threefold: a zone around NTU; a new use category for restricted tenure, non-tradable, mixed housing and enterprise land, valued as the restricted interest it is; and a zone authority that runs its own operations and takes stakes in the enterprises it grows.

It is a controlled experiment in whether Singapore's land pricing regime is suppressing agglomeration, entrepreneurship and indigenous capital formation. If there is a Singaporean secret sauce that inheres beyond the cost pressures of land and wages, then a zone here, alongside the one in Johor, will tell us. It is a test we should run for our younger generation.

We have spent 30 years making this country a good place for other people's companies to succeed. I am asking that we spend the next 30 making it a place where our owners can – not just a better deal for the young, a country which is built categorically for the young.

Speaker, in closing, there has been much talk that the world has changed and it is not changing back. We can all feel it. So, here is the test of whether we are serious. We must reform significant parts of our present economic structure to deal with a changed world, to pursue growth that distributes more fairly and to measure what makes that growth worth having – a fair share of national income, real income growth in line with productivity and a widening range of what an ordinary wage can afford.

Many of these changes must come at the national level, but some are assumptions, long in the tooth, that must be tested. Universal market land pricing is one. And a policy laboratory at real scale is how we test it. The zone is one part.

In this Motion, each of my hon friends will bring another – structural solutions to structural problems. Singaporeans deserve serious answers; and serious answers are what the WP will provide. That is why we have moved this Motion to create an economy of the future that works for all. Sir, I seek to move. [ Applause. ]

[(proc text) Question proposed. (proc text)]

Mr Speaker : Assoc Prof Jamus Lim.

12.33 pm

Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim (Sengkang) : Mr Speaker, I second the Motion in the name of my hon friend Kenneth Tiong.

I cannot agree more that we need both dynamic local companies and opportunities for businesses to succeed, which is why my contribution to this debate will focus on how we can wean ourselves away from a top-down foreign investment, reliant multinational corporation- (MNC-) centric economic model; and instead build a bottom-up domestic capital led small and medium enterprise- (SME-) focused one. I will also weave in constructive critique on the recently released ESR.

To start, it is useful to sketch out what our traditional growth model has been. Essentially, the strategy was to accumulate. Accumulate more of what economists call factors of production, to ride on increases in the labour force due to demographic change, while simultaneously building up complementary capital, both manufactured in the form of machines, factories, equipment, as well as human through education.

For the former, we marshalled foreign savings with heavy foreign direct investments from MNCs in the early years and since the turn of the century, inward portfolio investment from global funds and family offices. We supplemented this with forced domestic saving from households in the form of CPF and from the state by maintaining large fiscal surpluses.

For the latter, we cranked up educational attainment by rapidly educating our school-aged children, then starting in the 1990s, by increasingly absorbing skilled workers from abroad.

We coupled this build-up of factors with fundamentals, exploiting our geographical location, we fostered an economy open to trade in goods, services and finance.

We also placed emphasis on quality institutions and attractive low tax climate, respect for property rights and rule of law and a high functioning civil service.

We fired on all these cylinders, which brought us famously from a per capita income of around $1,600 at Independence; to more than $121,000 today – a massive increase by any stretch of the imagination.

Notwithstanding how we were already ahead in the 1960s, at least relative to the rest of the developing world, our growth story is undeniably impressive.

This model is not unique to us. It was successfully deployed by Japan in its early industrialisation and the approach, with some idiosyncratic variations, was how the other East Asian dragon economies of Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea became wealthy. And starting in the 1980s, China has adapted the self-save model.

As successful as this traditional model was, it had embedded within it several pathologies. It made us obsessed somewhat with courting foreign capital and fearful of right-minded pro-worker policies that would reduce our attractiveness as regional headquarters. Our educational system to churn out a formidable number of excellent operators, but far fewer risk-taking entrepreneurs. And in the drive to economise on scarce land, our Government's leasehold model has fostered a rent-seeking mindset in real estate, rather than treating land as just another normal input to production.

Perhaps the most damning drawback is a known design flaw in the relentless pursuit of accumulating inputs to production, we have lagged in productivity growth. To be fair, this was also the case with the other dragon economies. Yet even among them, Singapore has fared the worst.

Just as important, these other economies, once they entrenched their high-income status, began to evolve their model toward a more internally driven, self-sustaining productivity led one. We have yet to do so decisively.

Some may argue that we should make no excuses for growth. I believe that this is incomplete at best and misguided at worst. After all, we already know how to drive good growth – crank up capital expenditure to the detriment of labour income and productivity.

Indeed, this has been the consistent criticism of Singapore's growth model during its rapid growth phase from the 1960s through to the 1990s and was arguably the impetus for the menagerie of productivity campaigns and bodies that, alas, has not overturned our nation's productivity woes.

And while it is tempting for us to look at bolstering growth from tried and tested tools, such as building up yet more of our already intensive capital stock, we must resist because it is clear that disproportionately prioritising resource allocation into hard infrastructure investment, especially in real estate, is running up against diminishing returns.

Sir, what would such a new model look like? For starters, we must evolve away from our traditional reliance on foreign MNCs as a driver of our growth and pivot toward SMEs as our homegrown economic engine.

While the ESR speaks about both, it betrays, somewhat, an implicit bias toward the former. We need a conscious shift from not too much fixation with tax competition and undervalued exchange rate and the wooing of footloose MNCs. We must instead promote bottom-up formation and growth of our indigenous companies and unleash the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of our local workforce. This means weaning our companies off a race-to-the-bottom focus on cost cutting as the only means to be competitive.

Revenue and wages should instead hinge on productivity gains, not a relentless search for cheaper inputs. Margins can and should be driven by elevating value add and quality. What we want is a "made in Singapore" to be synonymous with better, not just faster or cheaper, which is best left to economies lower down the income ladder.

To be clear, this is not simply an appeal for faster growth, not just for growth's sake. It is of existential importance, especially in the age of AI. Research shows that worldwide, small firms drive destructive innovation, and startups are the bulwark of sustainable growth through this process of creative destruction. Yet, while SMEs account for 99 out of 100 registered enterprises here and provide jobs for seven out of 10 Singaporean workers, they currently only contribute to half of the economy's value added.

If our SMEs are stifled because business or funding opportunities are crowded out by the bigger players, we will never discover our own homegrown globally competitive unicorns. Or if they simply choose to coast along without feeling empowered to challenge large incumbent firms, we will never build a vibrant body of SMEs that form the backbone of our economy, like Germany's Mittelstand or Japan's Taiheiyo Industrial Belt.

To enable this transformation, we need a domestic body of medium-sized enterprises capable of growing to become the next wave of national corporate champions and driving a 21st century innovation-led economy. We need Singaporeans to start Singaporean companies and for these companies to grow and succeed domestically and on the world stage.

Singapore is no stranger to support for SMEs. The Government would undoubtedly point to a veritable grab bag of schemes, such as the Productivity Solutions Grant, SkillsFuture Enterprise Credit, Enterprise Development Grant, Market Readiness Assistance, Enterprise Workforce Transformation Package – I could go on.

The question is not whether these are useful. They are. The issue is whether these catalytic grants will spur SME activity sufficiently to allow them to systematically advance to the next stage of growth, or whether there are other structural impediments that inhibit them from transforming themselves from small local firms to medium sized, globally competitive ones.

Businesses themselves report several key constraints to growth. Most notably, SMEs struggle with low levels of productivity, something that the Government itself has explicitly acknowledged. Many report an inability to attract and retain the sort of talent that will allow them to elevate their efficiency and output.

To be fair, our SMEs have to confront business costs among the highest in the world. And to compound the challenge, SMEs must secure financing for investment, which is especially scarce once they exit the startup stage. Our SMEs must stand ready to be the source of development innovation, the "D" in R&D.

I have shared with this House previously about how at less than 2% of GDP, our nation's R&D remains squarely below the global average and significantly behind that of leading innovation nations. But I also explained that this was because of anaemic R&D spending by the private sector, not the Government. Alas, among SMEs, this is even worse. The overwhelming majority of business R&D expenditure (BERD) is likely to be from large enterprises.

The ESR talks about R&D, but it does not underscore the importance of this pivot.

I note that the Prime Minister's Office announced last year a $37 billion commitment to research, innovation and enterprise funding over the next five years. This will bring our public expenditure to around 1%, which will be among the global leaders. But we need to accelerate private R&D, not just with more public funding, but with complementary funding from our private capital markets as well.

To be fair, tax incentives for corporations to undertake R&D are already very generous, with up to 400% deduction for the first $400,000 of qualifying expenditures every assessment year, supplemented more recently by up to 100% in Refundable Investment Credit. SMEs have been major beneficiaries, making up 85% of R&D claims.

But improving productivity is not about innovation alone. Research has shown that one important impediment to improving the efficiency of smaller firms is the quality of management. This means there may therefore be a case to expand the scope of qualifying R&D activities for the purposes of tax deductions for this group. This is especially for activities aimed at product commercialisation, enhanced internal business operation or overseas expansion.

What is also missing is a coherent innovation pathway for all SMEs, not just those oriented towards sexy, cutting-edge fields. Founders of old economy startups may not necessarily possess the technological sophistication to navigate the GoBusiness Directory or the awareness to seek out business advisors in Enterprise Singapore. They may not be able to string together the myriad packages available or even put together credible applications.

What is needed is a push rather than pull strategy, where new business registrants are automatically and routinely offered information on how they can access support from the Government to roll out business development innovations over the course of their initial years. Even better, startups can match with seconded experts that grow their R&D capabilities in-house, akin to the Agency for Science, Technology and Research's (A*STAR's) Technology for Enterprise Capability Upgrading (T-Up) programme.

There remains additional room for the state to act as well, through its indirect influence on GLCs. Despite being half of our economy's value-added R&D spending by domestic enterprises account for only $1 of every $5. Our GLCs can lead the way by dedicating more of their retained earnings toward expenditures in applied R&D, subject to a reasonable return on investment period. Over the medium run, they can look more towards elevating their spending to more closely match those of other MNCs.

Finally, we can also support SME productivity indirectly by tackling our sky-high business costs. Speaking to SMEs, the subject of crushing manpower and rent inevitably emerges. Yet scaling up and relocating is not always an option. Hence, we need to look for alternatives. One simple strategy is to cap the maximum quantum that rents may increase every year to the historical increase of about 3% annually.

This is a limit on the rate, not the level. Market rents will still prevail in the long run. Still, doing so will give time for businesses to adjust to jumps in their fixed costs. Such restrictions have been employed by many jurisdictions worldwide. Even if we limit it to Government and agency landlords, such as the HDB or JTC, it will be a major step forward.

It may also be time to revisit the dependency ratio ceiling for certain sectors, like F&B, where Singaporeans continue to shun open positions that are advertised even at attractive wages.

Sir, at the heart of the challenge of raising up our local SMEs is the difficulty of attracting and retaining talented workers. Singaporeans often view small firm jobs as small-time, second-tier operations compared to a more lucrative prestigious MNC career. The ESR report, while rightly emphasising the importance of good jobs, remains largely silent on the gap between SME and MNC positions and how they may be bridged.

Bridging this gap must recognise that smaller firms often struggle to round up sufficient financing for investment compared to larger ones. Relieving internal and external access to finance for the purposes of easing cash flow that will unlock hiring is first order if we wish to improve the viability of our young dynamic companies.

There are already schemes that support small enterprise business development. For example, the Enterprise Development Grant (EDG) is aimed at projects and the Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) is aimed at IT equipment. They ostensibly relieve financial constraints. The EDG even explicitly recognises human capital development projects as a core capability.

Our PSG should do the same since productivity is boosted as much by human capital as it is by IT equipment.

While one may argue that the Workforce Development Grant (WDG) does much the same thing, the WDG appears overly restrictive, reliant on an approved consultant panel and is not available on an ongoing basis.

I believe the scope should be more flexible and allow SMEs to bolster compensation and benefits to better match starting salaries offered by MNCs.

Beyond salaries, jobseekers may be attracted to work in SMEs because of the promise of greater work variety and flexibility, and greater exposure to business roles and functions. Internship and apprenticeship programmes, including those from polytechnics, universities and the Graduate Industry Traineeships (GRIT) Programme should actively look to enfold SMEs into their slate of potential employers. The Career Conversion Programmes should not be limited to the wholesale trade but be expanded to encompass a wider range of SME sectors.

That said, application and reporting requirements for these programmes are often onerous, stretching the already thin resources of small businesses. While I accept the need for prudence in managing public funds, we should not turn SMEs into another Government bureaucracy. There should be a simplified application process for grants and reporting process requirements should focus on fraud audit rather than extensive documentation compliance.

Moreover, funds are provided on a reimbursement basis at the moment. But any small business owner, especially one that is starting up, knows that one of the principal challenges that they face is sustaining cash flow. We should also reimburse any support we offer upfront and trust SME owners to deploy these grants wisely. Of course, supporting SMEs with young talent can occur even earlier upstream. SMEs in search of skilled workers often seek out interns. Unfortunately, many young would-be graduates remain unmatched to potential SME employers.

This is not for lack of trying. Most tertiary institutions already include a job exposure scheme, but take-up remains low. In 2024, the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) supplied 1,300 students while autonomous universities sent 800. This is despite how attachments often translate into jobs. Perhaps more importantly, SME participation remains low. Around 300 firms have joined such programmes, which are less than 1% of registered SMEs.

One factor behind the low take-up rate could be because companies that hope to partner with tertiary institutions must co-design and co-deliver bespoke curricula. This can be insurmountable for smaller companies with limited resources and understanding of how to go about doing so.

It may be better to take a cue from the German approach, where more than one in 10 companies participate in their equivalent programme, by expanding the scope of potential applicants, allowing interns to be hired using SkillsFuture funds and accepting simpler application criteria from SME employers.

Yet even when directed towards hiring talent, there is little structure to ensure the systematic transfer of skills such that the benefits of human capital are spread across the firm. That is especially the case for foreign talent.

There is room to place greater emphasis on local capability development built into schemes, such as the Pioneer Certificate Incentive, and Development and Expansion Incentive to better embed skills transfer to Singaporean employees. Larger grants in particular should be paired with a clear proposal and timetable for ensuring skills transfer, including the possibility of a sunset of foreign Employment Passes after a designated duration if no additional transfer is taking place. When local employees are sent for skills upgrading, employers of micro and small enterprises can be partially reimbursed with make-up pay to cover the costs of temporary hiring or overtime, similar to make-up pay when NSmen fulfil their reservist commitments.

Sir, let me close.

Mr Speaker : Assoc Prof Lim, you have a minute left.

Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim : I hear you.

To be clear, what I am calling for is not a wholesale overhaul of our GLC-heavy, MNC-led and foreign capital-reliant model, which has to date served us well. Sidelining these actors would amount to killing off the golden goose, which have established themselves as cornerstones of our corporate and industrial landscape. Our GLCs have also been increasingly competitive on international shores, projecting the economic influence of Singapore Inc worldwide.

Nor am I proposing that we abandon our foreign investment and shut the door to foreign capital flows. This will hollow out our capital base. No modern economy, much less a globalised one, like ours, operates without due attention to international players. But what I am calling for are policy and institutional shifts that will usher in a changed mindset for how we should view our homegrown companies in an already wealthy, advanced economy. The shift will place small, but especially, medium-sized firms at the beating heart of our nation's economic model, away from the interests of large foreign-based MNCs or even our GLC behemoths.

What we need is creative destruction. By destroying, we will create simultaneously an economy ready for the 21st century.

Mr Speaker : Mr Mark Lee.

12.53 pm

Mr Mark Lee (Nominated Member) : Mr Speaker, the Motion sets out aspirations that few would disagree with – a more inclusive economy, greater space for entrepreneurs to experiment, opportunities for businesses and workers to succeed, and a stronger base of Singapore companies and capital capable of venturing abroad.

These are not Government aspirations or Opposition aspirations. They are Singapore imperatives. The real question is not whether we want them. It is how we achieve them and who must act.

But we should begin with two truths.

First, Singapore's economy grew by 5.7% in the second quarter of this year. Manufacturing expanded by 12.2%, driven largely by AI-related demand for electronics and precision engineering. This growth is real and welcomed.

Second, it is not being felt evenly. On the ground, I have heard that unless your business is AI, then it must be BI, BI means "bei ai" (悲哀), which means "to be sorrowful", in Mandarin.

Many businesses, especially domestic-facing ones, continue to grapple with uncertain demand and persistently high manpower, rental and operating costs. For these businesses and their workers whose livelihoods depend on them, headline GDP does not feel like growth. It feels like daily firefighting. That concern is real.

Our response must therefore work on two horizons – practical, time-bound relief for viable businesses under immediate pressure and longer-term transformation support to help them raise productivity, scale and reach new markets.

But relief without transformation merely postpones the problem. The Government must build the runway for our economy through sound regulation, infrastructure, education, fair regulation and a strong social safety net. But firms, entrepreneurs and workers are the planes that must still take off. From a business perspective, this means three imperatives – enabled enterprises, expand opportunity and embed responsibility.

To enable enterprise, we must build an inclusive economy, one that gives people and businesses equal dignity, genuine access to opportunity and meaningful support when they face disadvantage or disruption. But fairness is not sameness. A traditional SME trying to digitise has different needs from a technology start-up developing intellectual property. A promising local enterprise preparing to expand overseas needs different support from a company whose business model that may no longer be viable.

Fairness means understanding what each business needs to progress and being clear about the outcomes public support should achieve. If support is spread too thinly, we fail to give enough runway to companies with the potential to break out internationally. At the same time, inclusion cannot mean guaranteeing the survival of every business.

A dynamic economy requires entry, experimentation, occasional failure and renewal. Entrepreneurs should have the room to fail responsibly and try again. But public support cannot remove every commercial risk or socialise every business loss. The Government's role is to create a fair and enabling environment. Businesses' role is to use it to improve, invest and compete.

This is where our business institutions must step up. My practical message to businesses is simple. Whatever stage of development you are at, your first port of call should be SBF or your relevant chamber and trade association.

A company should not need to understand the entire Government organisational chart before it can obtain help. If you need to understand a policy or regulation, start with us. If you need guidance on financing, start with us. If you need to transform your workforce, adopt AI, enter a new market or find the right Government support, start with us. We may not have every answer. But we will own the handover and help every company find the right door.

Take All Hearts, a homegrown training provider. As it grew, manual processes led to mounting errors and delays. Through SBF's Technology Implementation Advisory Service, developed with support from Enterprise Singapore and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), we helped the company adopt a single integrated tech solution. Manual data entry fell by half, reports became almost immediate and the staff gained more time to train and support learners.

For an established SME, the next step may be new financing, stronger management capabilities or entry into an overseas market.

UTRACON, a Singapore engineering firm seeking to grow in the Middle East, had the capability but lacked local partners and market access. Through GlobalConnect@SBF, supported by Enterprise Singapore, SBF connected it to a United Arab Emirates (UAE) partner and opened doors to regional projects. Our role is not to venture for companies but to shorten the distance to their first opportunity abroad. Enabling enterprise also means ensuring our regulations remain fit-for-purpose.

Regulations are necessary to protect workers, consumers, public safety, the environment and the integrity of our economy. But over time, rules can accumulate and create unintended friction. The answer is not deregulation for its sake. It is disciplined experimentation. Test changes carefully, learn from evidence and adjust where rules no longer work.

The Alliance for Action (AfA) on Business Competitiveness demonstrates how this can work. It brought businesses, trade associations and chambers and public agencies together through 25 engagement sessions. So far, 24 of 27 recommendations has been adopted in some shape and form. These included changes to foreign manpower sources for select occupations; retention of experienced Work Permit holders; more flexible industrial leases; faster solar-panel deployment approvals; and the creation of the SME Pro-Enterprise Office.

The value of the AfA was not that Government agreed with every business request. It was that businesses explained where rules created problems, and that agencies explained the safeguards and trade-offs they had to manage. Sometimes, businesses changed their views after understanding the policy reasons. In other cases, agencies adjusted the rules after understanding operational realities.

This is what good collaboration looks like. Not Government always saying yes, not business always being right. But policy learning through engagement and improving over time.

Mr Speaker, the Motion also speaks of healthy domestic demand and Singaporean capital venturing abroad. I agree.

For Singapore, domestic demand can only provide a buffer, but it cannot be our principal engine of scale. To grow, Singapore companies must venture abroad, find new customers, build new production capacity, acquire technology and participate in supply chains beyond our shores. So far, SBF has facilitated 108 overseas projects for 79 Singapore companies across 44 markets. That is the ambition we need to enable – Singapore companies venturing out, while keeping their most valuable capabilities anchored here.

Golden Bridge Foods is one example. With SBF's facilitation, this Singapore agri-food company invested more than RM50 million to establish a new manufacturing capacity in Johor, Malaysia, while retaining Singapore as the base for managing its regional business. This is why the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone (JS-SEZ) matters. Its potential can be strengthened by linking it more closely with Batam, Bintan and Karimun (BKK). SBF has initiated a strategic study on how better physical and digital connectivity, smoother customs arrangements and closer regulatory coordination could bring the JS-SEZ and BBK together as a wider regional cooperation.

But expanding our hinterland is no free lunch. Better connectivity also gives consumers more choices and exposes businesses here to greater competition.

SBF's Johor Bahru–Singapore Rapid Transit System (RTS) Link study, done together the Restaurant Association of Singapore and the Singapore Retailers Association illustrates this trade-off. After the RTS Link opens, Singapore consumers could spend an additional $1.05 billion annually in Johor Bahru, while Johor visitors could spend an additional $756 million in Singapore.

Our response cannot be to stop people from crossing the border. Neither can Singapore businesses compete on price alone. We must compete on quality, trust, productivity, innovation, distinctive products and better experiences.

As we expand markets to create new opportunities, competition will come. The answer is not protection. It is to help Singapore companies build the capabilities to venture abroad, anchor value here and become strong enough to compete.

This brings me to my third point on embedding responsibility. Companies that benefit from access to global talent must also help develop Singaporeans by mentoring them, build local successors and give Singapore employees regional and global exposure. We should not frame this as a choice between developing Singaporeans and remaining open to foreign or global talent.

Foreign professionals bring networks, technical knowledge and experience in overseas markets. But openness will remain socially sustainable only if it comes with real integration, knowledge transfer and investment in local leadership. The Alliance for Action on the Integration of Foreign Professionals, convened by the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth (MCCY), Singapore National Employers Federation (SNEF) and SBF, shows how this can be done. It produced practical recommendations to strengthen workplace integration while keeping Singapore open to global talent.

SBF, with support from MCCY, now has an Integration of Foreign Professionals Programme Office. It works with trade associations and chambers to run orientation for new Employment Pass holders, provides workplace-integration resources and conducts cultural-sensitivity workshops.

Finally, Mr Speaker, economic success must strengthen our wider society. Businesses benefit from Singapore's stability, infrastructure, educated workforce, rule of law and social cohesion. Giving back to society is not charity, but reinvestment in the foundations that enterprise depends on. That is why the work of the SBF Foundation and our social impact programmes matters.

Through VolunteerInc., we help companies, including SMEs, mobilise their employees to contribute skills and time in the community. Through EmployWell and MigrantWell, we create employment pathways for vulnerable groups and support migrant workers' well-being.

More than 5,200 companies have taken part in these programmes. But the human outcomes matter more. Through EmployWell alone, over 2,100 individuals facing barriers to work received employability support, and more than 1,000 re-entered the workforce. This is how businesses strengthen the social compact.

Mr Speaker, what do these examples show? They show what becomes possible when businesses and Government work together. Business leaders serve in SBF and our trade associations and chambers not because they have time to spare. Far from it. But because they know that no company can build a competitive ecosystem alone. Government cannot know every operational difficulty that businesses face. Businesses may not fully appreciate every national trade-off that Government must manage. Unions must understand that better jobs depend on viable companies, while employers must recognise that transformation cannot succeed without workers.

That is why our tripartite and public-private partnerships remain important. The parties do not need to agree on everything. But there must be enough trust to discuss difficult trade-offs honestly and enough commitment to act after the discussion.

If each of us plays our part, Singapore will not merely respond to the future. We will shape it together. That is the economy of the future I believe Singapore must build. Mr Speaker, in Mandarin, please.

( In Mandarin ) : [ Please refer to Vernacular Speech .] Mr Speaker, the current global economic outlook is uncertain. Fluctuating oil prices and frequent tariff changes have seriously affected economies and business worldwide. Singapore, as a small open nation with no natural resources, is likewise under considerable pressure.

Fortunately, we have a robust financial system. Businesses have been actively diversifying their investment and managing risks and the Government has recently introduced a range of support measures that can in the short term ease the pressure faced by SMEs and the people from external pressures.

Looking ahead, we still face several structural challenges. While AI is driving technological transformation, it is also pushing up energy demand and we need to develop renewable energy. The ageing population is also a serious concern – an inefficient youth population will lead to a dual shortage of both the workforce and consumer base.

These challenges are real and cannot be ignored. We must adapt in a timely manner. We all share the same goals. Our differences lie only in the path forward. As the saying goes, if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. If everyone acts independently and looks only after their own interests, some short-term progress may be made, but it will not last. Only by supporting one another and working together can we move forward steadily and sustainably.

Therefore, businesses should actively seize opportunities while giving back to society. Workers should continue learning and upgrading skills and the Government should continue building a fair, open and transparent business environment.

I firmly believe that as long as the tripartite partners work together, we will be able to weather the difficulties and achieve long-term development.

( In English ): In conclusion, Mr Speaker, the wording of the Motion suggest that these aspirations somehow stand apart from the ESR. I am not entirely persuaded by that framing. As such, I cannot support the Motion in its current form.

Mr Speaker : Mr Edward Chia.

1.10 pm

Mr Edward Chia Bing Hui (Holland-Bukit Timah) : Mr Speaker, Sir, first, I declare that I own and operate a biotech startup that provides circular food solutions to local companies and global enterprises. I rise to speak on the Motion on an Economy of the Future that Works for All. I agree with the broad aspirations behind the Motion.

We all want a more inclusive economy – stronger local companies, good jobs for Singaporeans and growth that gives our people confidence in the future. But I believe the Motion can be strengthened by making clear that these aspirations are aligned with the ESR, and by better reflecting the realities of Singapore's small and open economy.

Mr Speaker, Sir, I seek your consent to move amendments to the Motion.

Mr Speaker : May I have a copy of your proposed amendments?

Mr Edward Chia Bing Hui : Yes, Sir.

Mr Speaker : You can hand it to my Clerk. [ A copy of the amendment was handed to Mr Speaker. ]

Okay, I see you have four proposed amendments. They are in order. Are copies available for Members?

Mr Edward Chia Bing Hui : Yes, Sir.

Mr Speaker : We will get this distributed to all Members. [ Copies of the amendment were distributed to hon Members. ]

Alright, looks like every Member here has been given a copy. Mr Chia, you may move your amendments.

Mr Edward Chia Bing Hui : Thank you, Sir. Mr Speaker, I move that:

"In line 1, to delete 'notwithstanding', and insert 'in line with'."

"In line 5, to delete 'economic engine driven', and insert 'economy powered'."

"In line 5, after the words 'local companies', to insert 'global enterprises'."

"In line 5, after the words 'healthy domestic', to insert 'and external'."

The proposed amended Motion will therefore read, "That this House, in line with the suggestions in the economic strategy review on the future Singapore economy, believes: (a) in a more equal and inclusive economy with opportunities for entrepreneurs to experiment, households and businesses to succeed, workers to thrive, and ideas and innovations to flourish; and (b), in an economy powered by dynamic local companies, global enterprises, healthy domestic and external demand, and Singaporeans and Singaporean capital venturing abroad."

Mr Speaker, Sir, the amendments strengthen the Motion in three ways.

First, it makes clear that the aspirations of inclusion, entrepreneurship, innovation and good jobs are aligned with the ESR, not pursued in spite of it. Second, it recognises that the Singapore's future economy needs both dynamic local companies and global enterprises. Third, it recognises that healthy domestic demand must be supported by strong external demand, especially for a small and open economy, like Singapore.

I will therefore speak to the proposed amended Motion by making three points.

First, is that the ESR provides a strategic foundation for an inclusive and innovative economy. The ESR recognises that the world has changed fundamentally. In a more fractious environment, Singapore cannot simply preserve what worked in the past. We must renew our strategy. Its three imperatives are clear: sharpen Singapore's value proposition; enhance agility and adaptability; and build resilience alongside efficiency.

These recommendations did not emerge in isolation. The ESR was shaped through extensive engagements with businesses, unions, workers and industry stakeholders. It should therefore be seen not merely as a Government report, but as a national strategy, co-created, shaped with the people and enterprises that helped carry it out.

So, the next challenge is execution. And we start from a strong base. Investments in R&D have anchored research talent in Singapore and also catalysed business expenditure in R&D. Business expenditure in R&D has reached about $9 billion in 2023.

So, what we need to do next is to strengthen research translation. Singapore not only must produce more research, but translate more ideas into products; more intellectual property to businesses; more innovation into globally competitive Singapore enterprises.

This requires strong partnerships between our universities, research institutions, investors and enterprise. We need clearer pathways for promising technology to commercialise more industry-led research collaborations and better access for startups and SMEs to capital, customers and global markets.

Second, we must help workers move up, move across and move forward. Even as technology disrupts jobs, the answer is not to slow down technology adoption. That will make our firms less competitive and ultimately, weaken opportunities for Singaporeans. The answer is to give workers access to relevant training, better career guidance, industry-recognised skills and real pathways into growth sectors. An economy that works for all must create a broad range of good jobs for technicians, operational specialist, tradespeople, associates, and professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMETs), service workers, mid-career workers and mature workers.

My second point is that Singapore's economic engine must be powered by both dynamic local companies and global enterprises.

Dynamic local companies matter, but we should not frame local companies and global enterprises as competing choices. Singapore's success has never been built on such false choice. Instead, our focus should be on helping MNCs, large local companies, SMEs and startups build up one another. Global enterprises bring investments, technology and international networks while local enterprises contribute agility, innovation and specialised capabilities. Together, they create an ecosystem that builds capabilities, accelerates innovations and creates better job opportunities for Singaporeans.

We have already seen how this works in practice. AEM, a homegrown Singapore company, designs an advance system that test semiconductors before they reach the market, including the thermal control technology needed to screen today's power-hungry AI chips. Through a partnership with a global semiconductor MNC in the 2010s, AEM evolved from a contract manufacturer into a trusted innovative engineering partner to the semiconductor industry, delivering tests, thermal automation solutions to AI, high-performance computing and memory devices.

From a Singapore base, it has grown into a global test leader, with operations across Asia, Europe and the US, and it is now extending its expertise to the world's most advanced AI processors. This shows how partnership with a global enterprise can help a Singapore company build proprietary capabilities, move up the value chain and compete and win on the world stage. And I just last checked, AEM's market capitalisation is around $2.8 billion.

So, the challenge before us is to deepen these partnerships so that more Singapore enterprises can innovate, scale and internationalise. These connections strengthen research translations by bringing researchers, startups, SMEs, investors and industry together to move innovation more quickly from the laboratory to the marketplace. We must help our SMEs and startups scale while ensuring that global enterprises continue to find Singapore a trusted and valuable base. If we become less open, less connected and less attractive to global capital and talent, it is actually our local companies that will lose access to markets, partners, technology and opportunity.

Mr Speaker, Sir, my third point is that Singapore's future must be open and outward-looking while ensuring that growth strengthens our social compact and benefits Singaporeans. This is why we need both healthy domestic and external demand. Domestic demand matters. It sustains many local enterprises, supports jobs and reflects confidence among households and businesses. Yet our whole market alone cannot provide the scale needed for every sector. We therefore need both a vibrant domestic market where locally focused enterprises can thrive and strong global connections that help other firms reach larger markets.

In 2025, Singapore's exports for goods and services amounted to approximately 178% of our GDP. This reflects how deeply our economy is connected to regional and global markets. We must continue to serve the world from Singapore as a trusted hub for finance, trade, technology, logistics, aviation, maritime, data, arbitration, greenfields, professional services and innovation. At the same time, the benefits of this external orientation must flow back to Singaporeans through good jobs, wages, skills and enterprise opportunities. This reinforces confidence and demand at home.

This is why the ESR emphasis on Singapore as a connected and trusted hub is so important. In a more fragmented world, connectivity alone is not enough. We must become a place where flows are orchestrated, finance governed, translated into economic value. This is how we remain relevant. This is how we create high-value jobs. This is how we secure our future.

Mr Speaker, Sir, the proposed amended Motion also refers to Singaporeans and Singaporean capital venturing abroad. This is important, but this must be done from a strong and open Singapore base from which capital, talent and enterprise can scale into the region. We want Singaporeans to lead, manage, invest, build and operate across borders. We also want global partners to use Singapore as a launchpad and to create opportunities for Singaporeans from Singapore.

This is especially important in Southeast Asia. Our region is growing, but it is also diverse, complex and uneven. Singapore companies need support to understand local regulations, build partnerships, manage risk, access financing and scale operations. The Government can do this to help local enterprises internationalise through market access platforms, financing support, overseas networks, talent development and stronger partnerships with regional governments and businesses. But this must sit within an open and outward-looking strategy. We become stronger by helping the world solve problems from Singapore.

Mr Speaker, Sir, this brings me to the broader question of inclusion. Sometimes, economic debates frame equality and competitiveness as opposing objectives. I do not agree. For Singapore, competitiveness is what gives us the resources to be inclusive. Without growth, there will be fewer jobs. Without investments, there will be fewer opportunities. Without productive companies, wages cannot rise sustainably. Without fiscal resource, we cannot fund education, housing, healthcare, social support and skills upgrading.

So, the question is not whether we choose growth or inclusion. The question is what kind of growth we pursue and how we ensure that Singaporeans will benefit from it. We want growth that will create good jobs; growth that allows workers to move into better roles; growth that strengthens local enterprises; and growth that supports families, seniors, lower-wage workers and mid-career workers.

This is the exactly the kind of growth the Government has emphasised in its broader economic strategy. Progressive wages help lower-wage workers. Workfare supports workers who need additional help. SkillsFuture helps Singaporeans upgrade and reskill. The Forward Singapore agenda strengthens social support across different life stages. The ESR builds on this by focusing on good jobs, lifelong learning, enterprise transformation and resilience.

There is also another dimension to enterprise that we should not overlook. We should view enterprises not only as economic units but also as social actors. Companies create jobs, pay wages and generate growth, but at their best they can also strengthen communities, support vulnerable groups, care for the environment and contribute to a stronger society. The National Volunteer And Philanthropy Centre's (NVPC's) Company of Good Movement is one example. It has just marked its 10th anniversary and recognises businesses that embed corporate purpose and create positive impact beyond traditional economic indicators. The movement encourages companies to act across five areas: people, society, governance, environment and economic.

This is not just philanthropy. It is about how companies execute purpose through their core business and operations. Some companies do this through inclusive hiring and people-first workplace cultures. Others do this through employee volunteering, mentoring SMEs, supporting community partners, reducing waste, improving sustainability practices or using their products, services and supply chains to create wider social impact. Examples include Sheng Siong's people-first culture, HPE's waste recycling, HP's Planet Partners programme and Fraser's Property's efforts to shape environments and communities through its role as a real estate developer. In just three years, the movement has conferred 1,046 companies, more than 70% of them local companies. This is encouraging progress with room to grow further.

This matters because an inclusive economy cannot be built by the Government alone. Startups, SMEs, large local enterprises and MNCs can be a force for good when they embed purpose into how they hire, buy, build, serve and grow. A future economy that works for all must be one where businesses do well and also do good.

Sir, inclusion cannot mean insulating everyone from change. The role of the Government is not to freeze the economy in place. Instead, the role of the Government is to help workers and businesses adapt before disruption hits and to provide support when transitions are difficult. This requires honesty. The reality is that not every existing job will remain unchanged. Not every firm will survive in its current form and Singapore cannot avoid global competition.

But we can commit. We can commit to helping Singaporeans build new skills, access new opportunities and navigate change with confidence. We can commit to helping businesses transform, adopt new technologies, access new markets and build the capabilities needed to compete in a changing world. This is a more honest and sustainable form of inclusion.

This is why the proposed amended Motion matters. It reflects the balance Singapore must strike. It is aligned with the ESR. It supports dynamic local companies and global enterprises as part of one ecosystem that creates opportunities for Singaporean entrepreneurs and workers. It values healthy domestic demand while recognising the necessity of strong external demand. It encourages Singaporeans and Singaporean capital to venture abroad while remaining anchored in a trusted, open and resilient Singapore.

Our future economy must be open, competitive and inclusive at the same time. We must attract the best from the world while developing the best in Singaporeans. We must support local enterprises while staying plugged into a global network. We must embrace AI and technology, not to replace human capability, but to expand it – using AI to strengthen workers' judgement, free up time for meaningful interactions and support roles where trust remains central. We must grow externally while ensuring that Singaporeans benefit domestically. We must build resilience without becoming closed.

Mr Speaker, Sir, the ESR provides serious and forward-looking roadmap for the next phase. It recognises the real anxieties that workers and businesses face, but it also recognises that Singapore cannot respond to uncertainty by becoming smaller in our ambition. We must be bolder. We must take calculated risk. We must back our enterprises. We must invest in our people. We must strengthen our role as a global trusted hub and we must ensure that every Singaporean has a fair chance to contribute and benefit from the future economy.

An economy of the future that works for all is not built by choosing between openness and inclusion. It is built by making growth translate into good jobs. It is built by making innovation accessible to enterprises and workers. It is built by making change less frightening, because Singaporeans know that we will face it together. This is the economy we must build.

Mr Speaker, Sir, I seek Members' support for the amended Motion. [ Applause. ]

Mr Speaker : Mr Tiong, hang on, let me go through the process. There are four amendments proposed by Mr Edward Chia to the Motion:

Amendment No 1: "In line 1, to delete 'notwithstanding' and insert 'in line with'.".

Amendment No 2: "In line 5, to delete 'economic engine driven' and insert 'economy powered'.".

Amendment No 3: "In line 5, after the words 'local companies,' to insert 'global enterprises,'.".

Amendment No 4: "In line 5, after the words 'healthy domestic' to insert 'and external'.".

It may be convenient that the debate on the original Motion and on any other amendments moved by Members be proceeded with simultaneously as a debate on a single question. Do I have hon Members' agreement to this?

[(proc text) Hon Members indicated agreement. (proc text)]

Mr Speaker : Assent of the majority of Members is given. The question is the amendments as moved by Mr Edward Chia. The debate can range over the original Motion and the amendments.

Before I call on Mr Louis Chua, Mr Tiong, do you want to make a clarification? You certainly have the right of reply at the end, at the closing. Do you want to raise a clarification now? Sure.

1.32 pm

Mr Kenneth Tiong Boon Kiat : Thank you. Just one clarification for the hon Member Edward Chia. While we will have comments on some of the other amendments, for the second amendment, which is to delete "economic engine driven" and insert "economy powered", I am not quite sure what the purpose of this amendment is. It appears to me, to use a favourite word from a Minister opposite. Quite otiose.

Mr Speaker : Mr Chia.

Mr Edward Chia Bing Hui : Mr Speaker, Sir, I think we do not want to really debate on the choice of words or semantics at this point. But I think it is basically really saying that an economy must be powered by both local companies and global enterprises. And I think we could hear from the Member at his closing.

Essentially, I think the crux of the amendment is to first say that the spirit of your Motion, the intent, the original Motion is aligned with the ESR. And to support local companies, we must also take the view that global enterprises must be part of the single ecosystem that in turn supports local companies.

Mr Speaker : Mr Louis Chua

1.34 pm

Mr Chua Kheng Wee Louis (Sengkang) : Mr Speaker, in May this year, the ESR presented 32 recommendations across eight thrusts, the product of five committees and consultations with more than 7,700 stakeholders, with the full report released in June.

It is a serious piece of work and I commend those involved. But as I noted in this House last September, Singapore has never lacked task forces and committees – the Economic Strategies Committee in 2009, the Committee on the Future Economy in 2016, the Future Economy Council, the Industry Transformation Maps, the Emerging Stronger Task Force in 2020, and now the ESR and the Singapore Economic Resilient Task Force.

At this rate, reviewing the economy risks becoming a growth industry in its own right.

The ESR asks searching questions of our businesses and our workers: sharpen our value proposition, be agile, be resilient. These are fair propositions. But there is one economic actor of whom the report asked remarkably little – the Government itself and specifically, the Government in its most lucrative role as our landlord.

The state owns some 90% of the land in Singapore and it is by a wide margin the biggest landlord in the country.

My contention today is a simple one. The ESR ambitions for enterprise and innovation will not be realised so long as the Government continues to see itself as a landlord and as long as Singaporeans continue to share in the Government's rentier mindset.

In fact, even as economists often identify the key factors of production, being land, labour, capital and entrepreneurship, there is not a single mention of land in the 32 recommendations of the ESR report, even as the report itself had acknowledged that land, energy and demographic constraints are expected to tighten.

Mr Speaker, rent-seeking behaviour permeates our society and the tone is set at the top. As I have shared in my speech at the opening of this term in Parliament, policy should not inevitably reward the highest bidder at the expense of wider societal outcomes.

And it is in upstream land costs that we must go further. State land forms part of our reserves, but excessive land prices push up development costs and rents, impacting tenants and companies, and eventually consumers.

As a local C-suite member of one of Asia's largest real estate groups has shared in the past, in Singapore, land costs now form roughly 70% of total project development expenditure, up from just 4% in the 1980s for Raffles City. These costs do not vanish. They cascade from developer to tenant, from tenant to hawker, clinic, shopkeeper and finally, to every consumer.

I anticipate the familiar reply that rental is not the largest cost businesses face. Indeed, when this House debated hawker culture, the Senior Minister of State cited a National Environment Agency (NEA) survey showing that rental forms less than 10% of store holders' operating costs against 56% for raw materials and 20% for manpower.

But this argument proves too little. Where does the hawker suppliers operate from? A rented industrial unit on state priced land. Where does the wholesaler store his goods, the logistics firm parks its lorries, the essential kitchen prepares its ingredients? All on land whose price the state sets and extracts.

High land prices feed into rentals and rentals feed into every line of the cost structure, including the 56% we are told to look instead. Rent is not one cost amongst many. It is a cost embedded in all the others and an important, fixed overhead that cannot be avoided.

Members will recall the $52,000 monthly rental bid for a general practitioner (GP) clinic in an HDB estate. Minister Ong Ye Kung himself acknowledged that this must feed through to healthcare costs one way or another and that the highest rental bid does not deliver the best care for the community. I agreed with his view then and I continue to hold this view. During this year's Committee of Supply, I appreciate that HDB is expanding the Price Quality Method for commercial tenders of neighbourhood shops.

But if we accept this logic downstream at the level of a single shop tender, we must have the intellectual honesty to apply upstream to land policy itself.

Mr Speaker, there is a structural reason why these costs keep rising. Our land sales system is built so that prices can only ratchet upwards. Sites are awarded to the highest bidder generally, subject to a reserve price that is not published for any individual site. When the market bids above the reserve, the land is sold and a new benchmark is set. When the market bids below it, the tender is simply not awarded, barring other specific circumstances and the state waits for a better day. Heads, land prices rise. Tails, land prices are not allowed to fall.

In a reply to my Parliamentary Question in July 2021, the Minister for Law disclosed that the reserve price is pegged to 85% of the estimated market value assessed by the Chief Valuer's office; and that of the 133 sites launched for tender between 2016 and 2021, 17 were not awarded because the highest bids were deemed not reflective of the fair market value of the land.

That is roughly one in eight tenders aborted rather than allowed to clear at what the market was actually prepared to pay.

The pattern continues in February 2024, when the URA declined to award the Marina Gardens Crescent white site because the sole bid of $770 million, or $984 per square foot per plot ratio, was assessed to be too low.

The history of Paya Lebar Quarter, one of my favourite mixed-use sites in the East, tells the same story. In November 2011, URA rejected the sole bid from a consortium of UOL Group and Singapore Land for a mixed-use site in Paya Lebar Central at $529.5 million, or $566 per square foot per plot ratio on the grounds that it was too low. The consortium asked for reserve prices to be made public, given the cost and efforts of submission of such a scale. URA declined, saying disclosure would not be in the public interest.

When the site was eventually tended and awarded in April 2015, it was sold at $1.67 billion, or $943 per square foot per plot ratio, at a rate some two thirds higher than the bid the Government had earlier refused. The land waited four years; the price went up by about two thirds. The state coffers are higher by a billion, even as the site area is now bigger, and we saw private residential prices in that area reach new highs after Park Place Residences was eventually launched. Is this a healthy development?

The irony is that the Government understands this perfectly well in certain cases. NEA proudly sets no reserve rent at all for hawker stall tenders since 2012 and does not set a minimum bid price for hawker stall tenders.

My first call, therefore, is that maximising revenues from land and building should no longer be a primary consideration of land policy. As I have argued in this House before, we should bring back the two-envelope concept and price tenders as the default for strategic and community facing sites, so that land is awarded on the quality and value of what is built and not simply to whoever bids the most.

The Government is the biggest landlord of all benefits, but it does so at everyone else's expense.

The same logic applies to households. Home loans make up at least 70% of total household liabilities in Singapore and mortgage borrowing grew 5.8% year on year in the first quarter of this year. Our own regulatory framework, the total debt servicing ratio, contemplates households committing up to 55% of gross monthly income to debt service obligations.

A household servicing a 30-year mortgage at anywhere near that level does not leave the perceived security of a monthly paycheck to start a company with no visibility over cash inflows for years. It optimises for the next paycheck because it must. Moreover, according to ADP Research, 60% of workers in Singapore were living paycheck to paycheck as of 2024.

What capital is there for entrepreneurship? It is no wonder that risk aversion in Singapore is not some cultural mystery, but a lived balance sheet reality. That is why in the last term of Parliament, I moved an Adjournment Motion calling for rental housing to be developed as a genuine housing model and not merely a residual safety net for those with no other options.

The build-to-own model has served asset accumulation well, but it frontloads a lifetime of leverage onto Singaporeans in precisely the decades when they are most able to take entrepreneurial risk. In many other global cities, young professionals rent for years without stigma, preserving the flexibility to move, retrain and build.

My second call is therefore for a meaningful public rental option for young and middle-income Singaporeans with tenure-security and rent set with reference to income rather than market value. We already have a variance of this in the Parenthood Provisional Housing Scheme for married or engaged couples with more modest incomes and who wish to rent a temporary flat while waiting for their new home to be built.

If we want a generation of founders, we should stop shackling them to mortgages in their 20s and 30s.

Mr Speaker, since the Government seems to relish its position as being the largest landlord in the country, let me offer a new estate to develop. In the AI economy, compute is to value creation what land was to the industrial economy, the scarce foundational input on which everything else is built.

We have made a start and I acknowledge that an Enterprise Compute Initiative was announced at Budget 2025 with up to $150 million of funding support. This is however only meant to be a short-term programme that will only run for one year for the respective launch dates of each cloud service provider. By October 2025, we had reportedly paired some 1,000 firms with cloud partners, but this is a very modest figure as compared to the 385,000 or so firms in Singapore's enterprise landscape in 2024, as identified in the ESR's final report.

I also recognise that the National Trades Union Congress' (NTUC's) AI-Ready SG subsidises half the subscription cost of eligible AI tools for members, if you first go for an approved course. In other words, the principle of subsidised access to compute has been accepted by the Government. The questions that remain are of scale, duration and ambition.

Some examples from overseas may be instructive. Hong Kong built its own AI Supercomputing Centre at Cyberport and allocated HK$3 billion to a three-year AI subsidy scheme, under which eligible users receive subsidies of up to 70% of a centre's service list price. That is a state-owned facility with a published rate card and a discount.

Canada's Sovereign AI Compute Strategy pairs public supercomputing investment with a C$300 million Access Fund that covers two-thirds of eligible costs for local cloud-based AI computing services, on projects with compute costs of up to C$5 million. Note the word local, and that these are targeted at SMEs.

The United Kingdom (UK) having found itself with only 1.3% of global compute capacity in late 2022, committed up to £2 billion by 2030 under its Compute Roadmap, and its AI Research Resource now allocates compute directly: 10,000 GPU hours for first-time users and 20,000 GPU hours for SMEs, awarded as capacity rather than cash.

Consider also the asymmetry closer to home. We extract some $20 billion in a single year in land sales proceeds also and yet, we are only setting aside $150 million for the digital land on which our own companies must build, and $1 billion over five years in overall national AI research. And for all our first-place finishes in AI-readiness, only 4% of firms had embedded AI into core business processes by 2026, with adoption at 15% among SMEs, against 63% for larger firms. AI diffusion is a big concern.

I could not have summed it up better than a 2025 World Bank report on Digital Progress and Trends report, that governments should create an enabling environment to facilitate access to compute resources, catalysing AI adoption, adaptation and innovation. This can include targeted interventions such as compute subsidies for SMEs and researchers, regional data centres and public-private partnership.

More recently, NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, also remarked that a strong AI ecosystem is not a foregone conclusion. Policy-makers have an important opportunity to act, such as through expanding access to compute for startups and researchers, and investing in shared training assets. This is not a one off or time limited effort, but instead we should spare no effort until a significant majority of our local enterprises have truly embedded AI into their core business processes.

My third call is therefore a so-called "HDB model for compute". The HDB public housing model made the Government's objective of home ownership for the people programme during our early years attainable through subsidised access to state land. Similarly, a national compute programme should offer a subsidised allocated capacity to local companies and particularly, SMEs and entrepreneurs. This will draw on capacity in which the state has an ownership interest, priced below market with a published rate card with tenure certainty and eligibility weighted towards local ownership and local value capture. As what Liang Wenfeng, chief executive officer (CEO) of DeepSeek said recently, "人才的差距，本质上也是因为算力的差距". Let us not have a talent gap in Singapore, simply because of a lack of access to compute.

Mr Speaker, I can already anticipate the Government's response to the proposals I have raised: that pricing land or compute below the highest market bid amounts to raiding the reserves. Allow me three responses.

First, the reserves belong to all Singaporeans, not to the government of the day. Foregone rent extraction that flows into the productive capacity of Singaporean households and firms is not a raid, but an investment in our collective future. It is the owners of the reserves investing in themselves.

Second, on the Government's own explanation to this House, leasehold land reverts to the state at the end of its term and is protected as past reserve once again. The debate is therefore about the pricing philosophy for the use of land over 99 years, not about giving the freehold away.

Third, we do not apply this stinginess to foreign investment promotion. We extend generous low tax incentives and charge as low as 5% corporate income tax, instead of 17% to attract MNCs via a series of incentive schemes. Why is a discount for a foreign MNC prudent economic strategy, but a discount for a Singaporean entrepreneur a raid on the reserves?

Allow me to conclude in Mandarin, Mr Speaker, on what the real risks are for Singapore.

( In Mandarin ) : [ Please refer to Vernacular Speech .] Mr Speaker, what are the real risks facing our country and our economy? Is it that we are pricing a small number of land parcels, rental flats or GPU clusters below the highest level that the market can bear? Or is it that generation after generation, Singaporeans will quietly come to the conclusion that, in their own country, the most lucrative business is to be a landlord and the safest life is to become a homeowner burdened by mortgage repayments for half their lives?

I welcome the final recommendation report of the Economic Strategy Review Committee and I support that Motion moved by Mr Kenneth Tiong and Assoc Prof Jamus Lim. But, as long as the state remains the most successful rent maximiser in our economy, the grand vision of this strategy will remain only on paper. The Government should stop seeing itself as Singapore's biggest landlord and should instead see itself as more actively as the people's greatest enabler.

Mr Speaker, I support the Motion proposed by Mr Kenneth Tiong and Assoc Prof Jamus Lim.

Mr Speaker : Ms Mariam Jaafar.

1.50 pm

Ms Mariam Jaafar (Sembawang) : Mr Speaker, I rise in support of the amendments moved by the hon Member Mr Edward Chia.

Let me begin by acknowledging something important. The hon Members Assoc Prof Lim and Mr Kenneth Tiong have tapped into a sentiment that some Singaporeans genuinely feel: some business owners feel the economy has grown harder to navigate; some SMEs feel squeezed by costs, including rents, by manpower, and they feel crowded out for business and funding opportunities by larger competition; some workers, including younger workers, wonder if opportunity for them is expanding as fast as the economy itself.

Those feelings are real. If Singaporeans feel anxious about the future, it is our job to listen carefully. But listening carefully also means diagnosing carefully. Understanding how people feel is not the same as understanding why they feel that way and more importantly, what to do about it.

And that brings me to the central question before this House: how does a small country like Singapore continue to create prosperity in a changing, more volatile world?

It is a question every generation of Singaporeans has had to answer. Singapore's answer has never been abundant resources nor a domestic market of scale. Nor has it been abundant land. We have never had those luxuries. Everything we have achieved has depended on our ability to create far more value than our size would suggest possible. That has been Singapore's story for the last 60 years. It must be Singapore's story for the next 60.

Mr Speaker, a successful economic strategy for Singapore has to do two things: first, create as much value as a small nation possibly can; second, make sure Singaporeans create, capture and own a growing share of that value. Both questions matter. But they must be answered in the right order, because no nation has every captured value it did not first create. Chapter one must come before chapter two.

Sir, I have spent the bulk of my career advising companies on growth and competitiveness. One lesson has remained remarkably constant: the strongest organisations do not succeed because of one advantage. They succeed because they build complementary capabilities that reinforce one another – technology, talent, capital, customers, partnerships, compounding together. None of these strengths is sufficient on its own. Together, they create greater value than the sum of the parts.

The modern 21st century economy works the same way. It is not built around one company or one sector. It is built around ecosystems.

Singapore has never competed by trying to be bigger than anyone else. We have competed by bringing complementary strengths together faster and better than other countries many times our size. We connect capital with ideas, research with enterprise, talent with opportunity, local ambition with global markets, global enterprises with capable local suppliers. Each connection strengthens the next. Each success attracts another. Over time, those connections become an ecosystem that is far more competitive than any individual company, institution or sector can be on its own.

Singapore's advantage has been our ability to combine complementary strengths that reinforce one another into ecosystems that create more value.

I suspect there is broad agreement across this House that we want more Singaporean enterprises to succeed globally. The difference is not the destination. It is the path we believe gets us there.

That is why we should be careful about thinking of our choices as trade-offs, a tug of war, a zero-sum game – local enterprises versus global enterprises, domestic demand versus external demand, growth versus inclusion. These are not opposing forces. They are mutually reinforcing.

Take the relationship between global enterprises and local enterprises. Dynamic local companies are essential to Singapore's future. They embody Singaporean entrepreneurship, innovation and ambition. We should want more of them, larger ones, more productive ones, more that succeed well beyond our shores.

Global enterprises are equally indispensable, not because they are larger, not because they create jobs, but because they expand the productive frontier of the entire economy. They bring frontier technologies. They bring world-class management practices. They develop Singaporean talent, some of whom will one day set up their own companies. They connect Singapore companies to global customers and supply chains even if those supply chains are re-configuring. They create demanding customers for local suppliers. They expose our companies to international best practices. They raise the standards of the ecosystem around them.

In short, they expand the frontier of what Singapore's economy is capable of achieving.

But none of this happens by accident. It is built deliberately. When EDB approves a major investment, it is not simply asking how much capital will come or how many jobs will be created. It also asks what capabilities will be anchored here and how Singapore enterprises will benefit. In 2025, working alongside Enterprise Singapore, EDB generated 19 MNC-local enterprise partnership projects. That is not simply investment promotion. It is deliberate capability building, deliberate ecosystem deepening.

A small precision engineering firm here might start by supplying components to an MNC here. If the ecosystem is working, that story does not stop here. Exposure to global standards, new technologies and production methods, and demanding customers lets that firm deepen what it can do – move from making parts to designing solutions, from serving one market to several, from supplier to competitor in its own right. Eventually, it is no longer simply benefiting from the system. It is strengthening the system for the next generation of Singaporean companies. That is how capability compounds. That is how stronger Singapore enterprises are built.

I have had the privilege, particularly over the last few years, to work with more local SMEs. What is holding them back from scaling globally is rarely a lack of ambition or a lack of demand for what they make. The constraints are usually different – access to growth capital, management with experience running operations across borders, or leading technology transformation, networks that open overseas markets, risk appetite.

These are capability gaps and they are unlikely to be closed simply by wining ourselves off connections with our global capital. If anything, they are closed by making those connections work better for many more Singaporean enterprises.

That is why the real question is not whether local enterprises matter. It is not whether we should support them more strongly. We should. The real question is how we can build an economy where local and global enterprises reinforce one another, makes the other stronger. The real question is whether we are helping enough Singaporean enterprises get connected to the ecosystems, acquire the capabilities that allow them to climb the value chain, compete internationally and ultimately, become ecosystem builders themselves. And that is precisely what the ESR seeks to do.

The same logic applies to domestic and external demand. Domestic demand is important. It sustains heartland businesses. It provides resilience. But for a country of six million people, domestic demand cannot sustain the growth, wages and opportunities we aspire to. We must continue to compete in far larger markets.

Of course, many Singapore enterprises are not exporters. As the Member of Parliament for Woodlands, I perhaps feel more keenly than others, that heartland businesses are feeling the pressure and the RTS Link may accelerate this.

But the answer cannot be simply to strengthen domestic demand. We cannot ask consumers to ignore value, we cannot ask consumers to spend differently, we cannot ask them not to spend their money elsewhere. Our response has to be to help business compete differently.

Also, ultimately, domestic demand, for every hawker, every family business, every heartland retailer, ultimately depends on Singaporeans' spending power. That spending power comes from productive jobs, rising wages, competitive industries and companies succeeding in global markets. In turn, a vibrant domestic economy provides the stability, talent and confidence that enable more firms to grow and venture abroad. Again, these are not competing priorities. They are complementary strengths.

Mr Speaker, some Members have asked in the past: who ultimately captures the value? It is the right question. But I think we should answer it in the right way.

Ownership matters. It matters who owns the intellectual property. It matters who owns successful enterprises. It matters who owns the next generation of globally competitive companies. But ownership does not just become reality simply because we declare it to be our objective. It is built patiently, capability by capability, enterprise by enterprise, institution by institution. Capability makes ownership possible.

Take PSA. It began as a domestic port operator. Today, it operates over 70 terminals across more than 180 locations in 45 countries. But the most valuable thing PSA has now is not simply a larger portfolio of terminals. Managing ports across the world's major trade routes gives PSA a unique view of global supply chains. By combining operational expertise with digital technologies, data, automation and AI to design solutions its customers cannot get from a single-port operator. The ports were the entry point. The data advantage, the capability, that is the competitive advantage. And ownership follows.

Ownership is most durable when it is built on capability, because capability is what allows ownership to endure and grow.

Singapore will not own every company shaping the global AI economy. Nor do we need to. These companies create enormous value for Singaporeans, through jobs, supplier ecosystems, knowledge spillovers, capability building. And yes, an MNC may one day leave Singapore. Investment can move. Capability stays.

The most important question is whether Singaporeans are building the capabilities to create value alongside them – as founders, as engineers, as researchers, as investors, as suppliers, as technology leaders and increasingly, as owners of globally competitive enterprises themselves.

Ownership in a modern economy takes many forms: a founder building the next regional champion, an employer with stock options in a growing company, a Singapore supplier moving into higher-value-added design and engineering, an investor participating in the growth of world-class businesses, our sovereign wealth funds investing on behalf of every Singaporean. These are all ways in which Singaporeans participate in, capture and own the value that our economy creates.

The goal is therefore not simply to own more assets. It is to build an economy where more Singaporeans have meaningful ownership in the value they help create. And we do this by building the whole innovation ecosystem: research, talent, capital, patient financing, market access, regulation, strong global partnerships. These are complementary strengths. And when they come together, they create something larger than any one policy, say on research, could achieve.

I want to go back to where I started. If an SME owner says, "I don't feel these benefits," we should listen. If they say, "I feel crowded out," we should listen. If they say, "This ecosystem seems to work for everyone except businesses like mine," we should listen.

Global firms do compete with local ones for talent, for capital. Wages feel the pressure and it falls unevenly and this is real. Openness is not costless. But the answer to that real cost is not to become a less open economy, when openness is where the capability comes from. The answer is to make sure more Singaporeans capture the upside instead of only absorbing the cost, skills that move a worker toward the frontier rather than away from it, capital markets deep enough, partnerships between MNCs and local firms that help more local firms becoming suppliers, adopters, internationalisers and owners in their own right. And that is firmly, firmly embedded in the ESR strategies.

Mr Speaker, we all want to see more large successful Singapore companies. More value captured here. More Singaporeans venturing abroad. But if we make rebalancing the organising principle of our strategy, we may not end up with more of those companies. We get fewer. Target ownership before capability and competitiveness, and we do not own more of the pie. We own more of a smaller one.

That is why I support the hon Member Mr Edward Chia's amendments. They recognise something this House has known for 60 years and cannot afford to forget for the next 60. Our strength has never come from any one source alone. It comes from strengthening the connections between them – dynamic local companies, global enterprises, domestic demand and external demand, Singaporeans and Singaporean capital venturing confidently into the world. These were never separate engines to be weighed against each other. They are complementary strengths, working together as one system, working together to lift ordinary Singaporeans.

Singapore never succeeded by asking the world to make room for us. We succeeded by becoming useful, indispensable to it, even as the world changes around us.

Our task is now to continue to build an economy of the future where each reinforces the other, where the best companies, foreign or local, want to be. And to make sure more Singaporeans have the capability, the confidence and the opportunity to shape that future, to create value, to capture it and increasingly, to own it. So that every generation of Singaporeans begins with opportunities greater than the generation before. Mr Speaker, I support the amended Motion. [ Applause. ]

Mr Speaker : Mr Andre Low.

2.05 pm

Mr Low Wu Yang Andre (Non-Constituency Member) : Thank you, Mr Speaker. Mr Speaker, the ESR is organised around workers adapting again and again. It proposes training, pathways and career bridges between jobs. But it gives far less attention to the all-important first transition from education or National Service (NS) into stable work, and to whether young people get a fair start.

In February, during the Budget debate, I called this phenomenon the broken bottom rung of the career ladder – when young Singaporeans are unable to make that first meaningful step. The first job is where someone takes a chance on you. It is where you gain the experience that every subsequent employer expects you to have. A young person cannot create that opportunity alone. When firms stop taking chances on beginners, Singapore eventually stops producing experienced workers.

Today, I want to ask the Government a practical question: if a young Singaporean has prepared for work, searched earnestly and still cannot secure stable employment, what must change so that their sustained effort can lead them somewhere?

Today, most graduates still manage to find work. Among autonomous- university graduates in the labour force, those who secured employment of any kind within six months of completing their final examinations amounted to 88.9% of the 2025 cohort, a slight drop from 91.2% in 2024. So, eight out of nine graduates found work last year, but that figure is a broad measure. It includes graduates in full-time permanent employment; but also, those in part-time, temporary or freelance work; those who have accepted a job that starts later; and those taking steps to start a business.

However, those in full-time permanent employment amounted to 74.4% of the cohort last year, down from 79.4% the previous year. That means only three out of four – down from four out of five – found more stable, long-term roles and could start building an actual career.

I would not sound the klaxons just yet, but these are among several worrying signals, both in Singapore and from around the world, that it is getting harder for our youngest amongst us to find work.

The signals grow stronger when we look across different educational paths. Among surveyed fresh graduates from full-time external degree programmes at private education institutions, 78.9% secured employment and 46.9% were in full-time permanent employment. So, another 24% were in part-time or temporary work, including 9.7% who said this was involuntary. It is clearly not a bed of roses for everyone. The transition into stable work looks materially different depending on where you graduate.

Behind these figures are young people who have done what was asked of them and still cannot get started. I have heard from young graduates who told me about searches running into the hundreds of applications. One submitted more than 500 applications over six months and received few interviews. Another submitted close to 200 in four months without securing a single one.

For these young people, the first transition meant repeated effort, very little response and no clear place to turn should their efforts repeatedly fail to net a reward.

A confluence of factors is likely driving the cooling job market for young Singaporeans. With the increased adoption of both AI and "old-school" technological and productivity advancements, a firm may make the entirely rational decision to automate away the basic tasks once given to junior employees. It may decide that training a beginner is too costly in today's high cost environment and when that person can ultimately leave after gaining critical experience.

Take those same rational decisions and scale them across the economy, and we can start to see the problem. If every firm, local companies and global enterprises alike, makes the same calculation, the economic engine gradually stops producing experienced workers. What works for one company's balance sheet damages the national workforce.

The Government has introduced several measures to support the transition into work. The SG Youth Plan has introduced Job Tasters to help young people explore an occupation. Training helps them prepare. Matching services connect them to vacancies. Work-Study and Company-Led Training can combine a real job with structured workplace learning.

However, each helps at a different stage. Taken together, however, a young person can still move from exposure to training to job matching without getting a fair start. Exposure is useful, but exposure is not employment. That is the gap we must fill.

And Mr Speaker, that is why I propose a "Fair Start Promise" to all our youths – a national commitment to work towards a simple goal. If you are a young Singaporean under 30 making the transition from education or NS into working life, that you will get a fair start, through stable employment or a proper paid career-building pathway. That means we must rebuild the broken bottom rung of the career ladder.

The establishment of the Skills and Workforce Development Agency (SWDA) gives us an important opportunity to make this promise real. By bringing skills and employment under one roof, the Government can now judge the whole journey by one outcome: whether young Singaporeans actually get a fair start.

The Government should make fulfilling the "Fair Start Promise" a core mission of SWDA, with staged targets that show whether Singapore is moving closer to the goal.

For the individual young Singaporean, what this means is targeted and individualised support from SWDA case officers and that should begin early. Six months into the transition is a sensible checkpoint at which to assess outcomes. Any young person still searching at that point should continue to receive active support and no one should be left to flounder alone.

But a national goal alone will not create opportunities. So, we must create more genuine ways for young people to get their fair start.

First, we should open more ordinary entry-level jobs to capable beginners, where an employer has real work that can develop a beginner through the ordinary course of employment, the priority should be that proper job.

My colleague Eileen Chong spoke during the SWDA Bill debate about the implementation gap in skills-based hiring. Singapore has produced tool kits and established institutions to promote this, but we still do not know clearly whether employers are changing how they hire or if they are lagging behind. She called for the Public Service to lead by example and for a published baseline tracking skills-based job postings by sector and employer size. I support these proposals.

I have also previously proposed that the Careers and Skills Passport evolve from a digital filing cabinet into a dynamic, living credential. I now propose extending that idea: making it work better for hiring. The Passport already allows Singaporeans to share verified qualifications, training and employment records with employers.

For a fresh graduate, however, that record will naturally be thinner. The SWDA should establish standards through which the institutes of higher learning (IHLs) and employers can verify substantial projects, internships, Work-Study learning stints and other assessed competencies through the Careers and Skills Passport. Employers should then match that evidence to the actual skills required for the job and where appropriate, let applicants demonstrate these skills through a structured practical assessment.

The Public Service should apply the same discipline to its own entry-level roles: identify what must genuinely be known on the first day, remove degree and prior-experience requirements that cannot be justified and publish whether its hiring practices are changing. The Government should again lead by example.

These measures would improve the match between capable beginners and entry-level jobs that already exist in the market. But matching alone cannot build the workplace experience that some jobs genuinely require and Singapore must therefore also create more places where beginners can acquire it.

That brings me to my second point. We should build proper paid apprenticeships. In some occupations, competence can only be built through sustained, supervised practice. Employers want experience because the work genuinely takes time to learn. Yet, every firm has an incentive to wait for another firm to bear the cost of producing that experienced worker.

Singapore already has workplace programmes for young entrants. GRIT, for example, offers a three- to six-month allowance-based traineeship and can provide useful short-term experience. But where an occupation requires sustained, supervised practice over a longer period of time, we need a different, more well-developed route: a proper apprenticeship framework providing paid employment, full employee status, CPF, structured training and portable competences.

That is why Singapore should build a national market for proper paid apprenticeships. SWDA should identify occupations where employers need workers but beginners need sustained workplace training, and work with employers and sector bodies to expand apprenticeship places that meet a common quality floor. That means recruiting firms and coordinating the teaching assessment and supervision needed to build competence while making sure every place provides enough real work.

Shared capacity is especially important for SMEs. A smaller firm may have valuable work but lack a training department, a full curriculum or enough varied tasks to train an apprentice alone. Sector bodies and consortia can provide common teaching roving mentors and independent assessment while coordinating rotations between these SMEs, where these are needed to fully develop a range of competence.

Employers would still provide the job and the wages and the workplace supervision as well as their own share of investment.

The quality floor must be clear. A proper apprenticeship is paid employment. It should carry a contract of service, wages, CPF and ordinary workplace protections. The apprentice should perform productive work, learn through a structured plan and have a named mentor. Wages should progress with competence. These skills should also be recognised independently of any one employer and carry value elsewhere across the market. The same employer need not guarantee permanent conversion, but before the pathway ends, there should be credible decision on conversion or progression.

The Government should support the shared infrastructure and portable occupational training that individual firms are unlikely to provide alone. Employers must remain substantial investors from the first day. That is the bargain we strike. The Government solves the coordination problem, firms provide real work and help build the worker.

Proper apprenticeships are central to a fair start for young people. The same principles have wider application across the economy. My colleague, Mr Gerald Giam, will speak next about the application to the skilled trades, where verified competence should lead to recognised mastery and real progression.

Third, the Government should use its economic leverage to create genuinely additional job opportunities. Some employers have productive work but still hesitate to hire a beginner because of the initial wages, supervision and lower productivity. The Government can change that decision selectively.

One lever is expanding targeted temporary risk-sharing arrangements. Support should be available where an employer can show that they will create a genuine additional employee job or proper apprenticeship, and that the opening would not proceed on the same terms without help. The employer must contribute throughout and take responsibility for wages, CPF, real work supervision and development.

Another lever is public procurement. Where workforce development is relevant to a substantial public contract, procuring agencies can require or recognise proportionate commitment to proper apprenticeships and genuine employee entry level roles. The purpose is to connect public purchasing demand to the development of Singapore's future workforce without imposing a blanket quota on every contractor.

Both levers should face the same test: did public intervention change the employer’s decision and create a productive opportunity that would not otherwise have existed? Public money should not pay employers to relabel planned vacancies, displace existing workers or cycle young people through temporary seats. Support should depend on additional work and real development. Money should be recovered where an employer misrepresents the role or fails to provide the job, wages or development promised.

These measures will not eliminate every difficult transition for our youths, but they can however increase the number of genuine first opportunities without compelling private employers to hire or manufacturing make work in the economy.

Finally, we must measure whether young people actually get that fair start. The Fair Start Promise should be judged by whether they enter stable employment or a proper paid career building pathway and can build from it. The SWDA should publish a baseline and staged targets for those outcomes. It should report whether employment lasts, whether job responsibilities and wages progress, and whether the results differ across groups.

The results must also show how many young people remain without stable employment at the critical six-month mark, for how long and for what broad reasons. A youth should not disappear from the figures because a referral failed or a programme ended. Keeping these outcomes visible will show where vacancies, training capacity or practical support remain inadequate.

A downturn may also make progress towards the Fair Start Promise harder. That is when honest measurement matters most. It tells Parliament and the public how much opportunity has disappeared and whether the national response is strong enough.

The Fair Start Promise sets the national ambition. The three proposals I suggested are the practical ways to move closer towards making that a reality: opening existing jobs to capable beginners with skills-based hiring, building proper paid apprenticeships and creating additional opportunities where public intervention changes the calculus and hiring decision for any employer. Transparent results will also show where progress is being made and where the Government must do more.

Mr Speaker, in conclusion, the Fair Start Promise asks something of everyone. Young people must prepare, search earnestly and engage with suitable opportunities. Employers must provide real jobs and invest in beginners. The Government must build the conditions in which sustained effort can lead to progress and lead to a stable career.

The Government must not stand aside when every employer waits for someone else to provide a first chance. It must not let young people disappear between programmes and institutions.

Mr Speaker : Mr Azhar Othman.

2.21 pm

Mr Azhar Othman (Nominated Member) : Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak on the Motion "An Economy of the Future that Works for All".

I would like to declare that I am the Deputy President of the Singapore Malay Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SMCCI), Chairman of SME Centre @ SMCCI, a Council Member of the East Asia Business Council and an Executive Chairman of Enercon Asia Pte Ltd.

I would just like to highlight that the Motion itself is quite important. More importantly is the collaboration between the private sectors and the Government. The reason I say this is because we do not want to go into a Motion whereby we want to re-invent everything. I think the most important part is not break what is already working.

I say this in my context of travelling with the SME Centre to one of the Central Asian countries. We did a business study over there. The government of the day or the chamber that we met was quite amazed with what we have – a system, from the Ministry of Trade and Industry, down to Enterprise Singapore, down to the SME Centre, that creates a cohesiveness between the Government to the ground. This does not exist in other countries. This is something that we should be proud of. We should retain – the ability to grow together.

The fundamental of our livelihood cannot be disrupted or changed. And that is trade. We live in an era of heightened geopolitical tensions and a multi-polar world. Countries are turning inwards, protectionism is rising, supply chains are being re-configured along political lines. In such a climate, the instinct of many nations is to build walls.

For Singapore, that cannot be our response. Trade is the lifeblood of this nation. We must not become a trade barrier. We must be the bridge of trade. Our strategy must clear, open, connected, trusted and resilient. We must double down on what makes Singapore unique – a credible, rules-based hub that can link markets, capital, talent and ideas across a fragmented world.

I would like to highlight importance of working together – that includes the Government, GLCs, Enterprise Singapore, private sectors, SMEs, unions that represent the workforce, trade associations and chambers. Member Mark Lee has commented on how important the trade chambers are.

There are seven parts to my speech which I believe will put a clear perspective to achieve a concentrated network of help as one ecosystem of support to tackle the challenges ahead and devise a set of common strategies to ensure we progress and be very successful.

The first one. Trade as our lifeblood in a protectionist world. Mr Speaker, Singapore's prosperity has always been anchored on trade. In a world where major economies are derisking, diversifying and sometimes decoupling, we must be the connector others can rely on.

To do this, we must expand our network of free trade agreements (FTAs). We must pursue FTAs with as many countries as possible, not just big economies but also, emerging markets. Africa, Latin America, Central Asia. Every new FTA is a new door for our SMEs, a new channel for our services and a new vote of confidence in Singapore's open economy.

Position Singapore as a bridge of trade. While others raise tariffs and impose quotas, we must lower friction. We must be the neutral ground where East meets West, where North connects with South. Our legal system, financial infrastructure and logistical capabilities make us ideal for this role.

Empower Enterprise Singapore to be a global conduit in creating Queen Bee companies from GLCs that supports SMEs. This is something that I would like to share for us to be able to be a strong economy which is unique to our country – whereby the cohesiveness of working together is very important.

Enterprise Singapore's international presence must be leveraged more aggressively. Their overseas centres should act as business matchmakers, linking Singapore companies with partners, distributors and joint venture opportunities abroad. They should not just be officers, they should be deal makers.

Recently, I attended an Enterprise Singapore talk on the Middle East situation and shared with local businesses about what to expect and what are the opportunities. Of course, there are challenges. Of course, there is risk. But through that informed setting, we are able to make good judgements on whether we should come in or should not come in. But overall, the value that is given to companies is that it allowed us to evaluate with certainty and with clarity. That is the part that I see as going together, of having Enterprise Singapore overseas and bringing information back to the ground.

For GLCs, I think they play an important role as well. Similarly, I attended a session organised by the SBF, where they were trying to connect the Queen Bee or GLCs to local businesses in Singapore. That is very important as well. We are overdue on such kind of collaborations. We have companies that go all over the world, that tender for big projects. The ability to work together is more important than ever. This is quite crucial. Through that collaboration and interaction, we also show that we have the right sentiment whereby businesses can work with the Government and GLCs very, very well.

Moving on, we can reduce the cost of error for SMEs going overseas. Expanding abroad is risky, especially for SMEs. A single misstep can be fatal. The Government should enhance grants – as what we have seen before – and financial support to derisk internationalisation. This includes shared warehousing or logistic hubs in key markets, tax incentives for re-investing overseas profit back into R&D or capability building.

When we reduce the cost of failure, we increase the courage to try. That is how Singaporean companies grow into regional and global champions.

Second, Singapore as the hub of hubs. Mr Speaker, in a fragmented world, Singapore's greatest advantage is our ability to be everything to everyone – a one-stop hub for all main industries. We must consciously position ourself as a: financial hub – continue to deepen our capital markets, attract asset managers and investment, and become the leading centre for green finance and fintech in Asia; logistics hub – leverage our port and airport connectivity to be the premier transshipment and distribution centre for the world; transport hub – expand our aviation and maritime networks to remain the gateway between various countries; education hub – attract top global universities and research institutions and nurture homegrown talent to serve regional and global needs; management hub – position Singapore as a regional headquarters for MNCs and the base for professional services in law, accounting, consulting and so on; medical hub – build our world-class healthcare system to attract medical tourism, clinical trials and biotech innovation; and of course, AI hub – invest in AI research, talent and infrastructure to become the leading AI ecosystem in Southeast Asia; sustainability hub – another part that is important in creating a centre of excellence and trust for sustainability reporting and deployment.

This "hub of hubs" strategy is not about doing everything ourselves. It is about creating an ecosystem where global players want to base their operations, where Singaporean SMEs can plug into global value chains and where talent from around the world wants to work and innovate with.

Third, empowering SMEs to thrive locally and globally. SMEs make up 99% of our enterprises and employ about two-thirds of our workforce. They are the backbone of our economy. Yet they face rising costs, tight labour markets and intense competition. We must do more to help them not just survive but thrive.

SME Centres, which are one of the hubs that can offer to companies, must be the first port of call for every small and medium business. They have provided and should enhance their services. SME Centres do provide business advisory services, free of charge, with the support of the Government, workshops on digitalisation, sustainability and internationalisation, access to templates, tools and best practices for governance and compliance.

Leverage trade associations and chambers. Organisations like SBF, the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, SMCCI, the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Association of Small and Medium Enterprise and others must be empowered to do more and not limited to the following: organise business missions and networking events; host sector-specific forums on growth areas like green economy, AI and healthcare; educate members on regulatory changes and emerging opportunities; advocate for SME concerns at the policy level. And I think one that has been doing very well is mentorship programmes, pairing seasoned entrepreneurs with startups. This is something that even the SMCCI has started doing.

Next, to encourage businesses to adapt to changing demand. The market does not wait. SMEs must be ready to pivot, whether it is adopting e-commerce, shifting to sustainable products, or tapping into new customer segments. Government, and the trade associations and chambers can help by providing real-time market intelligence and trend analysis.

The next part is promoting "Buy Singapore, Support Singapore". The reason I raised this issue is regarding GLCs supporting local SMEs. I think that is where we can work together to lift everybody up. And doing so, this recognises every dollar spent is circulated in our economy, creates jobs and builds resilience. Government procurement can lead by example, prioritising local SMEs where quality and value are comparable.

The fourth part, embracing sustainability as a competitive edge. Sustainability is no longer optional. It is a business imperative. As Singapore aims for net-zero by 2050 or earlier, companies must embed sustainability into their operations. Incentivise green adoption. The Government should expand grants for energy-efficient or even increase the grant and of course, carbon accounting and reporting tools, sustainable packaging and supply chain solutions and build green capabilities.

We would also like to see Singapore positioned as a green hub. We can attract green investments by offering tax breaks for sustainable ventures, fast-track approvals for green projects, a one-stop shop for sustainability certification. Companies that adopt sustainability early will not only comply with regulations but also, gain a competitive edge in global markets where consumers and investors demand responsibility.

Fifth, manpower and lifelong learning in the age of AI. Mr Speaker, I must address the challenge of AI. AI is not coming; AI is already here. It is transforming industries, automating tasks; in some cases, replacing workers. This is a distant threat; it is a present reality.

We cannot stop technological progress, but we can ensure that no Singaporean is left behind. Workforce must be ready to learn and relearn. The half-life of skills is shrinking. What you learned five years ago may be obsolete today. Every worker must embrace lifelong learning, not as a slogan, but as a survival strategy.

Government to fund training and AI tools. The SkillsFuture framework is a good start, but it must go further – allow training credits to be used for subscribing to AI-powered productivity tools, fund memberships in trade associations and chambers, and business networks that provide continuous learning, provide stipends for mid-career workers undergoing reskilling, not as a support but as a programme.

Focus on human-centric skills. AI can automate routine tasks, but it cannot replicate creativity, empathy and leadership. Our education and training systems must emphasise these uniquely human skills.

We must support workers in transition. For those whose jobs that are displaced by AI, we need stronger monthly income support during retraining, career conversion programmes tailored to growth sectors, counselling and mental health support to manage anxiety and uncertainty. Constant learning is the only way to stay competitive and employable. The Government must make it affordable, accessible and relevant.

The sixth part, supporting R&D and reducing cost pressures. Innovation is the engine of future growth. But R&D is expensive, especially for SMEs. The Government must increase R&D grants and tax incentives, expand the Research and Development Tax Incentive scheme, create co-funding pools for industry-academia collaborations, support proof-of-concept and pilot projects that bridge the gap between lab and market.

Of course, the next one is mitigating high cost of living and operating. Singaporeans are feeling the pinch. Businesses are grappling with rising rents, utilities and manpower costs. We must review regulatory fees and streamline compliance burdens, provide targeted relief for SMEs in high-cost sectors, ensure housing and transport remain affordable to retain talent. A thriving economy requires both innovation and affordability.

The last part, part seven, keeping the Singapore Dream alive. Mr Speaker, at the heart of this Motion is a simple question: what kind of future do we want for Singapore?

The Singapore Dream must remain alive. It is the belief that with hard work, determination and a fair chance, every Singaporean can achieve aspirations, whether in arts, sports, academia, business or culture. We must ensure that no one feels left out. Inclusive growth means that the benefits of progress are shared broadly. We must uplift the vulnerable, support the middle, and celebrate the successful.

Pride in our nation. Singaporeans must be proud of their country. They must see themselves in our economic story, not as bystanders, but as protagonists. Mr Speaker, do allow me to speak the following in Malay.

( In Malay ) : [ Please refer to Vernacular Speech .] Mr Speaker, the Motion before us calls for an economy that is equal, inclusive, and driven by dynamic local companies. In a world that is increasingly turning inward, Singapore must stand firm as a beacon of openness.

We must be the bridge for trade, not a barrier. We must become the Centres of Excellence – in finance, logistics, transport, education, management, medical, sustainability and AI.

We must empower our SMEs to thrive both locally and globally.

We must embrace sustainability as a competitive advantage.

We must prepare our workforce for the AI revolution.

And we must ensure that the Singapore Dream remains alive for all.

Let us build an economy where every Singaporean can prosper, where every enterprise can grow and where our nation continues to punch above its weight on the global stage.

( In English ): Allow me to do a pantun on this.

( In Malay ) : [ Please refer to Vernacular Speech .] The changing world brings uncertainties;

Singapore companies brace and prepare;

Steered by the Government's strategies;

Together as one, we forge ahead from there.

( In English ): Mr Speaker, in conclusion, the Motion before us calls for an economy that is equal, inclusive and driven by dynamic local companies. In a world turning inward, Singapore must stand firm as a beacon of openness. We must be the bridge of trade, not the barrier. We must become the hub of hubs – financial, logistics, transport, education, management, medical, sustainability and AI. We must empower our SMEs to thrive locally and globally. We must embrace sustainability as a competitive advantage. We must prepare our workforce for the AI revolution and we must keep the Singapore Dream alive for all.

Let us build an economy where every Singaporean can prosper, where every enterprise can grow and where our nation continues to punch above its weight on the global stage. Mr Speaker, I support the amended Motion on the context that we have to work together as one. [ Applause. ]

Mr Speaker : Mr Gerald Giam.

2.38 pm

Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song (Aljunied) : Mr Speaker, for decades, skilled trades persons – from electricians and plumbers to lift engineers and infrastructure and technicians – have not been accorded the prestige and pay that match their vital economic contributions. We have relied on foreign labour arbitrage and allowed unlicensed workers to perform tasks meant for certified practitioners, inevitably suppressing local trade earnings over time.

With a median monthly income of just $2,700 in 2023, skilled trades are seldom seen as a career of first choice for young Singaporeans. Over the past decade, the local craft workforce has shrunk by 40% to 50%. Of the 186,000 craftsmen and trades workers in Singapore – only 28% are locals and their ranks are ageing with a median age of 56 years old.

Yet, skilled trades persons form the bedrock of our national infrastructure. While AI can automate administrative reports, and overseas remote workers can process corporate accounts, they cannot physically rewire a server room, repair a water main, or maintain critical infrastructure in Singapore. These crafts are inherently localised, highly skilled and resistant to remote replacement.

If we want to offer genuine economic mobility to our vocational graduates, we cannot leave the skilled trades trapped by undercutting from unlicensed workers, rigid licensing regimes and limited career progression pathways. We must elevate these vocations into respected high earning avenues of trade, entrepreneurship and national pride.

While upskilling is essential, classroom retraining has limited utility in technical crafts, compared to master-led apprenticeships, and training alone cannot resolve deeper market distortions.

As we look to elevate skilled technical vocations, reliance on frameworks patterned after the Progressive Wage Model or the Career Progression Model will reach natural structural limits. While these models establish important wage floors across foundational sectors, their design relies heavily on climbing fixed corporate ladders into administrative or supervisory roles, positions that are inherently limited in number, and compel artisans to abandon their practical craft just to earn a higher income.

To enable our artisans to achieve true long-term wage progression, we must look beyond administrative ladders and restructure the underlying market so that technical mastery naturally commands the true market value of their craft.

To achieve this, we must introduce a market-friendly trade competency framework that elevate skilled trades into highly respected avenues of independent enterprise and professional advancement. We must enable trades persons to contribute to and build prosperous, scalable businesses, ensuring they do not feel stuck in demanding jobs with limited prospects.

The ESR report rightly acknowledges that essential physical trades are vital to Singapore's economic resilience. However, its recommendations continue to rely on incremental tweaks within employer-led models. While the ESR points to outsourcing and weak skills recognition, it remains silent on the deeper structural distortions depressing trade wages.

The report features an inspiring young electrician whose grit is truly commendable. Yet, his pathway is telling – unlocking high earnings required four academic degrees, including a master's degree from Nitec all the way to a master's degree. I applaud his drive but question the system. Why force a master craftsman through an academic obstacle course instead of directly valuing hands-on mastery and independent enterprise?

This paradigm shift must begin with how these essential vocations are regulated and protected in the open market.

Consider all our current licensing regimes, almost all fixed electrical work legally requires an Energy Market Authority (EMA)-licensed electrical worker, while regulated plumbing requires a PUB-licensed plumber. While non-compliance carries statutory fines of up to $10,000, a jail term of up to three years, or both, daily practice reveals a massive gap between the rates charged by licensed trades persons and unregulated marketplace alternatives. This economic gap tempts cash constrained buyers to opt for uncertified options across many routine property maintenance tasks.

Such choices carry serious public safety risks. Uncertified electrical work can cause loose connections, arcing, structural fires or electrocution, while improper plumbing joints can lead to concealed leaks, sewage backflow or water supply contamination.

In 2016, the improper wiring of a water heater to a three-pin plug by workers unlicensed to do electrical work resulted in the tragic electrocution of a 15-year-old boy in his HDB flat. Similarly, in 2020, an elderly couple and their son were electrocuted to death in their Jurong flat due to similar unsafe installation of a water heater.

To protect public safety and shield local artisans from wage depressing undercutting, regulators, including EMA and PUB, must enforce strict regulatory baselines for all market players, whether local or foreign, to ensure local artisans compete on a true level playing field of technical quality and safety. This will require the agencies to staff sufficient inspectors and auditors to conduct enforcement and respond to whistle-blowing complaints.

Second, we must streamline how local talent enters and moves through the vocational talent pipeline. Local manpower supply is currently constrained by rigid structures that force junior workers and mid-career entrants through a long, uncertain route just to secure a licence. We should promote the skills traits to students and mid-career switches as viable, respected alternatives to polytechnic diplomas and university degrees.

Training pathways already exist, whether through full-time ITE programmes or certification courses at the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) Academy or Singapore Institute of Power and Gas for mid-career switches. However, despite completing their classroom education, aspiring tradespersons face structural challenges when attempting to translate those qualifications into licenced, independent careers. The structural bottleneck lies in the post-graduation licensing requirements of completing two years of relevant practical experience, covering a full spectrum of trade work.

Trade practitioners I spoke to have highlighted that in reality, almost no small contractor covers the entire spectrum of work, expecting a residential service plumber to log experience across industrial supply systems creates a practical bottleneck as current evaluation criteria favour multi-year commercial construction projects over day-to-day residential maintenance.

We can resolve the licensing bottleneck by implementing a modular trade endorsement pathway. Instead of requiring two years of full spectrum experience before a worker can practise independently, this pathway certifies specific verified competencies task by task. Each cleared module would legally authorise the tradesperson for that specific scope of work, whether in water heater installations, sanitary piping or wiring loops. These milestones are verified via hands on practical assessments, customer ratings and structured peer reviews by master practitioners. This allows local apprentices to start practising legally and earning a respectable living for the task they have mastered, while progressively expanding their certified scope over time.

To operationalise these modular endorsements, we need a modern digital architecture, an official tradesperson skills ledger platform. This platform serves a dual purpose. It allows tradespersons to log task-specific trade endorsements, verified under the supervision of licensed artisans, creating an immutable record of their practical milestones. It can also double as a national trades marketplace, connecting buyers, both enterprises and homeowners, directly with licensed tradespersons, based on verified modular competencies, domain expertise and clear rate schedules set transparently by the artisans themselves.

Clear benchmark call out rate bands can be established, providing upfront price transparency for property owners, while guaranteeing fair off-hours compensation for artisans, eliminating both predatory surge gouging and artificial wage caps. By streamlining, matching and reducing administrative overhead for both small contractors and buyers, the system enables tradespersons to establish sustainable commercial clients, secure corporate procurement contracts and build long-term business equity.

Fourth, we must eliminate the structural overload reliance on an employer's sole discretion to advance an apprentice's career. Across skilled trades, the Government currently enforces safety through rigid employer-tied licensing requirements, inadvertently, granting employers veto power over an entry-level worker's advancement.

Under the current market structure, established employers have little commercial incentive to sign off on the logbooks and testimonials of apprentices, who may later become direct competitors. While on-the-job training under senior practitioners remains essential, we must ensure that if an apprentice faces unreasonable administrative delays or employer gatekeeping, an independent audit mechanism exists.

An apprentice should be able to submit their immutable digital work logs and project portfolios to an independent technical panel for verification. This preserves direct supervisory accountability while protecting apprentices from career stagnation and employer hold-up.

Finally, to tie these pillars together, I propose establishing a new autonomous entity called the Singapore Guild of Skilled Tradespersons, which will define baseline competencies, advocate for fair commercial rates, manage the tradesperson skills ledger and empower local tradespersons to self-regulate and scale their operations.

Existing industry bodies, like the Singapore Plumbing Society, the Singapore Electrical Contractors and Licensed Electrical Workers Association, and the Specialist Trade Alliance of Singapore, possess relevant sectoral familiarity. These trade societies can be reformed and integrated as dedicated chambers under this guild. This will give every tradesperson a direct voice, remove corporate employer gatekeeping and empower artisans to govern their craft under a self-regulatory model similar to those enjoyed by doctors, engineers and accountants.

Under this four-sided partnership of shared accountability, employers provide structured apprenticeships with all. Progress and milestones log transparently in the Tradespersons Skills Ledger. The Singapore Guild of Skilled Tradespersons acts as an independent quality auditor and serves as a safety guardian. Tradespersons maintain verified digital profiles and direct statutory accountability for work within their endorsed scope and consumers gain direct access to a trusted, transparent marketplace with verified quality assurance.

Mr Speaker, elevating our physical crafts requires more than just policy tweaks. It demands restoring the social standing and institutional dignity of our artisans. When we give skilled tradespersons the autonomy to govern their own professions, command transparent commercial returns for their mastery and build independent, high earning businesses, we can fundamentally change how society views this form of blue-collar work.

By replacing rigid academic trade mills with direct market rewards for technical excellence, entering a trade will no longer be seen as a second-best option, born of academic detour, but a proud, lucrative and respected pathway into entrepreneurship and master craftsmanship. Through independent representation, technology driven competency tracking and structured apprenticeships, this comprehensive structural redesign will restore our workers' leverage, and ensure that national economic progress serves the dignity and prosperity of every Singaporean.

So, I support the original Motion standing in the names of my hon friends, Mr Kenneth Tiong, the Member for Aljunied group representation constituency (GRC), and Assoc Prof James Lim, the Member for Sengkang GRC.

Mr Speaker : Mr Saktiandi Supaat.

2.53 pm

Mr Saktiandi Supaat (Bishan-Toa Payoh) : Mr Speaker, Sir, let me first declare that I work in a foreign financial institution based in Singapore, serving SMEs and corporates.

I rise to speak on the Motion before this House. There is much in the Motion's aspirations that I support. We want stronger Singapore enterprises. We want our entrepreneurs to succeed and internationalise. We want good jobs and rising opportunities for Singaporeans. Ultimately, economic progress must translate into better lives for our people.

I also recognise the argument made by Members proposing this Motion. Singapore's traditional economic model has served us well, but the competitive environment has changed. On this, there is common ground. Costs have risen. Technology has made it easier for corporate functions to move. Other economies have developed deeper capabilities. Geopolitical fragmentation is reshaping investment and supply chains.

So, yes, Singapore's economic strategy must evolve.

But a more competitive environment does not make external demand or global companies less important to Singapore's next phase of growth. It makes our ability to compete successfully for them and to capture greater value from their presence here, even more important. Healthy domestic demand can strengthen our resilience, but we should be cautious about suggesting that it can substitute for the scale and opportunities provided by our global economic connections.

Mr Speaker, there has been a suggestion that Singapore needs a new economic playbook. I agree, but this is precisely what the ESR already seeks to address. The ESR was informed by more than 80 engagements involving more than 7,700 businesses, workers, unions and trade associations, some of whom are in this room.

It recognises that assumptions underpinning Singapore's success are changing. Its response is not simply to repeat the strategy of the past six decades; it is to upgrade it. And in fact, many of the ESR's recommendations are strikingly similar to the aspirations contained in today's Motion.

The ESR's recommendations will drive the next bound of economic growth and workforce transformation amidst drastically changed global environment. The ESR calls for stronger support for entrepreneurship and access to growth capital, more and better jobs, stronger career transition support and lifelong learning for workers, strengthening Singapore's position as a global leader in AI and a hub for global flows, and building a more dynamic enterprise ecosystem so that more Singapore-based companies can start, scale and succeed globally.

These are not merely aspirations on paper. Many have already begun to find expression in Government policy, including measures announced in recent Budget, enhancing enterprise financing, supporting SMEs and internationalisation, strengthening workforce transitions and investing further in our AI capabilities.

This suggests there is considerable common ground between the aspiration in today's Motion and the direction Singapore is already taking through the ESR.

The useful question for today's debate, therefore, to me, is where the substantive difference lies, whether they concern the overall economic model or the balance, emphasis and policy choices within that model. So, I think that distinction matters because the debate is not really between an old playbook and a new one. It is about what should be in the new playbook, and where we may differ on the balance and emphasis.

One area where I believe we should be careful is the weight we place on external demand and global companies in Singapore's next phase of growth. We have heard many speeches before me on this, but I just want to reiterate it again, briefly.

There is one economic reality Singapore cannot escape. For a small country, like ours, domestic demand alone cannot provide the scale of opportunities that Singaporeans aspire to. In 2025, Singapore's merchandise trade reached almost $1.4 trillion, equivalent to several times the size of our GDP. That gives some sense of just how deeply Singapore's prosperity is connected to demand beyond our shores.

Our semiconductor plants do not produce mainly for Singapore consumers; our pharmaceutical facilities do not manufacture only for patients here; our port, airport and financial centres serve markets far beyond our shores. Domestic demand supports our economic engine. External demand provides much of its scale, and the same applies to global companies.

We should absolutely build more Singapore champions, but this is not a choice between global companies and local enterprises. The ESR itself calls for Singapore to support high-potential enterprises, both homegrown and global.

And this remains the very real source of economic opportunity. In 2025, EDB secured $14.2 billion in fixed asset investment commitments, with the investment commitments expected to create around 15,700 jobs when realised over the next five years. But the model must evolve.

The relevant question today is no longer simply how much investment did we attract, it should increasingly be how much value do we anchor in Singapore. Our strategic functions located here – are Singaporeans progressing into specialists and leadership roles? Are our SMEs becoming suppliers and partners? Are technology and capabilities diffusing into the wider economy?

The ESR seeks to address precisely these linkages, as I infer from its report. It calls for us to go beyond simply attracting investment and to embed these investments more deeply into Singapore through stronger local supplier networks, partnerships with our research institutions, deeper innovation capabilities and stronger pipelines of skilled talent.

We have already built considerable capabilities. Private sector R&D expenditure more than doubled from $4.3 billion in 2013 to $9 billion in 2023. The next challenge, as the ESR recognises, is to connect these capabilities more tightly to industry needs.

Indeed, spillovers extend beyond the firms themselves. A 2025 Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) study estimated that between 2012 and 2019, each EDB-supported firm generated net spillover benefits averaging $48.5 million in value added annually for non-EDB-supported firms.

Significantly, this spillover benefits accounted for 41% of the firms' total direct and spillover economic contribution and much of this came through the labour market, as skills and capabilities developed in these firms benefited the wider economy. Being an economist, I read the report. It is quite rigorous. I can see that the numbers actually do show benefits on Singapore's front.

In other words, the objective is not simply to bring global companies here but to anchor more of their capabilities here and ensure that their presence strengthens Singapore companies and Singaporean workers as well. That should increasingly be our test of successful foreign investment.

Let me make this less abstract, Mr Speaker. My office is in One Raffles Quay in Raffles Place. Almost every morning, I take the lift up and down. I see young Singaporeans going into offices occupied by global companies, including firms, such as ByteDance, financial institutions and technology companies. They work in technology, data, finance, compliance and regional functions. These are young Singaporeans, building careers in global businesses while remaining based in Singapore.

When these companies choose Singapore as a regional hub, they do not simply rent office space. They create jobs and demand for local services. They bring technology and managerial capabilities. They contribute to the vibrancy of our business districts. And this brings me to the concern about a "two-speed economy" narrative.

We should take that concern seriously. Indeed, I note that the ESR itself recognises the capability and cost constraints faced by SMEs and the difficulties smaller firms can face in navigating and accessing existing support. In areas, such as AI adoption, ESR specifically calls for support to extend beyond leading firms to the wider business base.

So, the challenge facing smaller enterprises is not absent from the ESR. The more important question is whether our transmission mechanisms are strong enough to reach them. But the answer is not to slow down firms operating at the productivity frontier. It is to strengthen the transmission mechanisms and help more firms move towards that frontier, to create convergence upwards.

A Singapore SME supplying an advanced manufacturer may have to meet exacting global standards. In doing so, it builds capabilities that can help it win other customers and enter new markets. Workers trained in MNCs carry skills and experience throughout the economy. Technology and management practices can diffuse, and anchor companies create demand for suppliers, professional services, logistics and specialised skills.

But these spillovers are not automatic. That is where policy matters. Openness must create capability and this principle applies to workers too.

Take the administrator or driver working in the logistics and supply chain industry, for example – and I serve as a union advisor to the Supply Chain Employees' Union. As AI, automation and digitalisation transform supply chains, our objective cannot simply be to preserve today's job exactly as it exists. We must help workers move up the same value chain that we want Singapore's economy to move up.

That is also why capability transfer matters. We already have the Capability Transfer Programme, supporting companies in bringing foreign specialists to transfer capabilities to our local workforce as well as overseas training for Singaporeans. Could we go further, for example, by facilitating more structured capability transfer from foreign professionals already working here to Singapore colleagues?

This is precisely the transmission mechanism we should strengthen. Openness must create capability. Global expertise anchored here, with Singaporeans progressively equipped to take on more sophisticated roles. That is not a retreat from our hub strategy. It is an evolution of it.

Mr Speaker, there is one further area I would like to touch on – costs and the policy choices involved. Singapore cannot compete with much larger economies principally on cost. We must compete on value through skills, connectivity, trust, infrastructure, innovation and our ability to manage complex regional and global operations.

I think Members on both sides of this House would agree that many local enterprises face significant cost pressures. That is not in dispute. But if business costs are an important concern in today's debate, or in other speeches later on, I hope we can also have greater clarity on the policy choices that would address them. For many SMEs, particularly in sectors, such as services, retail, logistics and F&B, significant cost pressures include labour, rental and energy.

So, the question I have is: so, what are the policy choices? I have heard some from the earlier speeches. If labour costs are the principal concern, are Members suggesting that we significantly relax our foreign manpower policies? If rental costs are the concern, are Members proposing some form of rent regulation or greater intervention in commercial leasing? If energy costs are the issue, are Members suggesting energy price controls or longer-term subsidies?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are genuine policy questions. Because every proposal involves trade-offs. We all want our businesses to remain competitive and to manage their costs. But measures to reduce one cost can have consequences elsewhere.

At the same time, Parliament has debated proposals before aimed at strengthening wages and retirement adequacy, as well as more ambitious environmental measures. These may be legitimate policy objectives, but they illustrate the trade-offs involved – measures that advance important social or environmental objectives can affect business cost structures

So, when we call for lower costs and greater support for local enterprises, I think the next questions should be: what are the concrete policy choices? What are the trade-offs? And who ultimately bears the costs?

So, I hope today's debate and later speeches can therefore move beyond identifying the challenges facing SMEs, on which there is considerable common ground, towards a clearer discussion of which policy choices we or they are prepared to make and which trade-offs we are prepared to accept. Essentially, economic policy ultimately requires choices, and choices require prioritisation. Mr Speaker, in Malay, please.

( In Malay ) : [ Please refer to Vernacular Speech .] Mr Speaker, before I touch on the efforts within the Malay/Muslim community, allow me to summarise one important point. As a small country, Singapore cannot depend on domestic demand alone. We need global markets, global investment and international economic linkages to create greater scale for growth and opportunities for our people. But our objective is not simply to bring more global companies to Singapore.

What matters more is how much value, capability and opportunity we can anchor in Singapore.

Are Singaporeans getting better jobs and opportunities to progress? Are our local SMEs becoming suppliers and partners to global companies? Are technology, skills and expertise spreading across our wider economy? Efforts to address these questions are aligned with the key thrusts of the Economic Strategy Review, or ESR, report. We do not have to choose between global companies and local companies. We need to ensure that both can grow together.

If different parts of our economy are moving at different speeds, the answer is not to slow down those that are most competitive. Instead, we need to help more enterprises and workers build their capabilities so that they can progress together. Economic openness and inclusion are also not conflicting objectives.

Our challenge is to remain open to the world, while ensuring that more Singaporeans, workers and Singapore enterprises can seize the opportunities that this openness creates. All this is aligned with the recommendations of the Economic Strategy Review report.

This is also the spirit that we want to bring to the Malay/Muslim community. National strategies will only bring about meaningful change when our communities understand the changes taking place and are able to seize the opportunities available. Within the Malay/Muslim community, the Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs has announced the establishment of the Committee for Economic Resilience, which I co-chair with Dr Wan Rizal. We want to listen to the aspirations and economic concerns of our youths, workers, professionals and entrepreneurs, and help translate the ESR recommendations into more tangible opportunities.

Our purpose is not to create a separate economic strategy for the Malay/Muslim community. Our objective is to ensure that our community is prepared for change and well positioned to seize and create new opportunities. Our priorities are aligned with the ESR.

First, technology and AI. How can we help more Malay/Muslim business owners use AI to raise productivity, strengthen competitiveness and grow their businesses? This is where M³+, business leaders and community networks can serve as a bridge between national programmes and needs on the ground.

Second, growth and internationalisation. For enterprises with the aspiration and potential, Singapore should be their starting point, not their limit. We want to help more enterprises build capabilities, become suppliers and partners to global companies, and eventually venture into ASEAN and wider markets.

Third, jobs, skills and career transitions. Technology will change jobs and the skills required. We need to help workers understand these changes early, upgrade their skills and seize opportunities in growth sectors.

We should not wait until someone loses his or her job before we act. Economic resilience also means preparing before change occurs. From awareness to participation.

Mr Speaker, ultimately, our ambition cannot stop at simply raising awareness about the ESR. We need to move from awareness to participation in the ESR strategy.

Can more Malay/Muslim SMEs become suppliers and business partners to global companies? Can more of our entrepreneurs expand into ASEAN? Can more of our young people enter sectors such as advanced manufacturing, digital technology, AI, the green economy and other emerging sectors? These are among the questions that we want to examine through the Committee for Economic Resilience.

Inclusion is not simply about redistributing the gains from growth after they have been created. Inclusion also means widening opportunities so that more members of our community can participate in the very process that creates that growth.

And our aspiration should be clear.

The Malay/Muslim community should not merely be prepared for the economy of the future. We should have the confidence, skills and capabilities to help shape that future economy and succeed in it.

Allow me to conclude this Malay section with a pantun:

Sailing our boat on tranquil seas;

Stopping awhile at Pulau Ubin;

Knowledge acquired, talent grows with ease;

Progressing together, a secure future is attained.

( In English ): Mr Speaker, as I said at the outset, there is considerable common ground between the aspirations in this Motion and the direction already set out in the ESR.

The question is therefore not whether our economic model must evolve. It must. The question is how it evolves and which foundations of Singapore's economic success we must preserve even as we strengthen local enterprise, resilience and inclusion.

One such foundation is our openness and connectivity to the world. We can build stronger Singapore companies, strengthen resilience and broaden participation in growth. But these objectives should complement our global orientation, not substitute it.

Our task is to create convergence upwards, so that more Singaporean companies and workers benefit from the technology, capabilities, investment and opportunities flowing through our economy. Because the choice is not between being global and inclusive. Our challenge is to remain global while ensuring that more Singaporeans, businesses and communities participate in the opportunities our global connections create.

So, Mr Speaker, while I support the aspirations underlying this Motion, I cannot support the Motion as it stands. I will, however, support the Motion with the proposed amendments by Member of Parliament Mr Edward Chia. And I will also support, especially the second line, where the word "engine" needs to be replaced, because it is not just a single economic engine. It is about the whole economy, powered by multiple factors. It makes the second sentence clearer to me. The amendment may seem minor but it makes it clearer in that sense.

So, that is, in that sense, with the amendments, how we build stronger companies, create better jobs and build an economy of the future that truly works for all. [ Applause. ]

Mr Speaker : Mr Fadli Fawzi.

3.13 pm

Mr Fadli Fawzi (Aljunied) : Mr Speaker, I speak today in support of the original Motion filed by my hon friends, Assoc Prof Jamus Lim and Mr Kenneth Tiong. The ESR recognises that the global economy is changing in ways that are structural rather than cyclical. My speech will focus on Thrusts 6 and 7 of the ESR. While their broad aims are laudable, I hope to advance some different recommendations for consideration, in the shared hope and spirit of better preparing and protecting our Singaporean workers.

I will frame my suggestions through three questions.

The first question concerns the journey. What is the journey for Singaporean workers who find themselves displaced in the workforce or at risk of being made obsolete?

The second question is about the destination. What is the destination for those who undertake skills training or upgrading and how can we ensure that such retraining or upskilling results in a job on the other side?

The third question ties the previous two together. What is the proof that our continuing education system actually works?

Mr Speaker, I begin with my first question. What is the journey like for Singaporeans who undertake reskilling or retraining opportunities? More importantly, how can we make sure that these workers can and do benefit from these opportunities, and what can be done to make the journey easier for them?

My answer is two-fold: one, is to offer a robust safety net so that workers, especially those who are displaced, can pursue retraining and reskilling opportunities without anxiety or worry; two, is to unlock sources of funding for those who may wish to pursue deeper mid-career upskilling.

Sir, Singaporean workers deserve a robust safety net. Upskilling and retraining sounds good in the abstract as a response to job displacement. But we have to remember that Singaporean workers are not video game characters, progressing through a skill tree to get an achievement unlocked. To workers made redundant or are on the verge of losing their jobs, upskilling and retraining may not sound like solutions in the immediate moment, but rather as another source of stress and uncertainty.

Let us not understate the psychological distress and desperation that precarious employment can cause. Other than anxiety and disappointment, workers can also feel shame and embarrassment, especially if they are breadwinners with children or elderly depending on them.

We must thus manage workforce transformations and transitions with sensitivity. We need our Singaporean workers to feel secure and have confidence that they can and will overcome an employment disruption if and when they face one. We need affected workers to be confident that they have the full backing of society and the Government as they endeavour to overcome this setback.

Sir, that sense of security, hope and confidence can only come by offering our workers the protection of a robust safety net, namely through: one, mandatory retrenchment benefits; and two, a universal redundancy insurance scheme.

Mr Speaker, the ESR in Thrust 6 calls for earlier intervention in retrenchment support. Early intervention makes sense. However, I want to ask whether this alone is sufficient or even fair for the affected workers who have sometimes contributed years of service.

Crucially, employers are encouraged to abide by the Tripartite Advisory on Managing Excess Manpower and Responsible Retrenchment. As a result, retrenchment benefits remain at the discretion of the respective employers. This is a policy choice that unfairly disadvantages our workers and leaves them vulnerable. To me, this is wrong. We must protect hardworking Singaporeans and legislate mandatory retrenchment benefits.

Sir, now, I turn to another concern raised in Thrust 6 of the ESR about strengthening support for our PMEs.

We believe that a redundancy insurance scheme offers better protection for all workers, including our PMEs. In contrast to the SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support scheme, our proposal is meant to be universal and funded by joint contributions from both employers and employees, amounting to a combined 0.1% of the worker's monthly salary. Because every worker pays into it, every worker will be eligible to benefit from it. The basic idea is for each retrenched worker to receive 40% of their last drawn salary, which will be further capped at 40% of Singapore's prevailing median income. These payouts will last up to six months at most.

Sir, one of the advantages of our redundancy insurance scheme is that the payouts are straightforward. Workers will not have to go through an application process or face an agonising wait about the outcome or stress themselves out further about what they should do if their application was rejected. Our proposal offers displaced workers the assurance, peace of mind and financial buffer to properly reskill and seek a better job fit since the worker would not need to jump at the first offer that comes along. This will also reduce the prospect of underemployment.

Mr Speaker, at this point, I can already hear the murmurs about moral hazard from hon colleagues across the aisle. I want to reassure them that our redundancy insurance features the following "4Cs" to address this. The 4Cs are coverage, conditionality, caps and cushion.

First, coverage is restricted only to cases of involuntary redundancy, thus eliminating the concerns that workers may quit in order to collect benefits.

Second, conditionality payouts for the second and subsequent months will be made conditional on the individual's job searching and/or retraining efforts.

Third, caps. The payouts are modest and limited by a double-40 cap, that is, only 40% of the last drawn salary, which is also further subjected to a cap at 40% of median income.

Lastly, cushion. These payouts are time limited and not meant to fully replace lost income. Rather, it is intended to merely cushion the harsh impact of retrenchment and provide a semblance of security and assurance to the worker and his/her family and dependants in their immediate future.

Beyond the 4Cs, Mr Speaker, let me make a more fundamental point about the redundancy insurance scheme. I am glad to see that the Prime Minister is here in the House, because he would perhaps best appreciate how our universal redundancy insurance scheme can reflect and foster a "we first" spirit by pooling our resources collectively and engaging in risk sharing. It is a reminder that all of us Singaporeans are in this together and that we mutually help and support each other when things get difficult.

Sir, I return to the question about the journey. What else can we do to better support workers who are retraining or upskilling? What I want to suggest here is especially pertinent for Singaporeans who have spent time in the workforce and may now want to upskill in a major and deeper way. This could mean taking on a postgraduate degree. In doing so, workers would then gain the qualifications and competencies needed to either value add to their current work or even to pivot to new industries.

However, such deep upskilling is often more demanding, very time- and energy-intensive, and involves a longer-term commitment. It can also be financially exacting.

Here, I am in agreement with ESR's diagnosis and recommendation in Thrust 7, which calls for expanding funding support to cover a broader range of deeper rescaling pathways, including post-graduate programmes offered by institutes of higher learning (IHLs). I have two specific proposals in this regard.

First, the Government should directly offer mid-career Singaporeans undertaking a postgraduate degree with access to education loans that are interest free for at least the duration of the course and with repayments to start at a modest rate before progressively increasing after a certain period. What I have in mind here is something like the MENDAKI study loans, which has a repayment arrangement that scales up over a period of time.

Second, the Government should expand the CPF Education Loan Scheme to cover part-time and full-time Master's programmes at our IHLs. This is currently not possible.

Finding the funding for postgraduate studies is often a challenge for many working professionals. Yet, postgraduate degrees remain useful in improving employability. For instance, employers sometimes reduce the years of working experience needed for applicants with a postgraduate degree.

Sir, these suggestions partly emerged from my own experience of pursuing a mid-career switch a few years ago. I left the Public Service to pursue a postgraduate Juris Doctor (JD) programme at Singapore Management University to become a lawyer. The temporary transition back to being a full-time student was difficult, not least due to the loss of a stable income for the three years of the JD programme.

However, securing an interest-free education loan from MENDAKI was helpful for me. Also, while being a JD student, I was in a slightly better financial place as a result of holding a Master's in sociology, that enabled me to secure part-time employment teaching at Singapore Institute of Management, which helped me with my day-to-day expenses.

Today, retraining and upskilling is something unavoidable for the Singaporean worker. However, we in this House would do well to recognise that the process of retraining and especially deeper upskilling involves opportunity and real cost, some of which can and should be alleviated.

Mr Speaker, I now arrive at my second question – the destination. Training by itself is not an economic outcome. Obtaining a certificate does not necessarily translate into a livelihood. If retraining ends with the worker returning home to search job portals alone, then we have merely replaced one form of insecurity with another.

I am thus encouraged by the opportunity presented last month by the merger of SkillsFuture Singapore and Workforce Singapore into a single Statutory Board. SWDA has the potential to serve a new integrated system where workers can be supported actively by the state throughout the entire process of displacement, retraining, job matching and re-employment. I believe that this is in line with the recommendation in Thrust 7 of the ESR.

As such, SWDA should avoid merely becoming a larger training administrator. Instead, it should be connecting together employers, training providers and workers so that retraining culminates in a real opportunity for employment.

SWDA should serve as a premier one-stop employment centre where every involuntary unemployed jobseeker can be assigned with a dedicated caseworker. Jobseekers will meet with the caseworker for a one-on-one guidance on the job search process. After a careful consideration of the jobseeker's circumstances, skills and experience as well as the expected vacancies in the job market, the caseworker can then either match the jobseekers to available jobs or else recommend retraining or upskilling courses that can prepare these jobseekers to transition into another role.

To properly fulfil this bridging and matching function, SWDA will have to do two things in tandem: (a) tracking the macro developments in the job sector; and (b) ensuring that its programme offerings are fit for purpose.

The first task is for the SWDA to have a good understanding of the ever evolving needs and demands of the job market so that they can better match or train jobseekers for these jobs. Here, SWDA can work with employers to understand which sectors are expanding, which firms are expected to have vacancies over the next six to 12 months and which industries face persistent worker shortages.

The second task requires the SWDA to build a culture of rigorous evaluation so that taxpayers' monies are funding courses and training programmes that actually provide good employment outcomes for workers or at the very least provide skills needed by the industry. For example, in many industries, there are companies that compete commercially but require many of the same foundational competencies. SWDA can work with industry partners to build training programmes that focus on sector-wide skills during the first few months, followed by a shorter company-specific immersion.

SWDA should also work with industry professionals to design training curricula for workers. It should regularly collect employers' requirements across each industry or perhaps even receive curricular proposals from these employers, as suggested before by two of my hon friends, Mr Gerald Giam and Assoc Prof Jamus Lim. Training providers should then demonstrate how their own programmes meet these industries' identified needs. If this is not the case already, industry representatives should sit on these curricula's steering committees.

SkillsFuture providers should also be governed by tougher quality assurance frameworks with frequent audits on providers and trainers. There should also be industry input on the assessment standards for SkillsFuture courses. Every SkillsFuture programme, from curriculum to assessment, should require sign off from three stakeholders: an employer or industry representative, the Government and the training provider.

Finally, SWDA should work with employers to provide probationary opportunities for successful graduates from SkillsFuture programmes. This will demonstrate that they are solid training programmes that can prepare workers to enter new jobs or new industries.

I believe that a new SWDA can best serve our workforce by becoming the national convener for matching displaced workers, employers and training institutions into a single coherent system of retraining and rehiring. SWDA can then develop a niche in creating the career bridges which the ESR talks about in Thrust 6 – those structured pathways for at risk workers to gain employment in more resilient occupations.

Mr Speaker, my third question is the proof. How can we be confident that our system of continuing education actually works? Where is the evidence to tell us that our training programmes actually succeed?

We spend billions of dollars supporting workforce development, but surprisingly, little outcome data enters the public domain. We know, for example, that around 55% of previously unemployed trainees who participated in the SkillsFuture Career Transition Programme found new jobs within six months. But we do not know which courses perform better at helping trainees to find new jobs, which providers consistently deliver stronger outcomes, whether wages rise after retraining and whether workers remain employed one year later.

I understand that SkillsFuture and continuing education more generally should not be narrowly evaluated in terms of employment outcomes. SkillsFuture also serves the purposes of enrichment and lifelong learning, which is why one of my hon colleagues shared with me even her 88-year-old mother receives SkillsFuture credits.

However, Mr Speaker, the point remains. If the Government is primarily relying on SkillsFuture as a platform to deliver workforce retraining and upskilling, then surely our evaluation of SkillsFuture and its offerings must reflect that priority. The Government should thus publish more metrics to help workers assess the effectiveness of specific SkillsFuture programmes in relation to employment prospects. For example, for each provider and course, we should publish how many trainees found new jobs within six months and the average wages of these new jobs.

The availability of such data will transform accountability throughout our training ecosystem. Providers will be forced to complete on outcomes rather than marketing and workers would make better informed decisions before going for training. Government spending should then flow towards programmes that demonstrably succeed.

Mr Speaker, one last point on why we invest in the upskilling of our workers. Singapore has built one of the world's most generous systems of continuing education. Without a doubt, the Government has invested significantly in our people, But as always is the case with Government expenditure, where the money goes and how it is spent matters as much as how much is spent.

The recently released report of the Auditor-General raises questions about whether the money has been fruitfully used. The Auditor-General's Office (AGO) flagged some issues with the Career Conversion Programme and Mid-Career Pathways Programme. In page 65 of the report, the AGO found that six group of 30-related entities had engaged in patterns that suggested "potential gaming of the programmes to maximise grant claims rather than genuine training initiatives".

While I understand that Workforce Singapore has addressed some of these findings, my concern is about the vulnerabilities in the system that can be exploited. The Government must remain vigilant in detecting any abuse of the system and plugging these gaps, so to ensure public monies can deliver genuine training of our workforce, because every dollar diverted and wasted is a dollar not spent to re-train or upskill a worker to stay employable. And we must ensure that taxpayers' money that we spend to support reskilling and career conversion should produce genuine workforce outcomes and meaningfully help displaced workers rebuild their careers.

To recap the proposals in my speech: one, legislating mandatory retrenchment benefits; two, implementing universal redundancy insurance; three, introducing interest-free education loans and allowing CPF to be used for postgraduate studies; four, consolidating SWDA into a one-stop shop for employment and upskilling, with dedicated caseworkers; five, collaborating more closely with industry partners to finetune SkillsFuture offerings and curricula; and six, publishing more public outcome data by provider and course.

Mr Speaker, the ESR rightly observes that Singapore's greatest asset has always been its people. And to maximise our competitive advantage, we must enable Singaporeans to move confidently from one stage of their working lives to another. Ideally, the worker should begin re-training or upskilling with a clear idea of the destination ahead, he or she should be able to see, right from the start, a credible career bridge, rather than resting on some vague hope that re-training will lead to some hazy notion of somewhere better. With that, I reiterate my support for the original Motion. [ Applause. ]

Mr Speaker : Assoc Prof Kenneth Goh.

3.32 pm

Assoc Prof Kenneth Goh (Nominated Member) : Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would first like to declare my interest as a faculty member at an autonomous university.

Mr Speaker, the ESR sets out how Singapore can remain competitive in a fast-changing world. Its central themes are adaptability and resilience. It also calls for a more dynamic enterprise base, stronger support for career transitions and AI that augments workers.

The movers of the original Motion have described it as complementary to, but distinct from, the ESR. And I agree with many of the aspirations in paragraph (a) of the Motion. Entrepreneurs should be able to experiment, businesses should have room to succeed and workers should thrive and innovation should flourish.

But agreement with those aspirations is not the same as support for the original framing of the Motion. My concern is that the wording does not adequately address the trade-offs involved.

I will begin with fairness, then turn to enterprise dynamism and the relationship between workers and innovation.

Let me start with the phrase "a more equal and inclusive economy". A more equal outcome is not always a fairer one. Equal pay for equal work may be fair, but we also give more help to households with greater needs. It can also be fair to reward greater contribution or responsible risk-taking. The appropriate principle really depends on the issue. So, the question is not simply whether outcomes are equal. It is whether they are fair.

This does not mean we should simply accept inequality. Large differences in income and wealth can generate wide social and economic costs. They can entrench advantage, weaken mobility and leave people with very different capacities to pursue opportunities or recover from setbacks. Where essential costs overwhelm lower-income households, greater support should be provided. Where family resources determine access to education or career opportunities, the pathways available to those with fewer means should be widened. So, the response to the social and economic costs of inequality should be to target those specific costs, rather than assume that equality is always the appropriate remedy.

We should also not only look at the distribution of wealth, but also, at how that wealth is put to use. This points to a broader understanding of inclusion. People should not only have access to opportunity at the outset; they should have the ability to change direction throughout their lives.

The ESR's proposal for proactive career bridges for workers in at-risk roles is an important step in that direction. And I would extend the same principle more broadly – across education and work, employment and entrepreneurship, and transitions between different careers.

Consider university students who discover during their first year that they have chosen the wrong course. When they transfer programmes, the subsidised semesters already used count against the tuition grant available for the new programme. Any additional study required may therefore attract non-subsidised fees. The fiscal rationale for that is understandable. But the ability to correct an early mismatch can then depend on family means.

Could there be a limited, one-time course-correction allowance for a first transfer made during the first year? For example, one or two subsidised semesters could be disregarded, subject to appropriate academic advising and maximum recognition of credits already completed.

This is not a case for unlimited switching or subsidy. It is about ensuring that an early mismatch does not become financially irreversible. It may also reduce the pressure on families to secure the "right" course at the first attempt.

Our systems can sometimes behave like conveyor belts. They work very efficiently when the destination is known, but they are a lot less forgiving when someone needs to change direction. So, a more adaptable system should allow people to switch pathways without losing all the progress they have already made. That is how I would calibrate the Motion's reference to inclusion: not identical journeys or destinations, but real opportunities to change directions as people develop.

Sir, my second point concerns opportunities for entrepreneurs to experiment and for businesses to succeed. The ESR is right to emphasise enterprise renewal, including restructuring and exit. Indeed, enterprise dynamism must work for people too, not just for capital. Experimentation involves uncertainty, so some ventures will pivot, others will end. And when that happens, the learning should not be lost and the entrepreneur should not be permanently penalised.

A worker who leaves a job to pursue a venture should be able to return to employment, regardless of the venture's eventual outcome. Employers should recognise the judgement and practical experience gained, rather than viewing that period as a blemish in that person's career.

At the same time, business success should not be defined only by scale or profitability. Consider Bettr Group, it is a homegrown specialty coffee company that combines its business with training and inclusive employment for people facing social and economic barriers. Its value lies not only in its commercial activity, but also in the skills and opportunities it helps create.

Bettr Group reminds us that enterprise dynamism should make room for a wider range of enterprises and forms of value. A healthy economy should allow experimentation and exit. It should also give enterprises that create wider societal value a fair opportunity to develop.

And so, my final point concerns the Motion's call for opportunities for workers to thrive and for ideas and innovation to flourish. Both the proposed and amended Motions' use of the word "thrive" is one I support. It sets a higher aspiration than simply keeping people employed and it is worth striving for. Workers should be engaged in their work and able to build a good life through it. They should also see a path to develop and progress. This builds on the ESR, which calls for AI to augment workers through job redesign and training, and for learning to be integrated more closely with real work and employers' needs.

Realising this higher aspiration requires reciprocal commitments. Let me turn first to workers and then to employers.

As routine tasks become more automatable, workers will need to exercise more judgement and deal with problems that do not have formulaic answers. Reskilling cannot stop at attending courses. Workers must be willing to apply what they have learnt and take on new responsibilities. Employers, in turn, can decide how technology changes work. They can use it mainly to do the same work with fewer people, or they can use it to help the organisation grow and create more valuable roles for workers.

Where workers take on greater responsibilities and help generate productivity gains, this should be reflected in their pay or greater autonomy over their work and time. This does not mean preserving every task or preventing disruption. It means that workers should take responsibility for adapting, while employers should use innovation not merely to reduce costs, but to grow the organisation and share the resulting benefits with those who produce them.

Mr Speaker, my concern is not with the aspirations in paragraph (a). It is with compressing distinct principles and trade-offs into a single proposition. Fairness does not always require equal outcomes. But inequality should not become a lasting barrier to opportunity.

Enterprise dynamism requires room for experimentation and exit. It should also recognise wider societal value. Workers and innovation can flourish together, but only through a reciprocal commitment: workers must adapt and employers must create more valuable work and share the gains.

I therefore retain reservations about paragraph (a) as presently framed. I would have preferred a more nuanced and calibrated formulation, one that preserves its aspirations while making the trade-offs and responsibilities clearer.

That said, the amendments proposed by Mr Edward Chia brings the Motion closer to my position and it is more consistent with the points I have made. And on balance, I would support the Motion as amended. Thank you, Mr Speaker. [ Applause. ]

Mr Speaker : Mr Pritam Singh.

3.43 pm

Mr Pritam Singh (Aljunied) : Mr Speaker, I rise in support of the original Motion. The full report of the ESR released on 24 June goes to the heart of what kind of economy and what kind of society we want to build for Singapore and for our workers. It is situated within a world increasingly shaped by AI, technological disruption, geopolitical fragmentation and intensifying economic competition.

In addition, the ESR speaks extensively about jobs and strengthening resilience, with section (b) of the report specifically devoted to it. Thrust 6 makes a specific call to shorten the current requirement for companies to submit a mandatory retrenchment notification within five working days after workers are notified.

My speech expands on this and will focus on worker resilience, the reality of how retrenchment hits our workers and how we can better support them, because a resilient economy cannot be built on the backs of insecure workers.

That is why I believe the time has come for Singapore to legislate minimum retrenchment benefits, a subject I have pursued previously in this House, most recently in April this year, and separately, in the context of the ongoing review of the Employment Act.

In advocating for the legislation of retrenchment benefits, my speech will cover four broad sections: first, I will provide an overview of the retrenchment situation in Singapore; second, I will summarise the legal position on retrenchment benefits in Singapore. thirdly, I will explain why retrenchment benefits are important for workers; and fourthly, I will address the common reasons against the legislation of retrenchment benefits and how they should be reviewed in light of the ESR's broader recommendations.

First, the local situation. Last Friday, The Straits Times published an article titled "Singapore adds more jobs in Q2 even as retrenchments rose". Within the story, it was reported that the 4,500 retrenchments from April to June this year were the highest since the last quarter of 2020. Over the last 12 months, Lazada, Gardenia, Shopee, Asia Pacific Breweries, Agoda, DHL and Yeo Hiap Seng are just some of the household names that have announced retrenchments, which made the headlines in Singapore, with some moving operations across the border to Malaysia. In 2024, the major technology companies in Singapore such as Meta, Tiktok, Dyson, Microsoft and Google collectively cut at least 9,000 jobs in Singapore.

In this regard, two specific data points are noteworthy.

Firstly, in 2024 and 2025, total employment in Singapore grew, and the unemployment rate has remained low at around 2% in 2024 and 2025. However, recorded retrenchments have increased in recent years from 6,440 in 2022 to 13,020 in 2024, and 14,490 in 2025.

Secondly, from 2020 to 2025, eight out of 10 eligible employees were paid retrenchment benefits at or above the prevailing tripartite guideline of two weeks' salary for every year of service. This bodes well for a baseline legislated minimum retrenchment benefits starting point for all workers. This data point provided by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), however, does not specifically reveal how many workers receive the unionised norm of one month's salary for every year of service, although I understand this is not uncommon in many collective agreements.

Critically, though, what we can reasonably extrapolate from both these data points is that in 2024, for example, potentially close to 3,000 retrenched workers in Singapore either received no retrenchment benefits at all or received less than what is prescribed by the tripartite guidelines. That is not a small number by any stretch.

Today, many economies in Asia provide some form of legislative statutory protection for retrenched workers. However, workers in Singapore have no statutory entitlement to retrenchment benefits. Outside contract, retrenchment benefits remain largely governed by tripartite norms and employer practices. To receive retrenchment benefits, workers in Singapore are dependent on the goodwill of employers, the terms of their employment contracts, or the strength of their bargaining position after they have already lost their jobs.

This legislative omission in our employment laws sits in stark contrast to the reality our workers face as set out by the ESR report: first, that Singaporeans should not assume that economic growth will automatically result in the same extent of job creation as before; and secondly, that despite Singapore's positive employment situation, worker anxiety has increased across a wide range of sectors.

I now move on to the second section of my speech on the legal position. Singapore's courts and tribunals have reaffirmed a legal position that does not sit easily with workers. In JIF v JIG , the Employment Claims Tribunal held that section 45 of the Employment Act does not create a statutory entitlement to retrenchment benefits. The tribunal held that retrenchment benefits are payable only when they arise from a contract of employment, collective agreement, or some other legal basis. Tripartite guidelines do not create such a legal basis. Indeed, this position can be traced back to the Court of Appeals decision in Bethlehem Singapore Pte Ltd v Ler Hock Seng , which made it clear that section 45 does not compel employers to pay retrenchment benefits simply because an employee has completed a qualifying period of service.

The significance of the tribunal judgment in particular is magnified by its timing and it forces us to confront an important policy question. At the very moment, the ESR is asking Singaporeans to prepare for an era of more frequent restructuring, more rapid technological disruption and greater economic uncertainty, the Courts have reminded us that workers facing retrenchment possess no general statutory entitlement to retrenchment benefits.

The question before Parliament is whether the law remains adequate for workers and the economy that the ESR hopes to evince.

In my view, the law has fallen behind. Let us look around the region. China legislates economic compensation for workers affected by redundancy and restructuring. South Korea imposes significant legal requirements before redundancies may be carried out. Taiwan legislates severance entitlements. Malaysia legislates termination and lay-off benefits. Thailand legislates severance payments based on years of service. Indonesia legislates retrenchment compensation. The Philippines legislates separations pay.

These countries differ enormously in their political systems, labour markets and stages of economic development. Yet they have all reached a common conclusion: business flexibility for employers and worker protection are not mutually exclusive.

I now move on to my third section on why retrenchment benefits are crucial for our workers.

Retrenchment benefits matter because they support workers and their families precisely at the stage of life when financial obligations can often be at their greatest. They represent an important layer of support provided by employers, complementing taxpayer-funded assistance such as the Jobseeker Support Scheme.

In the Singapore context, this additional financial relief is especially important, given how leveraged many households are. According to DBS Bank's 2025 instalment of its financial wellness series, which analysed aggregated and anonymised data from approximately two million DBS and POSB retail customers, Gen Zs and Millennials aged 25 to 44 are increasingly shouldering heavier liabilities and are falling behind their older counterparts in building retirement savings. Among pre-retirement age groups, those aged 35 to 44 are the most financially stretched, with debts slightly overweighing liquid assets, largely due to housing vehicle and credit card loans.

Outside these age bands, when a worker in his 50s loses his or her job, the consequences extend far beyond immediate income loss. CPF contributions stop, retirement balances grow more slowly, housing obligations continue, healthcare expenses continue, caregiving responsibilities continue. Retrenchment is not merely a labour market issue. For many, it is also a retirement adequacy issue, a housing issue, a family issue and a social stability issue.

As Singapore transits towards a high wage, high-cost economy, the effects of retrenchment will become even more severe, if workers are unable to secure employment at a comparable income level. The mental health dimension of job loss and financial insecurity cannot be understated either.

Taxpayers are playing their part financing the Jobseeker Support Scheme, and the Government and Labour Movement are devoting significant resources towards retraining. Employers must play their part too, based on the available data on retrenchment benefits, we know that many employers are already prepared to shoulder that responsibility and pay retrenchment benefits to workers.

The fourth section of my speech will deal with the arguments against the legislation of retrenchment benefits. Throughout Singapore's history, many worker protections were initially criticised as threats to business competitiveness. When Workfare was introduced, concerns were raised about costs, even as Workfare was taxpayer-funded. When the progressive wage model was expanded, concerns were raised about costs, especially after Government wage support tapers off. When platform workers were granted stronger protections, concerns were again raised about costs.

In fact, when the Government announced the review of the Employment Act last year, the Singapore National Employers' Federation cautioned that the review should not, and I quote, "inadvertently mandate progressive employment practices that may reduce flexibilities for employers and undermine business competitiveness".

Yet, advancing major pro-worker reforms are always important because economic growth alone is never enough.

Today, we regard things like Workfare as part of a mature and balanced economic system. Retrenchment benefits should be viewed in exactly the same way.

Over the years, MOM has advanced several arguments against legislating retrenchment benefits for our workers. However, the risks it has hitherto identified should be carefully examined and weighed afresh against the increasingly unpredictable economic landscape facing workers in the years ahead, as outlined by the ESR report.

The first argument is that mandatory retrenchment benefits may make employers more hesitant to offer long-term or permanent employment contracts. Yet, the existence of mandatory retrenchment benefits in many economies, including advanced economies, has not eliminated permanent employment. It is clear that such demands are influenced by a range of factors, including labour demand, skills and manpower shortages, productivity and broader labour market regulations. In the Singapore context, a generally tight labour market could have the opposite effect with employers competing to hire the best with a permanent contract, an important lure.

Second, the Government has argued that legislating a minimum retrenchment benefit may result in employers converging on that very minimum. However, the facts do not fully support this concern. There is already a tripartite guideline. There are already collective agreements that prescribe retrenchment benefits and the vast majority of employers converge at those benchmarks anyway, with a very small number paying more than the one-month norm for each year of service.

It is therefore not obvious that legislation would necessarily result in a different status quo with employers prevented from paying a higher amount should they deem it appropriate to do so.

Finally, it has been argued that mandatory retrenchment benefits may affect the viability of companies already facing financial difficulties and could place remaining employees at greater risk. This concern must be weighed against the reality that financial difficulty does not automatically extinguish obligations of distress firms, such as unpaid wages, CPF contributions, taxes, supplier debts or bank loans. Businesses do also account for employee leave encashment, gratuity obligations, contractual liabilities and debt repayments. Retrenchment benefits can be similarly treated as a foreseeable employment cost as they are today by progressive employers.

More importantly, this argument assumes that retrenchments only occur when companies are losing money. But that is not always the case. Many retrenchments occur when profitable firms restructure, automate functions, consolidate operations, relocate activities or seek to improve profitability – as we have seen in Singapore over the last few years. In such circumstances, retrenchment is often a strategic business decision rather than a last resort.

Indeed, this helps explain why some unions have successfully negotiated for enhanced retrenchment benefits in the absence of statutory protection, precisely because not all firms retrench workers due to financial distress. Like earlier efforts to strengthen worker protection, legislating retrenchment benefits will inevitably attract concerns from businesses.

Those concerns deserve attention and respect, because it is neither simple nor straightforward to start, build or sustain a business. However, we should not forget that many responsible employers already provide retrenchment benefits: eight out of 10 eligible employees already receive retrenchment benefits up to the tripartite guideline of two weeks salary for every year of service.

As I mentioned earlier, this can serve as the starting point for legislative retrenchment benefits. This would largely formalise an existing practice while ensuring that workers who fall through the gap that cannot be bridged by non-binding tripartite guidelines are protected. Responsible employers would no longer be disadvantaged relative to those who provide the bare minimum or nothing at all.

A statutory framework could also be enhanced by subsidiary legislation directing higher payouts for larger firms, such as up to the union norm of one month salary for every year of service, something which larger global MNCs in particular would not necessarily baulk at, especially since they are already subject to legislative regimes governing retrenchment benefits in other countries where they operate.

The ability of smaller employers to pay retrenchment benefits often comes up as a concern against legislating retrenchment benefits completely. The concerns of these small businesses are not irrelevant or unimportant. A business with a revenue of half a million dollars is certainly a different enterprise compared to one that records $50 million in revenue.

Various countries address this particular issue differently, even as they legislate for retrenchment benefits. Some create backstops, such as national insurance schemes, while others advance wage guarantee agreements, while yet others treat retrenchment benefits as a preferential debt through insolvency laws.

These are not uncharted waters, and a perfect legislative retrenchment benefits regime does not need to be the enemy of a good regime that protects more workers than it does today in Singapore.

In conclusion, the call for legislating retrenchment benefits is about what kind of society we want Singapore to become. The ESR calls on more international enterprises to set up regional headquarters Singapore and is fundamentally an economic plan for the future. It sees international trust in the Singapore brand as a strategic asset that Singapore rightly seeks to leverage in advancing its economic value proposition.

Yet that trust hosts an important domestic dimension that builds that very Singapore brand. Trust and commitment to an employer is strengthened when workers know that after years of service, if restructuring occurs through no fault of their own, they will receive fair and meaningful protection. Therefore, as part of the Government's implementation of the ESR, I urge the Government to convene employers, unions and workers to develop a statutory retrenchment benefits framework with the objective of introducing legislation.

A resilient society requires workers who know they will not be left to bear the burdens of economic change alone, because in line with the call of the Labour Movement in NTUC, no less, while not every job can be protected, every worker deserves protection.

I support the original Motion in the names of Members Kenneth Tiong and Jamus Lim, which calls for an inclusive and equal economy for all Singaporeans. [ Applause. ]

4.00 pm

Mr Speaker : Order. We have been in session for close to five and a half hours, so I propose to take a break. I suspend the Sitting and will take the chair at 4.20 pm. Order. Order.

Sitting accordingly suspended

at 4.00 pm until 4.20 pm.

Sitting resumed at 4.20 pm.

[Deputy Speaker (Mr Christopher de Souza) in the Chair]

An Economy of the Future that Works for All

[(proc text) Debate resumed. (proc text)]

Mr Deputy Speaker : Assoc Prof Terence Ho.

4.20 pm

Assoc Prof Terence Ho (Nominated Member) : Mr Deputy Speaker, I rise in support of the amended Motion. I would like to declare my interest as the Executive Director of the Institute for Adult Learning, Singapore’s National Centre of Excellence for Adult Learning.

It is, without doubt, critical for Singapore to sustain an inclusive and dynamic economy. We are building on firm foundations and the ESR provides a robust blueprint to take our economy forward. That said, more ideas to spur inclusive economic growth should be welcome. There are many dimensions to this Motion and I will focus my remarks on our workforce and people as the key to an inclusive and dynamic economy.

An inclusive economy must benefit its people. In Singapore, the main channel through which economic growth benefits Singaporeans is good jobs and incomes. This remains the central socio-economic strategy, as affirmed in the recent debate in this House on an AI transition with no jobless growth. While we will have to consider new ways to strengthen social support and protection, and to step up redistribution for more equitable outcomes, we must continue to prioritise employment and good jobs.

The first limb of today's Parliamentary Motion speaks of providing opportunities for workers to thrive. It is worth reflecting on what this means.

To me, it means that workers are not locked into pre-set pathways or dead-end jobs on their basis of the past educational qualifications. Instead, they must have opportunities to continually grow and develop in their careers. It also means that workers are not confined to tasks that are mundane or repetitive because all the interesting work has been taken over by AI. Instead, workers must have autonomy to express their talent and creativity, and to find meaning and self-actualisation in their work.

Three sets of factors are needed: first, workers must be nimble and adaptable; second, organisations must transform to activate skills and unlock the potential of workers; third, we need a refreshed work and learning ecosystem enabled by public policy to support workers and organisations, and help them thrive.

First, nimble and adaptable workers. Singapore tops the world in test scores of 15-year-olds, but can we top the world in the skills and learning agility of 45-year-olds? The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD's) survey of adult skills suggest that we are only in the middle of the pack relative to OECD economies in adult literacy and numeracy.

Framing our ambition is important. We should set our sights high, not just to have the world's best students, but also to have the world's most agile, adaptable and innovative workforce. We must reaffirm that people are our key competitive advantage, and not just technology or infrastructure. In Singapore, we often say that people are our only resource, hence, the sustained investment the Government has put into education and human capital development through the years.

Today, it is not just about developing hard skills and competencies. The human skills, or critical core skills, are coming to the fore, and the meta-skill of learning to learn is perhaps the most important of all. We need to emphasise learning agility and adaptability amid disruption, and dynamic innovation beyond static excellence. AI and automation will analyse and execute, but it is human beings who set the agenda, prioritise tasks, frame the questions, weigh up the options that AI suggests, make decisions and ultimately, take responsibility for outcomes. All this requires judgement and creativity rooted in continual learning.

As individuals, we must get out of our comfort zones to seek new opportunities to learn and grow. We must also plan for our careers and invest in our career health. We should not limit ourselves to being just students, employees, freelancers or employers at any one time. Everyone can be a worker-learner and a worker-entrepreneur. And because learning never stops, there should be no hard boundary between Pre-employment Training and Continuing Education and Training. And everyone, regardless of occupation, needs to have the mindset and instincts of an entrepreneur to contribute and succeed in the future economy.

Second, let us focus on what organisations can do. They must transform to activate the skills of the workforce and unleash the creativity of their people. Otherwise, the gains from training and reskilling will not be fully realised. A body of research, including findings from the Institute for Adult Learning's Skills and Learning Survey, suggests that much of what people learn in formal training is not applied at work, often because there is no opportunity to do so, or because the workplace is not conducive.

Learning must therefore be dovetailed with organisational strategy and not treated as a standalone activity. Enterprises must become learning enterprises, where learning is embedded in corporate DNA. Leaders, human resource (HR) professionals, line managers and unions all have a role to play in enabling learning by activating mindsets, securing training resources, embedding learning and work, and creating conducive environments for learning and experimentation.

It should also be a priority for organisations to adopt skills-first practices, where skills, rather than credentials, become the key consideration for hiring, career development and advancement. This will give employers access to a larger pool of talent, while workers will enjoy greater career mobility as they are not limited by their previous educational qualifications or work experience, but can leverage the skills they have picked up through work to take on new job roles or cross into other sectors.

It is important that employers conduct regular structured career conversations with employees across all career stages and not just older workers. Such conversations help individuals understand the strengths, aspirations and development opportunities, while enabling organisations to better develop and deploy talent. Finally, organisations should encourage ground-up innovation by looking to the workforce as a source of insight and innovation.

In a complex and uncertain environment, it is particularly important for workers to make sense of the evolving context and to be empowered to co-create solutions with opportunities to hone their instincts and build their confidence. Workers' tacit knowledge is also valuable in human-centric work redesign, where involving workers in redesigning work can lead to greater ownership and better outcomes.

Third, a refreshed, integrated work and learning ecosystem is necessary to foster an agile, adaptable and innovative workforce, along with a labour market characterised by quality jobs, skills alignment and strong labour mobility.

Let me first acknowledge what is already in place under SkillsFuture. There is generous support for training and reskilling. We have a common skills taxonomy and a Careers and Skills Passport that support skills certification, recognition and portability. There is also a network of training providers whose quality standards are closely monitored. Labour market intelligence is made available to individuals, firms and training providers via a suite of online tools and dashboards.

What more can be done?

First, I think we need to accelerate efforts at making skills-first practices more prevalent and indeed, the default for firms and organisations. The Institute of Adult Learning will be launching a skills-first framework for action in October, which will set out concrete actions and behaviours that we hope will become widely adopted by individuals, employers and training providers.

Second, we need to develop robust skills credentialing. Today, there is a gap in the Careers and Skills Passport in that it primarily captures formal training and credentials, along with work experience. As workplace learning becomes an increasingly important part of lifelong learning, we need to be able to assess and recognise skills acquired on-the-job and demonstrable at the workplace. The Institute of Adult Learning has pioneered skills credentialing for the training and adult education sector, and we are working with partner agencies to adapt this methodology for other sectors.

This is important, as a more complete skills passport would enable and encourage adoption of skills-first practices. IHLs, too, can support this by designing student testimonials to better reflect skills acquired through coursework, internships and co-curricular activities.

Third, there is a need to support enterprises in becoming learning organisations by providing practical tool kits and resources to strengthen organisational capabilities, while helping leaders, HR and organisational development professionals place learning at the heart of organisational strategy and unlock the potential of their workforce.

Fourth, there is scope to further invest in personalised career guidance and job-matching capabilities, not just recommending jobs based on skills, but also on values, aspirations and personality fit.

A senior consultant psychiatrist recently told me that job fit is a major factor for human health and happiness. He observed that different kinds of work may be better suited to different personability types. Forcing a square peg into a round hole may lead to stress, burnout and poor mental health. Conversely, a good job fit is likely to result in personal fulfilment, more engaged and energised workers along with higher productivity and creativity on the job.

A more comprehensive and effective system of career coaching and guidance, not just for displaced workers but also for those in employment, can moreover support better career health and resilience.

Fifth, we can strengthen support for micro entrepreneurship. Thanks to AI, individuals can now put their business ideas to the test with much lower barriers to market entry. AI is making one-person companies increasingly viable. The Government could review what more could be done to support such ventures, whether through financing, access to AI compute, business networks and mentoring, or other targeted forms of support to encourage micro entrepreneurship as a viable career pathway or source of supplementary income for Singaporeans.

Finally, we need to invest significantly in understanding the nexus among technology, adult learning, employability and business performance.

Every chief HR officer I spoke with recently has shared that one of the central challenges facing their organisation is AI and its impact on work and their workforce. In this new reality of rapidly advancing AI, no organisation or government has all the answers. We need to experiment, test, iterate and scale up what works in AI-enabled learning, work redesign and employability across a range of sectors and organisation types.

Just as we have built up considerable expertise in pedagogy that has placed Singapore at the forefront of global education for school-age children, we need to similarly build up expertise in lifelong learning and employability. We should bring to Singapore the world's leading experts – not just academic researchers but practice-oriented academics who can bridge the world of academia and industry with timely research that informs practice in a fast-changing landscape. By building up our research and practice ecosystem, Singapore can be at the cutting edge of learning and employability in the AI age.

Let us match our ambition for our workforce with sustained investment in expertise and capability. Our guiding star should be to give our people the best chance of succeeding and contributing in the AI age, which is critical to a dynamic and inclusive economy and fundamental to renewing our social compact.

Mr Deputy Speaker : Ms He Ting Ru.

4.33 pm

Ms He Ting Ru (Sengkang) : Mr Deputy Speaker, post-Independence, we were laser-focused on pursuing economic growth as a young nation trying to stand on our own two feet, opening ourselves to foreign investment, connecting ourselves with networks of global trade and providing fertile ground for businesses both global and local to flourish. This resulted in vast improvement of the quality of life for large swathes of our population. For many, the promise of a better future for our next generation was a beacon of hope for which we worked towards.

Yet, in recent years, it is not unheard of for our residents to ask: should economic growth be our ultimate endgame?

The latest ESR report provides us a valuable opportunity for reflection and to rethink what progress means to Singapore. But at a time when retrenchments dominate newspaper headlines, anxious residents worry about unstable livelihoods and our little red dot feels ever-rising heat from climate change, it is timely for us to think how we can put economic growth in service of broader societal progress.

We need a Singapore economy that provides breathing room for each and every one of our people to be the best version of ourselves.

A few years back, I spoke about Kate Raworth's concept of doughnut economics, which envisions an economy that places at its heart a collective well-being and equality to achieve a safe and just space for humanity whilst protecting our earth from further environmental destruction. This is more relevant than ever. Our economic policies must embody an ethos of equity, and collective and planetary well-being while providing opportunities for all in our society to thrive.

I will address three key areas today towards this goal: first, tackling our care system; second, providing the right ecosystem for creatives and entrepreneurs to thrive; and third, protecting our planet.

If our economy is to be rooted in equity and collective well-being, we must first look at who determines how our economic pie is sliced. Of the members and five committees involved in the ESR, it appears to mainly comprise C-suite and the NTUC union leaders.

Even as we recognise their insights, organisations representing migrant workers, women's rights and persons with disabilities should also have been more clearly represented. Our economic trajectory must be shaped by the people, with the people and for the people. Diversity and perspective, representing the diverse stakeholders in our economy, must be used to identify potential blind spots and marginalised communities, and how these diverse communities live and experience our policies, economic and otherwise.

When we talk about economic contribution, our economic structure often focuses on the elite worlds of finance, tech and commerce. Yet, our economy is kept dynamic by a very diverse group of professionals whose contributions are invaluable for their collective economic success.

In particular, our care economy comprising both paid and unpaid labour in childcare, eldercare, healthcare and various social services. A foundational building block for any economy, our care infrastructure is what leads to the broader growth, well-being and human development for current and future generations. Building our care infrastructure must be seen as a priority, not just an afterthought, a problem to fix due to demographic changes.

In this line, Thrust 5 of the ESR recommended that we improve the attractiveness of AI-resilient sectors, such as allied health, early childhood education and social work. Many proposals were raised, such as job redesign, clarifying progression pathways, and strengthening skills development and certification. But also it mentioned increased wage support.

Granted, this is a tricky balance. An example can be seen in action by the UK's latest attempt to reform social care, which is envisaged to be a long and costly process involving difficult decisions even as there is room for statements that carers need to be the best paid in society rather than the worst.

Yet even in Singapore, wage support is solely needed for our caregivers. Latest MOM data as of June 2025 indicates the median gross wage earned by registered nurses at $5,129 per month. Social workers earn $4,565, preschool teachers earn $4,150. These numbers are lower than the overall median gross monthly income from employment of $5,775.

Even as we acknowledge that wage support is overdue, care workers must also be better acknowledged and supported for their invaluable contribution towards our society, regardless of their ability to weather AI-induced disruptions. Wages in the care economy must commensurate with the rising cost of living.

We also need to address the heavy emotional toll faced by care workers. A 2022 study published in the Academy of Medicine, Singapore's official journal measuring burnout in the public healthcare sector between July 2019 and January 2020 found that 37.8% of respondents had high emotional exhaustion scores; 29.7% had high de-personalisation scores and 55.3% had low personal accomplishment scores. Another study conducted in the second half of 2024 in our National University Polyclinics also found that nearly 10% of participants stated that they intended to leave their current position in the next six months. The authors of the study found this concerning, noting that the resignation rate of healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic was just 4%.

Just as the Law Society recently started to review the prevailing work culture for lawyers, it is time for our regulatory bodies to work with industry and non-governmental organisations in care economy segments to officially track workplace well-being and examine prevailing workplace standards.

Support for local entrepreneurship in the care economy is also key. The care economy is highly labour-intensive, and our general grant supporting capital needs in entrepreneurship and capability building needs closer scrutiny. While the current existence of the VentureForGood Grant administered by raiSE SG supports early and growth-stage social enterprises for up to $300,000 in capital expenditure and operating costs, how can we support more startups and commercial enterprises in this space to bring sustainable investments into the care economy? raiSE SG must work with the Ministry of Trade and Industry, and the Ministry of Social and Family Development jointly to review the care economy investment ecosystem to build a more sustainable investment and employment ecosystem.

Caregiving is also borne by informal carers, such as family and friends. This labour of love is not reflected in GDP figures, but its importance is underscored by the inaugural Duke-National University of Singapore study, which valued the economic contribution of informal caregiving for seniors at $1.28 billion annually.

The efforts of our caregivers often come at a cost – sacrificing health, careers and leisure time to care for loved ones. It is also why I have been calling since 2020 for official regular time-use studies for us to better understand our carers' needs and to measure the hidden economic and personal costs behind care. Carers also need better support, which is why our Party's manifesto has called for, amongst others, compensation for family caregivers and the expansion of respite care.

Singapore must bridge the gap of seeing care beyond being a cost. We must see caregiving as a growth segment that builds not just the economy of today, but the society of tomorrow.

Our society of tomorrow must also support creatives and entrepreneurs who dare to dream and pursue their own passions. How do we ensure that our local entrepreneurs and dreamers can have their passion made possible in Singapore?

To create the conditions for entrepreneurship to grow, we must first, as a society, foster a culture of self-discovery and exploration from young. Expanding entrepreneurship-related programmes in schools and encouraging critical thinking and empathy as prescribed in the ESR report only goes so far if our system does not reward risk-taking or having room to make mistakes and learn.

How do we explain the gap between the decades' long efforts to build an education system to be more holistic against the reality that these additional layers simply create new pathways for education arms races? What do we need to do to address parents' or would-be parents' fears for the next generation in an age of million-dollar HDB resale prices, ever-soaring Certificate of Entitlement prices and the never-ending sense of scarcity?

While this is a whole other topic, it is relevant to our economic policies for the future. For today, I would like to instead focus on our creatives and entrepreneurs.

Our creatives are risk-takers and visionaries. They turn ideas into commercial and cultural value and inspire the wonder that a thriving society needs. Yet a career in the arts remains a difficult choice in Singapore. Regulatory hurdles have forced artists to alter or remove public artworks while beloved art spaces have shuttered under rising costs and redevelopment pressures. These are not small setbacks. They kill the very activity we say we want to nurture.

The one-off Culture Pass is only a first step. What our creatives need is sustained support, dedicated work, display and commercial spaces to hone their craft and earn a decent living, backed by sensible commercial space regulations. These should sit alongside spaces for budding entrepreneurs, much like the creative and cultural parks we see in cities, such as Beijing and Taipei, proof that culture and commerce can thrive side by side.

Next, supporting the growth ambitions of our businesses, large and small. Small home-based businesses can be a testbed for aspiring founders to launch businesses. But the next step is often daunting, with commercial overheads quickly becoming prohibitive. Can the Government, across agencies, provide more affordable short-term stalls and shop spaces across HDB, URA and JTC-managed properties for first-time entrepreneurs, taking inspiration from the now ubiquitous shared office facilities to offer smaller modular units with lower renovation and deposit requirements and allow tendency periods that are shorter or easier contractual conditions for potential exit?

For SME looking to scale, the ESR report acknowledges that companies still find it difficult to secure growth stage capital and that Temasek already participates in SME co-investment. But what our businesses need to grow is bolder and broader base access to financing catalysed by private and public capital.

Enterprise Singapore-co-invested companies, through the Startup SG Equity Scheme, should be re) mainboard or catalyst, and ESG should work with SGX on governance and disclosure requirements for co-invested companies to ease the path to listing. Together with the Equity Market Development Programme, this can improve liquidity in our domestic equity market and attract more liquidity into these companies. Such companies should also be explicitly tracked on the impact they have beyond returns, for example, their contribution to activity and employment in Singapore. This is similar in spirit to Ireland's Strategic Investment Fund which has a double bottom-line mandate. To further encourage would-be entrepreneurs, we also need an ecosystem with structural measures to protect necessary risk-taking for success.

After I spoke in early May this year about supporting entrepreneurship amongst youths, including a call to adapt our current bankruptcy framework, a Straits Times' article on 26 May indicated that business failure is among the top reasons why individuals go into personal bankruptcy. Yet, working out a bankruptcy is often difficult, with practical limits on day-to-day activities and no automatic discharge. This can hold back those with bold ideas from taking the plunge.

Pro-data reforms have been found to be linked to better entrepreneurship and innovation outcomes. A European Union (EU) expert group report in 2011 that, "A second chance policy that enables formally bankrupt entrepreneurs to restart may represent one of the most promising and under-exploited policy options for company creation and job growth."

The EU has since adopted a more balanced preventive restructuring approach for bona fide entrepreneurs seeking a second chance. I will thus repeat our call to see if our bankruptcy regime can be reformed to encourage more would-be entrepreneurs to step up.

Finally, thriving humans need a flourishing planet. Yet, the relentless pursuit of economic growth on this planet has resulted in the over extraction of precious natural resources, damaged ecosystems and disruption to communities.

Thrust 8 of the ESR recommended that businesses prepare for a low-carbon and climate-resilient future. Noticeably, a heavy emphasis was placed on preparing businesses to shield themselves from the harmful effects of climate change, while not acknowledging that historically, it has been corporations and industrial development that have been the very reason we are now experiencing planetary distress. We need more attention and details on how our policies will make our enterprises and economies to be part of the solution to climate change, particularly in Thrust 2 of the ESR involves making Singapore a global leader for AI.

As I said during the debate on Singapore's use of AI, there's undoubtedly potential to harness the power of AI for greater economic and societal good. Yet, we, at the same time, hear about how low-wage workers, in developing nations are forced to view explicit content to train AI, as well as concerns about adverse effect on cognitive development and critical thinking. More expressly, data centres driven by AI-induced demand, guzzle up large amounts of energy and water, increasing carbon emissions, driving up utility prices and disrupting the lives of nearby communities.

The earlier 2019 moratorium on new data centres, as well as higher operating costs here, drove operators to set up shop in neighbouring Johor and Batam, with Singaporean companies owning the largest proportion of data centre capacity in both regions. This has caused disamenties for local communities, even prompting a group of Johor residents to protest against the construction of a nearby data centre.

Moving data centres further away also does not solve the problem. During my trip to Thailand in June, I noticed that while policy-makers were excited about investment and growth opportunities for AI in partnership with countries, like Singapore, there were also concerns about the environmental and sustainability impact of such investments.

While the planned resumption of data centre construction in Singapore requires the use of greener energy sources, how exactly are we balancing the needs for our precious land? Does this result in land that could otherwise be maintained to be for nature and green spaces to be ultimately razed to meet industrial and housing requirements?

Such green spaces are key to bolstering our heat resilience and are rapidly disappearing in the name of growth and economic survival. Concern is mounting over forests being cut down for housing, both at Maju Forest and Gillman Barracks, alongside a patch of forest near Woodlands Checkpoint, which would be cleared for the development of a new commercial hub, while over 52 hectares of forested land would be cut down for the next phase of the Jurong Innovation District.

Intensifying business and industrial operations ultimately affect our energy consumption. EMA noted that electricity consumption increased by 4% year-on-year in 2024, with commerce and service-related businesses consuming the highest proportion that year at 40.2% of our total electricity use. The situation is worse for water, particularly with data centres being huge consumers. Already, non-domestic water consumption takes up 55% of our total water use and PUB estimates that this is expected to increase to 60% by 2065. What are we doing to mitigate this impact?

Even before we craft our policies to address the impact on the climate, we must first measure the environmental impact. As I first mentioned during my Budget speech in 2022, a critical first step will be to track and monitor our policies, environmental outcomes via an environmental dashboard. This could be aided by the recent introduction of the Singapore classification for environmental purposes, which is used to classify data relating to environmental activities and products.

We would do well to remember that Mother Earth is not humankind's personal automated teller machine (ATM). We must ensure that our economic policies should not result in further destruction of our planet and a transparent accounting of its environmental outcomes would be a helpful tool keep us on our toes.

Mr Deputy Speaker, progress towards tomorrow does not mean that we compromise on our collective well-being for the sake of GDP growth. Progress means that we, as a society, support balance and well-rounded lifestyles with strong safety nets for our people, recognise all who contribute meaningfully to society, provide opportunities for everyone to dream big and uphold our responsibility as stewards of Mother Earth. The society of tomorrow that is built in Singapore must be one where all of us will thrive and enjoy the fruits of our effort together, and I believe that we can achieve that, and so much more for us and the generations that come.

Mr Deputy Speaker : Mr Patrick Tay.

4.52 pm

Mr Patrick Tay Teck Guan (Pioneer) : Mr Deputy Speaker, Sir, I rise to speak on the Motion before this House, and I support the amendments proposed by hon Member Edward Chia.

The aspirations expressed in this Motion to support local businesses – help workers succeed, build a Singaporean footprint overseas and ensure shared prosperity – are aspirations that all of us in this Chamber can support. Indeed, these have been central to the work of NTUC and the Labour Movement, our unions and our tripartite partners for many decades. They are also aligned with the spirit and direction of the ESR.

For many Singaporean workers and business owners, the future economy is already being felt in very real ways in uncertain demand, rising costs, sharper competition, new technologies and industries that are changing faster than ever before.

I am now into my 25th year in NTUC, and currently serve as the Executive Secretary of the United Workers of Electronics and Electrical Industries (UWEEI). Over the more than two decades, I have walked with workers through many storms, from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), to the Global Financial Crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic. Every crisis was different.

Every transition was painful in its own way. But the lesson was the same: workers must never be treated as collateral damage in economic change. At every phase of Singapore's development, we needed clear national direction and most importantly, the assurance that those who work hard, adapt and contribute will not be left behind.

The ESR is our latest national roadmap to create a broader range of good jobs, stronger enterprises and growth that benefits Singaporeans fairly and tangibly.

Today, I want to focus on three priorities, what I call the "3S" that are essential to build an economy that works for all.

First "S", safeguard the rules; second, share the gains; and third, strengthening our Singaporean Core.

First, safeguard the rules. Part (a) of the Motion speaks of an economy where "workers thrive". But workers cannot thrive on aspiration alone. They need fair rules, fair opportunity and fair protection. When the economy changes faster than workers can adapt, many feel that the odds are stacked against them. Our duty is to level the playing field for them to compete fairly.

AI will disrupt jobs at a speed and scale that we have not seen before. It can raise productivity and create new possibilities. But if poorly managed, it can also widen insecurity, compress career pathways and place too much risk on workers. Workers must not be asked to carry the burden of this transition alone.

There are two topics in this space, firstly, on retrenchment benefits and unemployment support. And on the topic of mandating retrenchment benefits, the NTUC and the Labour Movement, including myself, have been working with tripartite partners to ensure that no worker is left behind. NTUC and the Labour Movement, including many of our union leaders and unions, we have been negotiating collective agreements, unionising companies to ensure that they are well protected in the event that there is a lay-off and retrenchment benefits can be paid out.

In fact, we have such strong existing mechanisms, such as conciliation and MOM, and even the Industrial Arbitration Court – very unique, creature of statute – which I appeared before on multiple occasions to support and obtain retrenchment benefit payouts for workers, including PMEs. In fact, we have been trying to lobby, myself inclusive, in this House, for the past decade, including earlier this year, for further strengthening of the retrenchment protection regime here in Singapore.

It is in the common intent of everyone, I am sure, in this House, to ensure that affected workers are taken care of as every worker matters.

In fact, the tripartite partners, as I am involved in the negotiations for the Employment Act as well as all the relevant statutory provisions as well as advisories, we remain open in negotiating and discussions are underway, whether it is the Employment Act reviewing the Tripartite Advisory to strengthen it to tripartite guidelines, which I have raised before in this House, and even stronger measures against companies that flopped or failed to, comply with advisories.

These are things that we have been raising and I believe it is a journey, a journey which require all our tripartite partners to work closely together so that we achieve what we always say, a win-win-win outcome. It is always in the NTUC's and the Labour Movement's interest in our agenda to look after workers and their families, especially if they are affected by lay-offs.

And there are a whole plethora of measures and support measures to help them land the next job, support them well in the company as well as on many occasions. I have done this, in fact, in the last couple of years in my capacity as Executive Secretary of the UWEEI, I have been very, very involved in the many lay-offs that you see in the manufacturing sector.

The key is, we will continue to lobby, advocate on behalf of our workers. But more importantly, to work with our tripartite partners closely to ensure that we have the regime and the mechanism. We are also observing that the tripartite partners are very open to see new ways and mechanisms to overcome this to ensure no worker is left behind in the event of a lay-off or retrenchment.

On the topic of unemployment insurance support, this is something I spoke about more than a decade ago, lobbying for some form of unemployment support for workers in Singapore. I am very happy that it has been introduced last year, on 26 April – I remember the fateful date – the SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support Scheme was implemented.

What is unique about the scheme is that, unlike in an unemployment insurance, where there are premiums to be paid by both employers and employees, this is a situation where Government picks up the tab and gives that needed support through and with active labour market policies. That is something which will lessen the burden on workers having to fork out premiums.

And I have, at the same time, in this same House, also lobbied for this area to be further expanded and rebuilt, now that we are seeing in the last 24 months more PMEs being affected by lay-offs. So, that is an area which we can review, whether the income threshold of the SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support scheme can be raised – because currently, that is $5,000 – whether it can be raised to the median salary of PMEs, so, that is one avenue to explore. Or even another new scheme to support PMEs now that we know they are equally vulnerable as rank-and-file workers.

Local PMEs, I must say are a definite group which I have constantly spoken up for in this House. They form the broad middle of our workforce. They are also those most exposed to technical or, should I say, technological disruption and yet, may not always enjoy sufficient representation and protection.

Over the years, NTUC has worked closely with our tripartite partners to build stronger institutional safeguards, for example the Complementarity Assessment Framework (COMPASS) framework for Employment Passes to the newly enacted Workplace Fairness Act.

I am therefore heartened that the ESR recognises PMEs as a group deserving enhanced support and that it prioritises investment in AI technologies that augment rather than displace workers. I think that is the right direction.

Earlier this year, MOM, NTUC and Singapore National Employers Federation announced the formation of the Tripartite Jobs Council. Initiated by NTUC, this Jobs Council brings together unions, employers and Government as a central node to coordinate existing and new programmes to help workers reskill, and to help businesses redesign jobs responsibly so that AI becomes a tool for uplift, not displacement.

I think the difficulty of landing a new job is not a new discovery – I have raised this on numerous occasions – and we must pay particular attention to younger PMEs entering the workforce. They may be among the hardest-hit if AI compresses entry-level roles and creates a "broken rung" of sorts at the very start of their careers. And we unanimously agreed that if our young graduates cannot get that first meaningful foothold, their long-term progression may be affected. We cannot allow the first step of a career to become the weakest link in our labour market.

This is why I have lobbied also for, in this House, coaching, mentoring and expanding the SkillsFuture credits for use in the area of coaching and mentoring which has been supported, and really to have a stronger mechanism to help those transiting from school to work effectively, efficiently and seamlessly.

Through the GRIT programme, NTUC works hand-in-hand with Government and employers in sectors such as financial services, information and communication technology, manufacturing to give young graduates structured, industry-relevant experience.

Beyond the traineeship period, NTUC and Workforce Singapore, through the Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) and Careers Connect, help these young workers move into full-time roles and build confidence with AI tools so that they are not just job-ready for today, but career-ready for tomorrow.

And I have suggested for this scheme before in this House to be further expanded, to cover more areas, more sectors and maybe a review of whether it should be made permanent to really help new job entrants entering the job market which remains an issue and challenge.

The second "S" is share the gains. Part (b) rightly highlights the importance of healthy domestic demand. But for a small and open economy like Singapore, external demand is equally critical. According to the SBF, overseas revenue accounts for more than 40% of the total revenue for half of our businesses.

I am glad that the ESR has identified a dynamic enterprise ecosystem for Singapore-based companies to succeed globally as a key thrust. Domestic demand and external demand are not competing choices. We need both engines working together.

External demand helps Singapore grow the pie. But growth alone is not enough. The real test is whether that growth translates into better jobs, higher wages, stronger skills, and expanded opportunities for Singaporean workers and local businesses.

Global enterprises locate in Singapore not only for our domestic market, but to tap growth in Asia and beyond. But if Singapore is to remain a trusted global node, our workers must also move up the value chain. This is where the NTUC Company Training Committees (CTCs), play a critical role.

Since 2019, our CTCs have brought company management, workers and union leaders together to drive business and workforce transformation. In 2022, the Government provided NTUC with $100 million to scale up this initiative and subsequently another $200 million after it showed results in producing real shared gains for workers.

When companies modernise or adopt new technologies, our unions sit down with management to ensure workers are trained for higher-value roles and that productivity gains are reflected not only in company results, but also in workers' pay packets and career progression.

Let me give a practical example from our NTUC Electronics, Marine and Engineering Cluster. Through a CTC Grant project, a company introduced automation to its production process so it could take on more orders. But automation did not mean displacement. The union and management worked together on a structured training roadmap – 24 workers were reskilled, production capacity improved by 12%, and more importantly, these workers received a 5% wage increase over and above their annual increment, in addition to career development support.

To date, more than 15,000 workers have benefited from NTUC's CTC Grant projects, with workers in these projects receiving an average wage increase of 5% above their increment through this scheme.

Wage increases in tandem with productivity increase. This is what real sharing of gains look like. Not theoretical redistribution, but negotiated, sustainable outcomes where better productivity leads to better pay. This works in tandem with the National Wages Council, a tripartite body which responds to the uneven and sometimes unpredictable outlook for different sectors and different companies.

The last "S" is strengthen our Singaporean core. As our economy globalises, we must ensure that Singaporeans are not bystanders to our own success. We need both global enterprises with substantial operations here, and dynamic local companies with the ambition to venture abroad. But wherever Singaporean capital flows, Singaporean talent must flow too – to lead, not just to support. Singaporeans must have a fair shot at leadership, regional exposure and global careers.

Local SMEs cannot grow well and grow fast on the domestic market alone. In high-tech manufacturing and commercial services, many local firms have scaled by first becoming trusted partners to global MNCs based in Singapore; then, using that credibility to venture into overseas markets, including high-tech and industrial parks in Southeast Asia, China, and India. They build operational strength at home so that they can seize opportunities abroad.

Government schemes are important enablers. The Market Readiness Assistance Grant helps SMEs co-fund up to 50% of eligible overseas market entry costs, capped at $100,000 per new market. The Enterprise Development Grant supports SMEs in building core capabilities to compete internationally. These schemes help our local enterprises take the first step ahead with greater confidence.

But as Singaporean capital expands overseas, we must be intentional about building Singaporean corporate leaders. Our workers and PMEs must not only support regionalisation from the back office. They must be given the chance to lead, to manage, to build networks and to represent Singapore confidently in overseas markets.

I am glad that the ESR has recommended expanding the Overseas Markets Immersion Programme to give young professionals overseas and leadership exposure, and to support their progression into international postings. I encourage the Government to monitor and strengthen the proportion of Singaporeans in management positions, so that local PMEs have fair opportunities alongside their foreign counterparts.

Mr Speaker, Sir, building an economy of the future that works for all is not just a slogan. It is hard, continuous, collective work. It is work that NTUC and our unions have carried out for decades, sometimes visibly, sometimes quietly, but always with one purpose – which is to safeguard the rights, wages, welfare and work prospects of our workers.

In fact, I want to use this opportunity to thank my fellow union leaders who stand in line, to lend a hand, to watch their backs, give a shoulder to cry on sometimes in events of ups and downs in the economy.

But make no mistake – tripartism is not easy. Balancing the needs of workers, businesses and the nation is not easy. But precisely because it is hard, it forces us to find practical solutions that endure.

The ESR gives Singapore a comprehensive roadmap to stay globally competitive. Our task is to make sure that this roadmap is also worker-centric, inclusive and fair.

So, let us continue to strengthen this practical, tripartite partnership. Let us Safeguard the rules, Share the Gains, and Strengthen our Singaporean Core anchored by strong and lasting tripartite relationships. I support the amendments by hon Member Edward Chia to the Motion. [ Applause. ]

Mr Deputy Speaker : Ms Eileen Chong.

5.09 pm

Ms Eileen Chong Pei Shan (Non-Constituency Member) : Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Last July, the Prime Minister noted that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN's) per capita GDP today is around $6,000. And that if it reaches $10,000 or more, it is, in his words, a complete game changer. A young region, a rising middle class on our doorstep.

His observation is not new. The latest ESR report identifies Southeast Asia as an engine of growth. The Emerging Stronger Taskforce in 2021, under its Stronger Together pillar, had called for the deepening of partnerships, especially with Southeast Asia. So did the Committee on the Future Economy in 2017, in the first of seven strategies.

Every major economic blueprint of the past decade has named the region as key to Singapore's future. So, the question is not whether Southeast Asia matters. We have consensus that it does, but what have we actually done about it?

This Motion believes that an economy of the future that works for all includes an economic engine driven by Singaporeans and Singaporean capital venturing abroad. The ESR is explicit about the latter and several Members of the House have echoed this. The report asks that more of our own companies start, scale and succeed globally. It seeks deeper trade and supply chain links across the region and it envisions a Singapore where capital is raised, structured, deployed and recycled across the region and the world. Around each sits a familiar architecture of support, grants and market entry support for our companies, while our public institutions co-invest, de-risk and finance their expansion, which draws private Singaporean capital out alongside them.

The WP supports all of this, but capital does not manage itself in a market it does not know. Someone has to be there to turn capital that has been deployed into capital that is productive. The more successful we are at sending capital and our companies into the region, the more pressing the question that ESR does not answer: who are we sending with it?

Two weekends ago, the Government unveiled the new SG Youth Plan. A separate blueprint for young Singaporeans just a month after the ESR report, guided by the same conviction that our future lies in the region. It picks up on this threat that the ESR left hanging. It puts young Singaporeans and regional exposure at its centre and comes with some numbers. It commits to expanding overseas exposure for young Singaporeans: 17,000 short-term exposure places a year by 2030, up from the current 9,000; 3,000 overseas internships in ASEAN, China and India, doubled from today's 1,500. It expands on what young Singaporeans say we want. 63% agree that regional work experience would help us advance faster and half of us are willing to take up internships or jobs elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Mr Deputy Speaker, this is encouraging. The appetite is there. If half of us are already willing to go, then what we should be looking at is whether the state invests in building us something worth going to and something worth coming back to. And on this note, I want to highlight three gaps.

The first is offtake. The SG Youth Plan outlines a game plan focused on supply. More trips, more internships, earlier access. Every one of its regional commitments is about sending young Singaporeans out. But what happens when we come home is the most decisive, because if we return to a job market and promotion board that treats six months in Jakarta as a detour rather than an asset, then only one obvious conclusion will be drawn – that such experiences are a penalty rather than a premium.

Do enough employers in Singapore value and reward regional experience? While I cannot speak for all employers, I would like to share a perspective from our largest employer, the Government.

In April, I filed a Parliamentary Question asking where Government scholars have studied in the past decade. The answer I received was, "Taking into account all Government scholarships, including Public Service Commission, over the last three years, from 2023 to 2025, on an annual average basis, 49% of the recipients studied at local autonomous universities; 30% in the UK; 15% in the US; and 6% in other countries".

Six percent for the entire rest of the world, the whole of ASEAN included. I also asked if there were minimum targets for scholars to study in non-English speaking countries and or regions. The answer was no.

I am not doubting the quality of an Oxford, Cambridge or an Ivy League education, but these numbers mean that when we select and invest in young Singaporeans who will return to serve in the Public Service, a small group of whom might even take public office in the future, 10 out of 20 of them stay home, while another nine go west. If the Government is not prioritising and encouraging region readiness in the Public Service, how can we ask young Singaporeans to believe that there is market demand for this?

The second gap is depth. Exposure does not equal fluency or capability – 17,000 young Singaporeans spending some time in the region is not 17,000 region-ready Singaporeans. The SG Youth Plan included the story of an Institute of Technical Education student who came home after being sent to Hanoi. She was more confident and eager to explore opportunities beyond our shores. But inspiration is only a beginning. It is not an outcome.

Real region readiness is built over years, not weeks. The language learnt, the workings of the market understood from the inside, the network that answers when you call. Have we invested sufficiently in structures that will deepen this?

Key third languages offered to our students remain French, German, Japanese and Spanish – when blueprint after blueprint emphasise that our future lies with neighbours whose languages we do not teach. If we are serious, is it not time to ask whether Thai and Vietnamese also belong on that list? A short trip creates a memory. Language and cultural understanding are often the difference between a visitor and a partner.

The third, and perhaps most important, gap is whether and how any of this will be measured. Because we have heard this aspiration before, especially in 2018 during our term as ASEAN Chair. It was appropriately a year of speeches about how the region was our future and how the Government will help Singaporeans seize it.

In September 2018, in a written reply to a question on our progress in going regional, then Minister for Trade and Industry, Mr Chan Chun Sing, set out what we were doing for talent. We had the Youth Talent Programme, which targeted sending 1,000 students each year for work opportunities in overseas markets. We had a Professional Conversion Programme for Southeast Asia Ready Talent to reskill professionals for roles in the region. We also had an ASEAN Leadership Programme to help senior business leaders understand and grow into Southeast Asian markets.

And what became of them? It appears that the first two, in one form or another, are still with us. The Youth Talent Programme was folded into the Global Ready Talent Programme, which we were told supported 29,470 students between 2020 and 2024. The Professional Conversion Programme was renamed and runs today as the Career Conversion Programme for Internationalisation Professionals.

But what is less clear is what outcomes they have achieved eight years on.

The 29,470 figure for the Global Ready Talent Programme includes both domestic and overseas placements. It is only starting this April that local internship support has been discontinued. So, how many actually went abroad? And of those who did, where did they go? How many of them went on to work in the region or in a region-facing role?

For the Career Conversion Programme, how many professionals converted? From what sectors and into what roles? Has it helped their career trajectory?

What about the ASEAN Leadership Programme? How many leaders went through it? What became of their companies’ regional ambitions?

Mr Deputy Speaker, I have looked and struggled to find answers to the above questions from the public record. We have been generous in announcing schemes to build region-ready Singaporeans but seemingly less willing to measure whether they worked. If yes, what worked well? If not, what fell short of expectations?

Some figures that I do have are from the ESR report. While 50% of Singaporeans expressed interest in working abroad, only 3% have actually done a stint of six months or more. So, with the new SG Youth Plan aspiring to 17,000 regional immersion opportunities for young Singaporeans, I would like to ask what has changed this time, so that in 2030 we will be able to say whether it worked. How will the Government track not just how many places were filled, but how many young people go on to work in region-facing roles or to build a career in the region? Because if not, we are simply announcing a larger number to not measure.

And as we chair ASEAN again in 2027, I hope we will not only articulate our ambition to plug into the region but actively track and report on our investments in resourcing this ambition.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I want to now highlight a scheme, the Overseas Market Immersion Programme (OMIP), that best captures how our ambition and strategy diverge. The OMIP aims to give young Singaporeans real regional work experience, not just a taste of it. It works by helping employers send younger Singaporeans on structured postings abroad. It was launched in 2024 with the goal of 250 places over two years, significantly lower than the 2018 target of 1,000 a year. To date, it has supported more than 180 professionals.

The SG Youth Plan will expand the OMIP, not by scaling it so there are more places but by widening the eligibility by dropping the two-year rule so that younger professionals may qualify. This means more will be eligible without a commitment to send more people.

Widening the gate is not the same as sending more people through it. Eligibility without capacity is an invitation without a seat.

On behalf of fellow young Singaporeans, I have two asks: one, complement the eligibility widening by scaling the number of available places; and two, de-link it from employers. An employer-led scheme means a young Singaporean can only go if a company chooses to send them. It is dependent on the company having the HR capacity to manage an overseas posting. Rather than run a people scheme through companies, let us focus it on the people instead. Fund the OMIP directly as a fixed-term stint, at fair wages, open to all graduates from our tertiary institutions. Let us select based on our graduates’ drive, curiosity and seriousness, rather than our companies’ ability to shoulder the administrative burden of overseas postings.

We would not be the first to do this. France's Voluntariat International en Enterprise (VIE), the International Corporate Volunteer Programme, proves that it is possible to do more and even shows us how. The VIE places more than 11,500 young people abroad every year. They can directly search and apply for open positions that range from six to 24 months on the VIE platform. When selected, these young people sign a contract with Business France, a state agency, instead of the host company. Business France looks after payroll, health coverage and social protection. The host company picks the candidate, supervises their work and pays the allowance to Business France. The state sits in the middle and absorbs the friction that neither an individual nor a small company can carry alone.

It works. And the French government has the numbers to prove it because they measured it. Nine in 10 young persons on a VIE assignment find a job within six months of completing their stint. More than seven in 10 come back fluent in the language where they were posted. It is a scheme that produces more than inspiration. It kickstarts careers and builds capabilities. And tellingly, Singapore is among its top 10 destinations. We are on the receiving end of another country’s talent pipeline but are struggling to build our own.

I am not saying that we copy the French VIE programme wholesale. But we should draw inspiration from its design – explore how the state can offer support for what individuals and small companies cannot do on their own. And we should measure the outcomes of our programmes like France does for the VIE – publish not just how many places are filled but how many are in a role with explicit regional mandate or impact two and five years after completing the OMIP stint.

Let us fund the appetite that young Singaporeans have and measure outcomes rather than output.

And finally, we should go beyond the scheme and consider how we can tear down the wall that young Singaporeans find ourselves up against. The SG Youth Plan will see the launch of a new programme called “Adulting 101”. It will teach us about CPF, public housing policy, marriage and parenthood. It correctly identifies the very things that weigh on a young person deciding whether to take an overseas work opportunity. But these are not just facts to be explained. They are structures that will need to change for those who aspire to be regionally mobile.

A young Singaporean weighing three years in Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh is not only weighing salary against salary. She is weighing it against a BTO queue that rewards those who stay home; against CPF contributions a regional employer will not make; against the challenges of coming home to a housing and healthcare system she stepped out of. We have built a domestic architecture so finely tuned for staying home that leaving often means accepting penalties.

During his Institute of Policy Studies lectures last year, Mr Philip Yeo acknowledged this wall. His account of his EDB years was blunt – send officers out while they are young and single, because by their mid-30s with children and a mortgage, it becomes too hard.

So, developing region-ready Singaporeans means we should also consider how we can better support those who choose to go out. Explore how we can ensure that a regional posting does not complicate BTO opportunities and obligations; that children who go on post with their parents can have a seamless re-entry into school in Singapore. These cost only a fraction of the benefit they could bring and could go a long way to quell a family’s hesitation.

Let me close by drawing these threads together.

The ESR speaks of creating good jobs and the SG Youth Plan echoes it with the moves to help young Singaporeans land them. But for too long, we have pictured the good job as a high-value role inside an MNC that chose to base itself here, in Singapore. It is a good job that depends on someone else’s decision to come.

There is another kind of good job; one we seize because a field is taking shape around us and Singapore is well placed to lead it – the growing social impact sector in Southeast Asia. And here, I declare my interest as a professional in the social impact space.

As the public and private sectors in the region turn towards impact to close gaps in issues ranging from health and education to financial inclusion and climate resilience, someone has to convene players, develop benchmarks and innovate for solutions. These are building blocks of a new pool of good jobs that a small country like Singapore can punch above our weight in.

But it is also the kind of ambition that goes unrealised if we do not build a pipeline to seize it. For years, our answer to the regional talent gap has been to draw in the region’s brightest, educate them here and hope they stay. That worked well when we were the obvious best choice. But our region is catching up and this advantage shrinks each year as our neighbours close the gap.

As fellow Member, Mr Edward Chia, said earlier, we must attract the best from the world while developing the best in Singaporeans. The talent we import appreciates for a while then goes home. The Singaporean we equip to work in the region appreciates for a lifetime. A region-ready Singaporean holds capability that is hers – portable, not contingent on a company’s decision to base itself in Singapore. We have been slow to build the bridge that carries our people out and quicker to build a wall that keeps them home.

So, next year, when we assume the Chairmanship of ASEAN, it will, once again and appropriately so, be a year of speeches about how the region is our future and how the Government will help Singaporeans seize it. I hope that this time around, we will not only name the potential of the region as we did in 2018 but also help more Singaporeans seize it.

I rise in support of the original Motion tabled by my colleagues, Mr Kenneth Tiong and Assoc Prof Jamus Lim.

Mr Deputy Speaker : Dr Wan Rizal.

5.26 pm

Dr Wan Rizal (Jalan Besar) : Mr Deputy Speaker, the question before us is not whether our economic strategy points the right way. It is whether it reaches the worker who needs it. That is the work of NTUC and NTUC’s e2i, connecting workers to jobs: our youths who are taking their first step. Our lower-wage workers. Our mature PMEs. And those who start further back than most.

Every worker matters. That has been my conviction since I first stepped into this House. The ESR gives us a clear direction, and our task now is to turn that direction into something a worker can feel. Together with fellow Member, Mr Saktiandi Supaat, we co-chair the Committee for Economic Resilience, or Jawatankuasa Daya Ekonomi, for the Malay/Muslim community. And our job is to mobilise the community, so that these strategies become opportunities for our youths, businesses can scale further and higher wages for our workers.

And we should be honest about our size. Our domestic market is limited, and we have to tap demand in our region and beyond. The global enterprises based here support a large number of local workers. They have been a source of innovation, management practices and technology that helped our local businesses grow. They have also spurred the development of startups and new local enterprises.

What I want from our global enterprises and our local enterprises is the same thing – stand by our workers; help those who are retrenched bounce back with dignity; and help the rest become AI-ready before the changes arise, rather than after.

Today, I will speak on three things: first, supporting our lower-wage and mature workers; second, on building career clarity and safeguarding mental well-being as AI transforms our workplaces; and third, strengthening pathways for our underserved communities and our youths.

First, on supporting ourr lower-wage and mature workers. When we talk about lifting the bottom, the conversation usually turns to where the floor should sit. That is a fair question, and I understand why it is being asked. But a floor on its own only tells a worker where the first rung pays. It does not tell him whether there is a second rung or who will help him reach it.

That is the thinking behind the Progressive Wage Model. It sets a wage and it attaches a ladder to it, with training and a higher wage at each step, differentiated by different sectors. Cleaning, security, landscape, retail, food services, waste management, lift and escalator. Each of those sectors took years of negotiation because wage floors do not rise on their own.

And the work is still live. Just last month, as Chairman of the Tripartite Cluster, I was part of the announcement extending the Progressive Wage Model to our pest management workers. Alongside it, we have the Local Qualifying Salary that sets a floor for local workers in firms that hire foreign workers and Workfare tops up the income and CPF for our lower-wage Singaporeans.

So, the question is – has it worked? Over the past decade, incomes at the 20th percentile grew by 2.9% a year, ahead of the 2.1% at the median. And the ratio between what a worker at the 20th percentile earns and what a worker at the median earns has risen to 0.55. That gap is narrower in 2020, and narrower than it was in 2015.

To put it plainly, over the past decade, workers at the bottom of our ladder have been climbing faster than workers in the middle. But I will not pretend that our work is over. It is progressive, it is sector by sector. A segment of our lower-wage workers still sits outside these layers, many of them in platform and freelance work. And we have made real progress there. The Platform Workers Act now gives our delivery riders and private hire drivers CPF contributions, work injury compensation and formal representations. But as that segment continues to grow, I would ask the Government to study how our wage and protection floors can follow the worker rather than the job title.

Sir, behind every retrenchment statistic is a person, often someone who has given decades of their lives of loyal service and who is now unsure whether he or she still has a place in that workforce. That is why the NTUC set up the Job Security Council in February 2020. Managed by e2i, the Council supported more than 110,000 workers with job matching between 2020 and 2024.

Let me be clear about what the Council is for. Retrenchments edged up in the first quarter of this year, though the incidence remains within the non-recessionary norms. In an economy that keeps restructuring, some displacement will happen and we should be honest about that. But the majority of these retrenchments came from businesses re-organising themselves and restructuring. Firms are reshaping themselves and they will keep doing so.

So, the test is not whether the retrenchments happen. The test is what happens to the worker afterwards. On that test, unemployment has held steady even as retrenchments rose. The share of retrenched residents back in work within six months has also improved for a second consecutive quarter, to 60.7% in the first quarter of this year, and that does not happen on its own.

We also watch closely whether the help actually works. The Taskforce for Responsible Retrenchment and Employment Facilitation brings together MOM, NTUC, e2i, Enterprise Singapore and SWDA, and it has tracked our outcomes carefully. Between 2022 and 2024, about seven in 10 retrenched workers who received career coaching from our agencies and e2i were placed within six months. The median time to placement over that period was around three months.

Close to half of those placed came in at similar or higher wages than before. And more recently, among workers who took up the Taskforce's help before their last day of employment, about two-thirds were back in work within six months, better than the median for retrenched residents. That is the case for reaching our workers earlier, and not later. Numbers like these matter.

Let me tell you about one person. Mary Ho is a senior worker at Mandai Rainforest Resort. Through an agreement between the resort, e2i and the Food, Drinks and Allied Workers' Union, she was offered a redesigned role suited to her needs. What stayed with me was what Mary said herself. She was struck by how we had been involved at every step, making sure she was placed in a role that suited her.

That is what personalised support looks like. Someone walking beside a worker until they land a job.

To reach more workers, e2i now runs 27 National Career Centres across Singapore, expanded since 2024. That brings career, training and employment support closer to where our workers already live and work.

Sir, second point on career clarity and mental well-being at the AI age. In my Budget speech this year, I shared the story of a mid-career worker who had completed several courses over three years. She showed me her certificates with pride. Then she asked me a simple question. Had she upgraded in the right direction? I could not tell her the answer.

Effort without direction creates frustration. Effort with direction builds confidence and clearly, it gives a lot of clarity. And that is why I welcome the formation of the Tripartite Jobs Council. It brings our partners together to help workers reskill and to help businesses redesign jobs responsibly as AI reshapes our workplaces.

For this Council to succeed, its work must reach workers where they already are. That means the trusted touchpoints that I had mentioned earlier, on the ground, the very career centres and coaches that workers, like Mary, could turn to.

And the Labour Movement is not waiting. Through AI-Ready SG, we are already helping our workers and continue to do so, especially our PMEs, our youths, to gain practical confidence with AI, while supporting businesses to redesign jobs responsibly.

Our CTCs are where the real work happens. More than 3,800 CTCs have been formed, benefiting over 300,000 workers. And AI is now the centre of gravity. About 31% of CTC Grant projects supported this year are AI-related, up from about 17% for the whole of last year.

That is what turning technology into practical help looks like. Training that workers can use that same Monday morning. Because the anxiety is real. The fear of being replaced. The fear of falling behind is scary. The fear of being too old to start again causes confusion.

That anxiety does not stay in the workplace. It follows a person home and it wears on their health. I have long advocated in this House for a whole-of-society approach to mental well-being, including a Motion I had co-filed with fellow Members on this very subject. At the recent economic resilience dialogue with businesses and youths, may came forth and mentioned how important mental well-being is in a stage like this. Their ability to have support matters to them. And that is why the Committee for Economic Resilience will work very closely with community leaders and businesses to ensure that we give support for our community.

As we equip our workers for an AI-enabled economy, our support must address not just their skills but their peace of mind. Only then can they face the future with confidence, with clarity.

Sir, my third point on strengthening pathways for our underserved communities and our young people. The ESR focuses on strengthening lifelong learning and on linking training more closely to employment outcomes. I welcome that. But I would like to add this. Some workers start further back than others, whether because of their age, their background or simply because they lack the networks to open doors for them.

Part of my role at e2i is to sharpen our focus on reaching these groups, our lower-wage and mature workers. The aim is for our career services and programmes to be designed around their needs, like what we did with Mary, rather than around conveniences.

For our young people, clarity has to begin before they graduate, and we will come forward to them at an earlier stage than before, ensuring that they have the right clarity and a pathway to go into areas and sectors that have been assigned in the ESR.

A student who has stood inside a real workplace and who has a mentor she can call, makes a very different first decision from one who is guessing. And that is why early career exposure and structured mentorship and internships matter so much, and we will have many of those in the pipeline. Sir, please allow me to continue in Malay.

( In Malay ) : [ Please refer to Vernacular Speech .] Sir, the Economic Strategy Review report is comprehensive, and it gives us a clear direction for the economy of the future. For our young people, their first foray into the working world is often the most daunting. Through NTUC Youth, our younger members receive career guidance and industry exposure. There is also a structured Career Mentorship Programme, with more than 400 volunteer mentors from over 20 industries, offering our members a four-month mentorship.

Our objective is simple.

So, that a young person does not have to figure out their first steps alone. This complements the work of the Tripartite Jobs Council that I mentioned earlier, as well as the Graduate Industry Traineeships programme, so that our young people are supported throughout their first transition. This is also why NTUC signed a memorandum of understanding with the MENDAKI Foundation this year. It aims to strengthen the skills of Malay/Muslim workers, and to help more of them secure employment in growing sectors.

Within the Focus Area of M 3+ , NTUC, e2i, NTUC LearningHub, SWDA and the Lifelong Learning Institute have collaborated with MENDAKI. Together, we have supported more than 6,000 Malay/Muslim workers through career fairs and skills carnivals. Nearly 20% of them went on to receive more in-depth mentorship.

Now, as AI begins to transform the way we work, the same worry is felt in our homes too. So, allow me to offer this assurance.

NTUC and e2i are ready to move forward together with our Malay/Muslim workers, especially our young people. We will help them upskill, adapt, and access meaningful employment opportunities, whether in global companies or in local enterprises, where we want them to develop further.

( In English ): Mr Speaker, before I entered this House, I spent nearly 25 years as an educator. I learned that no one should be written off just because of a label that has been placed on them, not the academic stream that were put at them in schools and not the sector that they happen to work in.

And that belief still guides me in my work today. An economy of the future means an economy where every worker has someone walking alongside them, and gives them a clear path forward. Whatever their age, whatever their background, whatever their starting point. It means that our national strategies on AI, on skills, on enterprise growth, are only as good as how well they reach the worker who really needs them. They will be judged in the career centres, in the union offices and in the community partnerships where the real support is being delivered.

Let us make sure that no one, no Singaporean is left to struggle alone in this journey of AI where clarity is needed the most. Because every worker matters. Mr Deputy Speaker, I support this Motion, as amended by Mr Edward Chia. [ Applause. ]

Mr Deputy Speaker : Minister of State Dinesh Vasu Dash.

5.43 pm

The Minister of State for Culture, Community and Youth, and Manpower (Mr Dinesh Vasu Dash) : Mr Deputy Speaker, I thank the Members for bringing forward this Motion and support the amendments proposed by Mr Edward Chia.

At the heart of this Motion is an important aspiration: that Singapore remains an economy where our people have opportunities to succeed and our workers can look to the future with confidence.

I believe every Member of this House shares this aspiration. The Government certainly does. It has always been at the heart of our economic strategy. Our objective is not simply to grow the economy, but to improve the lives of all Singaporeans. We do this by creating better opportunities, better jobs and raising incomes, by ensuring that the benefits of growth are widely shared.

Let me make three points: first, Singaporeans have been, and always will be, at the centre of our manpower policies; second, we must transform enterprises and uplift a broader range of jobs together; third, our tripartite model is a fundamental source of strength, turning these aspirations expressed at this House into practical outcomes.

Our approach has delivered good outcomes for Singaporeans across the workforce. Our resident unemployment has remained low at 2.9% in March 2026. Real incomes have risen across the board. From 2021 to 2025, real income at the median grew cumulatively by 7.4%. Lower-income workers have seen faster income growth than the median worker. Over the same period, real income at the 20th percentile rose by 10.1%. Income inequality has also fallen.

Few advanced economies have been able to achieve all these outcomes at the same time. Some Members have contrasted Singapore with other industrialised economies, arguing that their greater reliance on local champions had produced better productivity models and better outcomes for their workers. But on comparable measures, Singapore's wage outcomes are higher than these economies, not only at the median but also at the lower levels of income.

In recent years, real wage growth has also kept pace with and exceeded productivity growth. From 2021 to 2025, real value added per worker increased by about 0.7% a year. Over the same period, real median income of full-time employed residents rose by about 1.8% a year while real income at the 20th percentile grew much faster.

This did not happen by accident but through sound growth policies and strategies and tripartite efforts like the Progressive Wage Model, Workfare and the Local Qualifying Salary that have uplifted wages.

More recently, despite a challenging external environment, Singapore's labour market has remained resilient. While retrenchments in some companies may have dominated the headlines, employment expanded for the 19th consecutive quarter in the first quarter of 2026. Resident employment continued to grow, unemployment remained low and firms continued to hire.

These outcomes are the result of deliberate policy choices. We have kept our economy competitive while ensuring that Singaporeans have access to opportunities, better jobs and clear pathways to progress. This has only been possible because Government, employers and unions have worked closely together.

Thus, the evidence does not support the conclusion that Singapore's economic model is a failure. We are navigating a structural transition, however difficult and uneven, from a position of strength. The system has served us well, but we must and will remain adaptable to the changing world.

Importantly, we are not standing still. We know the pace of change has accelerated. Workers expect more churn and disruption. Those who are displaced worry about how long they will take to find another job and whether the next job will be as good as the previous.

So, how should we respond? Some fundamentals remain. As an open and small economy, Singapore's prosperity has always depended on our ability to compete successfully in global markets while ensuring that Singaporeans benefit from that success. I am glad that there is broad agreement in this House on this fundamental point.

The ESR provides an actionable blueprint to address the very challenges that our economy faces. It was not a theoretical exercise. It was shaped by engagements with more than 7,700 stakeholders, including businesses, unions and workers, and grounded in Singapore's realities.

The ESR also puts workers at the heart of its strategies. Let me elaborate this in four ways: first, clearer pathways from skills to jobs; second, a stronger first step into work for our younger workers; third, a trampoline back to work; and finally, stronger ladders of mobility.

First, it is to make it easier for Singaporeans to access career and skills support. After more than a decade of SkillsFuture, we have built a stronger culture of lifelong learning. We will now focus even more sharply on employment outcomes so that training leads to better jobs, better wages and better career progression.

Mr Fadli Fawzi asked about the outcomes of our workforce programmes. In 2025, more than 62,000 jobseekers secured employment after benefiting from Workforce Singapore's programmes and services. Among jobseekers who received career-matching services in 2023, about six in 10 found employment within six months.

Our Career Conversion Programmes show what we can achieve when we journey with our workers. In fact, about nine in 10 participants remained employed for 24 months after embarking on the programme and about six in 10 earned more than their previous salaries.

These are not perfect outcomes and we must continue to improve them, but it made a real difference to those 62,000 jobseekers. They show why we should strengthen the system, not dismiss it.

Mr Fadli Fawzi also called for more robust reviews of SkillsFuture training programmes and for funding to be channelled to industry relevant training. We agree. We have been strengthening quality assurance and sharpening our focus on courses that address identified skills gaps, improve employability and support workforce transformation. We are also looking at to strengthen signals of industry demand so that training remains relevant and delivers value.

At the same time, we recognise that we can do more to tighten the nexus between training and jobs. This is why we merged SkillsFuture Singapore with Workforce Singapore into the new SWDA. SWDA will enable us to align future skills more closely with future jobs, identify at-risk workers earlier and provide more seamless support from training to placement. This will help us close the gap between learning and earning. We will share more at the SkillsFuture Festival Launch event in September.

Second, a stronger first step into work, giving young Singaporeans a stronger start. In today's uncertain economic environment with AI reshaping entry level tasks, many fresh graduates and their parents are understandably anxious about entry into the workforce. We recognise these concerns.

The WP argues that entry pathways for young people are broken. But the current picture is more resilient than suggested. In 2025, vacancies continued to outnumber jobseekers. In the first quarter of 2026, there were about 32,800 entry-level PMET vacancies, exceeding the number of graduates looking for jobs. Against this background, around nine in 10 university graduates from the 2025 cohort found employment within a year of graduation, comparable to previous cohorts. I believe my learned colleague from the WP has also highlighted a similar point.

The system has served us well, but must continue to evolve with a new generation of workers and a changing work environment. As part of the ESR, we saw the need to bring learning and work closer together, including formally recognising on-the-job training as part of qualifications. We do this precisely because we want our young to have a good headstart in their jobs.

In this regard, we agree with Mr Andre Low on the value of expanding work-based pathways like apprenticeships. This is already a key direction of our efforts. Through initiatives such as SkillsFuture Work-Study Programme, the AI Apprenticeship Programme and sectoral programmes such as the Monetary Authority of Singapore's Young Talent Programme for AI in Finance, we are helping more Singaporeans gain industry level skills while working and supporting smoother transitions into growth sectors. The task now is to broaden and deepen these pathways to connect education, work experience, skills recognition and employment.

We share the aspiration of giving every young Singaporean a fair start. Our goal is not just to help young Singaporeans get their first job, but to build strong career health from the start. This means giving them more opportunities to learn through work, gain recognised skills and credentials, and access tools and support, including the Careers and Skills Passport, to better navigate their careers.

We will continue to strengthen these pathways so that more young Singaporeans can build skills, gain experience and make a confident start in a changing economy.

Third, we are helping workers bounce back better. In line with the ESR's recommendations, we are studying ways to better support displaced workers and help them bounce back, including enhancements to the SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support Scheme. We did this because we understand what a challenging operating environment we are in and we believe that Singaporeans who fall on hard times should receive support to enable them to return to work. That is why we designed the Jobseeker Support Scheme to support re-employment, not unemployment.

Mr Fadli Fawzi suggested the introduction of an unemployment insurance scheme that is funded through premiums and conditional on job search and retraining, time limited and capped at a certain percentage of your last drawn pay. It is not clear how this differs from the Job Support Scheme, except that the Job Support Scheme places more emphasis on re-employment. But I suspect both schemes are similar to one another.

Instead of coming up with a new mechanism, the ESR has recommended that we strengthen schemes like the Jobseeker Support Scheme, especially for PMEs navigating more difficult career transitions. We are also studying how to do so, including whether the Jobseeker Support Scheme should be enhanced to cover more PMEs and give them greater confidence and assurance in their search for their next job.

Mr Fadli Fawzi and Mr Pritam Singh called for mandatory retrenchment benefits. In fact, NTUC had long advocated that workers affected by retrenchments should be fairly compensated. I believe Mr Patrick Tay had also mentioned this in his speech earlier. We will study this further under the Tripartite Workgroup on the Employment Act Review.

Mr Deputy Speaker, Singapore's success has never come from choosing between protecting workers or keeping our economy competitive. We have to get it right by creating job opportunities, helping Singaporean workers access them, and when they face the effects of economic disruption, ensuring that they will never have to navigate difficult and uncertain times alone.

Fourthly, we are putting in place strong ladders of mobility to ensure inclusive growth. We have consistently put inclusive growth at the heart of our strategies to make sure that no worker is left behind. The ESR follows that tradition. It is not about creating a fast lane for a few and a slow one for the rest. It is about broadening our shared lanes to give every Singaporean the space to move forward and to get to their destination.

We are building on good foundations. From 2014 to 2024, the ratio of income at the 20th percentile to the median improved from 0.52 to 0.55. Our efforts like the Progressive Wage Model and Workfare have been critical to this outcome.

Beyond uplifting the bottom, we are also building more pathways for good jobs. This includes jobs in domestic and essential services, where many workers are currently employed.

To this, let me briefly address Mr Gerald Giam's suggestion on uplifting the skills trades. We share the aspiration for the skills trades to offer better wages, stronger professional standing and clearer career progression for Singaporeans. We expressed that aspiration in the Forward SG exercise. The ESR similarly recommended broadening the range of good jobs, including by uplifting skills trades and making work-based learning a more recognised route to mastery.

We are already working to realise this aspiration. As MOM announced in the Committee of Supply this year, we have formed a partnership with the Specialists Trade Alliance of Singapore to develop more structured pathways into good jobs in the skills trades, starting with the electrical trades. This initiative seeks to address many of the issues that Mr Giam had raised.

But more broadly, the sustainable route to better jobs is higher productivity, better job design, stronger certification, modern tools and processes, and employers who are willing to share productivity gains with their workers – all of which the Government will double down on to strengthen.

This leads to my next point. Enterprise transformation and workforce transformation must work together. We support enterprises because their success creates opportunities for Singaporeans. This is especially important for SMEs as they employ about two-thirds of our workforce. When firms invest, innovate and raise productivity, they create better jobs, build deeper capabilities and sustain wage growth.

We also want Singaporeans to have different pathways to contribute and succeed. For some, that will mean building a career in an established enterprise. For others, it may mean starting a venture of their own. With AI and new technologies lowering the cost of developing products, reaching customers and scaling across markets, entrepreneurship is an increasingly viable pathway.

Not every venture will succeed. That is the nature of enterprise and risk-taking. But we are expanding support for promising startups to build, grow and reach global markets. Singapore now has more than 4,500 tech startups. And the ESR recommendations will strengthen access to growth capital, technology, networks and overseas markets. Successful ventures do more than reward their founders; they create job opportunities for other Singaporeans.

Some Members may call for stronger Singaporean representation in our economy. We too, want more of our local businesses to thrive, but the answer is to build them up, not to shut them out.

Take Carousell for example. Founded by three NUS graduates, Carousell began with a simple idea – to make selling pre-owned items as easy as taking a photograph. What started as a mobile-first classifieds app, it has since grown into a leading online marketplace and omnichannel e-commerce business operating across Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong, serving tens of millions of users across the region.

This illustrates how Singapore firms grow as they access international markets, overseas customers, global technologies and world-class business networks. We will continue to support young Singaporeans to go abroad and gain exposure through programmes, like the NUS Overseas College and the Overseas Market Immersion programme. Strong local enterprises and global companies are not mutually exclusive. They complement one another.

Let us also not forget that MNCs support Singaporeans too, not just Singapore businesses. Foreign-owned firms make up about one-fifth of firms in Singapore today but employ nearly one-third of resident workers. In 2025, Singapore citizens and permanent residents held about 85% of senior management roles in these MNCs.

My final point is on the importance of tripartism. In many countries, economic debates have become increasingly confrontational and divisive. Singapore has avoided this outcome, but we should never take this for granted.

I have listened carefully to how this Motion frames its vision of our economic engine – entrepreneurs, households, businesses, workers, capital. Two partners are notably missing from that list: employers and unions. That is not a small omission. It is precisely the space in which wages are negotiated, jobs are redesigned and disputes are resolved without a single strike in decades. Any vision for our economic future that is silent on how we will work with these partners is an incomplete one.

Our tripartite partnership brings Government, businesses and workers to work together to expand the economic pie and ensure that gains are fairly shared. That is what turns inclusive growth from an aspiration into practical outcomes – more investment, better jobs, rising wages.

The Company Training Committees (CTCs) are one practical example of tripartism in action. Since 2019, more than 3,800 CTCs have been formed, benefiting over 300,000 workers. Through the CTC Grant, companies and unions redesign jobs, build new capabilities and translate business transformation into better wages and career prospects. We will continue working with both NTUC and SNEF to build on this model, so that more enterprises and workers can benefit.

Mr Deputy Speaker, the aspiration behind this Motion is one that we all share. We want an economy where Singaporeans can participate, contribute and succeed. An economy where workers can build meaningful careers, enterprises can innovate and grow, and more Singaporeans can create opportunities not only for themselves, but for others as well.

This is precisely what the ESR seeks to achieve. Not by choosing between growth and inclusion, local enterprises and global connections, or competitiveness and worker protection. But by pursuing all of these together. This is how we turn economic growth into broad-based progress – through better jobs, better wages and better pathways for advancement. That is how we have and will continue to build an economy that works for all Singaporeans.

Mr Speaker, I support the amendments to the Motion, and the Motion as amended. [ Applause. ]

Mr Deputy Speaker : Mr Fadli Fawzi, you have a clarification of which Member please? Yes, please proceed.

6.05 pm

Mr Fadli Fawzi : Mr Deputy Speaker, first I would like to thank the Minister of State's openness towards the legislation of retrenchment benefits for the workers and I hope that this would lead to a Bill for this House's consideration sooner rather than later. However, I would like to address the Minister of State's statements on the Jobseeker Support Scheme in comparison to the Redundancy Insurance Scheme. He suggests, if I caught his point correctly, that both schemes are broadly similar, but I just want to make the following point.

Because the Redundancy Insurance is funded by joint contributions from employers and employees, the payouts are automatic and seamless. The Jobseeker Support Scheme, however, requires the retrenched worker to go through an application process and face the prospect of rejection. In fact, last year, only 4,000 out of 10,000 applicants were successful. Hence, there are three questions, Mr Deputy Speaker.

Mr Deputy Speaker : Yes, Mr Fadli Fawzi if I could invite you to ask your clarifications promptly. Thank you.

Mr Fadli Fawzi : I will, I will, Sir.

One, would it not be better if retrenched workers did not have to go through this arduous application and waiting process which can be very stressful to such workers in that situation?

Two, would our automatic and universal Redundancy Insurance Scheme also not reduce the risk of underemployment since the worker would not have to jump at the first job available?

And three, it was reported in CNA on 6 April 2026 that the Ministry of Manpower expects the Jobseeker Support Scheme to cover only 60% of the involuntarily unemployed each year. Again, would a universal Redundancy Insurance Scheme not be better in providing 100% coverage to our retrenched workers?

Mr Deputy Speaker : Minister of State Dinesh Vasu Dash, would you like to reply to those three clarifications put to you?

Mr Dinesh Vasu Dash : Mr Deputy Speaker, I thank the Member. Maybe just to highlight that the positions are not really very far. The only difference is perhaps the fact that for the Jobseeker Support Scheme, the need for the worker to indicate that they are in the process of applying for re-employment; and perhaps their friction is for that particular purpose. But if the Member reads the ESR report, the ESR report also highlights the need to consider whether an insurance scheme of sorts is indeed useful and that is something that will have to be studied as well.

So, I will probably frame it from that perspective and to add that friction in the process is not one that is intended to make it difficult for someone who is already going through difficult times but it is to make sure that they can bounce back, and bounce back stronger.

Mr Deputy Speaker : Mr Gerald Giam, you have a clarification? Of whom, please? Yes. Please proceed.

6.08 pm

Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song : Thank you, Sir. I have a clarification to seek from Minister of State Dinesh.

Sir, he mentioned about the Specialist Trade Alliance of Singapore initiative that MOM is working with. My question is: the upgrading certification and tools only work if certified practitioners are not continuously undercut in the open market. So, how will this initiative address this structural problem of uncertified operators who drag down market rates for properly accredited local tradespersons?

Mr Deputy Speaker : Minister of State Dinesh Vasu Dash, would you like to reply to that clarification?

Mr Dinesh Vasu Dash : I would just add that we are still studying that particular perspective. It is a bit easier from the electrical trades because there is EMA as one of the agencies who oversee parts of the system. But more importantly, increasing costs in itself may result in other considerations that we have to study fully to make sure that it does not end up in a situation that results in an increase in cost of the service and then we will have other unintended knock-on effects. It is still being studied and perhaps we can have a fuller discussion when the scheme is a bit more ready to be discussed.

Mr Deputy Speaker : There being no further clarifications, we will move on with the debate on the Motion and the amended Motion. Senior Minister of State Low Yen Ling.

6.09 pm

The Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry (Ms Low Yen Ling) : Mr Deputy Speaker, I thank Mr Kenneth Tiong as well as Assoc Prof Jamus Lim for bringing this Motion before the House, as well as Mr Edward Chia for the amendments that he proposed to the Motion, as well as all the Members who spoke before us for contributing to what has been a very rigorous as well as substantive debate.

At the heart of this debate is a fundamental question: How do we ensure that Singapore enterprises can continue to thrive in a rapidly changing world?

The answer matters because our enterprises are central to Singapore's success. SMEs make up 99% of all enterprises and employ more than 70% of our workforce. SMEs create good jobs, strengthen our communities and bolster Singapore's economic competitiveness.

But all the Members who spoke before us also shared that the environment that the SMEs operate in is becoming more challenging. Technology is reshaping industries. Competition is intensifying. And global disruptions have become a recurring nature and feature in the global economy. The recent Middle East crisis is the latest reminder of how quickly external events can affect our businesses.

Our response is not just to help the enterprises weather the new storm. It is to help our enterprises become stronger, more competitive and more resilient over the long term. Our economic strategy has always been centred on improving the lives of Singaporeans, because strong local enterprises are indispensable to that goal. That is why we will continue to stand alongside our businesses, help them build stronger capabilities, expand with confidence and innovate and grow beyond Singapore.

Let me share more about how we do so. Let me start with capability building.

Businesses today compete not just on cost, many of the Members said that. They do not just compete on cost but on innovation, on quality, productivity as well as speed. Yesterday's strengths are no guarantee of tomorrow's success. Enterprises that continue to build new capabilities will be better placed to stay ahead. Those that do not do so risk falling behind.

During the ESR, we engaged widely with trade associations and chambers representing SMEs and various businesses. Most SMEs recognised that transformation is no longer optional. The question is not whether to transform, but really how to do so in a practical, in an accessible as well as sustainable manner. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Every enterprise starts from a different position, serves different markets, customers and faces different opportunities. That is why we tailor our approach to support the company's needs, whether it is adopting AI, improving productivity, developing new products, services expanding into new markets.

Through Enterprise Singapore, businesses can access a wide range of Government support to build capabilities and transformation their operations. For example, Sin Chwee Mini Mart started as a wet market seafood store by Mr Goh Thiam Chwee in Bukit Gombak in 1990. Faced with changing consumer preferences, the second-generation owner Mr Jimmy Goh, his son, made the decision to reinvent the business. He launched Tankfully Fresh, transforming what had been a traditional wet market seafood stall into an omnichannel retailer.

With Government support, the company accelerated its transformation by implementing an integrated inventory management system to support its growing omni-channel business. The system enabled a 50% improvement in manpower efficiency. What used to be a wet market, small minimart, grew into new retail, B2B and online sales channels through contract manufacturing. Today, within a few years, 60% of the business revenue comes from online sales.

If anything, this example reminds us that every successful transformation begins with a decision by the business itself. The aim of our efforts is to help enterprises build the capabilities that matter most to their business at that point in time, so that they can become more productive, more competitive and more resilient.

Members over the last few hours have spoken about the challenges facing our F&B businesses. We Singaporeans, we love our food and we treasure our distinctive food culture. But the industry is changing rapidly. Operators face higher manpower, rental and operating costs, while consumer expectations continue to rise. This is not unique to Singapore. Around the world, diners are demanding greater convenience, better value and more differentiated experiences. Digital platforms, food delivery and social media have transformed how customers discover and consume food.

These trends present challenges, but also new opportunities. In fact, many of our F&B businesses are responding with determination. They are redesigning their operations, they are embracing technology, they are centralising food preparation and adopting AI and digital solutions to improve productivity and to serve their customers better.

Our role is to support these transformation efforts with practical assistance that helps businesses become more productive, competitive and resilient.

Our objective is not simply to help F&B businesses cope with higher costs. It is to help them operate differently and compete more effectively because that means improving productivity, redesigning their processes, embracing technology and finding new ways to deliver better value to their customers. That is why Enterprise Singapore has put in place a range of initiatives to support the transformation.

Businesses can improve productivity and redesign their operations through the F&B Process Optimisation Programme. Smaller businesses can lower costs and achieve greater scale through FoodX, by sharing manufacturing and food preparation facilities.

We also offer help for businesses to adopt digital and AI solutions. Coffee chain, Kopi & Tarts, which has about 20 outlets all over Singapore, they have benefited from these initiatives that I talked about. And across their outlets in Singapore, it has reduced more than 40 hours of food preparation time each day by outsourcing part of their ingredient preparation through FoodX. Forty hours a day is almost equivalent to allowing them to avail four full-time staff to focus on greater value-add services.

Another group of businesses close to our heart are the heartland enterprises. They are more than places to shop. They help define the character of our neighbourhoods, bring communities together and contribute to our social fabric. But like all businesses, they must adapt to changing consumer preferences and new technologies.

Ms Mariam Jaafar will be glad to know that we have been the heartland enterprises through the years with many initiatives, such as the Heartland Enterprise Placemaking Grant and the Enhanced Visual Merchandising Programme. In fact, earlier this year, just a few months ago, we enhanced both of these schemes by increasing the support level from 50% to 70%, helping our heartland enterprises refresh their concepts, improve their storefronts and to attract more footfall, more customers into their shops.

So, whether young or established, traditional or modern, every enterprise must continue building new capabilities to remain competitive. We will continue to support our businesses in this journey. And this journey includes going beyond Singapore to the world. Because our domestic market is limited, enterprises must venture beyond our shores to grow. Our small economy also needs strong external demand in addition to healthy domestic demand.

To help enterprises go global, we have established support for enterprises across their different stages of internationalisation. From grants like the recently enhanced Market Readiness Assistance, which helps businesses springboard overseas, to programmes like the Scale-Up. Let me elaborate.

Enterprise Singapore's Scale-Up programme helps high-potential Singapore companies build the capabilities they need to scale effectively and compete internationally.

To date, Scale-Up has supported more than 100 companies from diverse sectors – 80 of these companies have generated a combined $2.5 billion in additional revenue within three years of joining the Scale-Up programme. International expansion accounted for $1 billion of this growth.

One of these companies is Mlion Corporation. This is a steel foundation solutions company specialising in waterfront and underground construction. It sharpened its market entry strategies through Scale-Up just about four years ago. Since then, the company was able to, in the last four years, secure large-scale infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia markets and the Middle East and Africa. As a result, Mlion saw a fourfold increase in their revenue in 2024.

Another example is Space Matrix, a workplace design and build firm. The company accelerated its international growth by sharpening its strategy and strengthening its supply chain and procurement capabilities. Within two years, it has expanded into India, the Philippines and Dubai, and moved into the life sciences and data centre sectors. The company's revenue has grown more than 25%, and their profitability more than 200%.

So, as enterprises venture overseas, we know they will navigate unfamiliar regulations, higher operating costs, new competitors and geopolitical forces.

We have a network of over 35 Overseas Centres around the world, providing market intelligence, introductions to in-market partners and on-the-ground support for Singapore companies that want to capture growth opportunities overseas.

While the decision to internationalise is one that the enterprises must make for themselves, our goal is to create the conditions and provide the support that will spur them to compete and to succeed on the global stage. We will continue to monitor the global economic landscape and refine our globalisation schemes and support for Singapore enterprises to become global champions.

Every successful enterprise operates within a wider ecosystem of partners, networks and institutions.

Over the years, the Government has invested in building a strong and vibrant enterprise ecosystem. Our goal here is to create an environment in which enterprises can succeed, one that enables them to innovate, to build deeper capabilities, to gain access to talent, technology and market, and to be able to seize opportunities to enter new markets overseas.

And Ms Mariam Jaafar shared very eloquently earlier, a key element of this vibrant enterprise ecosystem is that mutually beneficial, mutually re-enforcing partnerships between our SMEs and our larger companies, including MNCs. As Mr Edward Chia and Ms Mariam Jaafar mentioned earlier, local and global enterprises in Singapore can work together to strengthen their capabilities, accelerate innovation and in doing so, create better jobs and opportunities for Singaporeans.

Look around at the MNCs' C-suite executives over the years, the positions are also taken up by Singaporeans. That is an important proof point.

Mr Deputy Speaker, if I may share my previous working experience which attests to the symbiotic working relationship between the smaller companies and larger companies. I recall, as an EDB officer some 26 years ago, I had worked on the Local Industry Upgrading Programme that matched the SMEs and the MNCs, company by company, sector by sector, matching them based on their workplan, their vision, their ambition and their values, but in a win-win partnership. And the programme allowed the MNCs to gain a strong base of suppliers, while allowing the SMEs to learn from the larger industry players and upgrade their capabilities.

Today, the programme has evolved to become what we call the Partnerships for Capability Transformation (PACT) programme, While LIUP focused primarily on strengthening supplier relationships between MNCs and SMEs, PACT brings the companies together to skill up, to innovate and in fact, to capture new opportunities together.

Since 2010, PACT has supported 137 partnerships and benefited more than 2,500 Singapore-based companies. PACT has progressively expanded to support a broader range of partnerships. Members will remember that last year, in this House, we announced expansion of the PACT programme to include internationalisation, corporate ventures and capability training. This has enabled SMEs to gain entry into regional as well as global value chains. In addition, SMEs get access to new customers and valuable chance to build stronger capabilities. They also co-create solutions and grow with the larger partners in their overseas operations.

Take the partnership between ForeFront AM, which is a local additive manufacturing firm, and GlobalFoundries MNC. Due to their collaboration, Forefront AM was able to increase its capabilities in additive manufacturing to create critical, highly customised parts for GlobalFoundries' high-value semiconductor manufacturing tools. And on the part of GlobalFoundries, the company qualified nine local SMEs to produce more than 200 critical tool parts as a result of the two PACT programme.

We also partnered industry leaders to help companies. Take AI adoption, for example. Mr Louis Chua called for greater support for AI adoption and acknowledged that the Enterprise Compute Initiative was announced last year. This is a scheme that where we work with leading cloud service providers like Google and Amazon as well as consultant partners to give enterprises access to cutting edge AI tools, cloud credits, training and certification. The Enterprise Compute Initiative is meant to kickstart adoption and to build momentum. So, we will continue to monitor the take-up closely and refine the support where needed.

Partnerships like these have enabled our local enterprises to capture fresh opportunities, build stronger and deeper capabilities, and compete in higher-value segments of the economy.

As shared by Mr Saktiandi Supaat, attracting MNC investments and the support we provide to local enterprises are complementary strategies. A robust economy needs the contributions of both the MNCs and SMEs.

On that note, let me now turn to another important pillar in our vibrant enterprise ecosystem – our close partnership with trade associations and chambers.

As Mr Mark Lee noted earlier, the trade associations and chambers play an important role as trusted intermediaries because the trade associations and chambers not only represent the enterprises and their respective sectors, they also help the businesses cope with shifts, like moving towards sustainability, digitalisation and workforce transformation. They are also instrumental in developing shared solutions as well as aggregating industry needs.

We will continue to work closely with all our trade associations and chambers in Singapore as they lead initiatives that bring businesses together to address common challenges and to seize new opportunities.

And furthermore, the trade associations and chambers have contributed their insights and industry perspectives on the needs of their sectors as part of our ESR process. The ESR recommendations and the directions we are taking reflect our trade associations and chambers' input and feedback. We value our close partnership and dialogue with our trade associations and chambers because we do not work in silos. The door is always open for discussion. And as Mr Mark Lee pointed out, 24 of the 27 recommendations by the Alliance for Action on Business Competitiveness have been accepted.

In fact, in April 2024, we sent up the Inter-Ministerial Committee for Pro-Enterprise Rules Review chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong as well as the various Ministers to oversee the agencies' efforts to improve regulatory efficiency and to reduce compliance burdens especially for SMEs. And the Inter-Ministerial Committee has achieved progress in these few areas within two years.

For example, 93% of all business regulatory applications have published service standards, with 80% of them committing to processing the applications within 30 working days. Agencies have also reviewed their license validity period. Today, 45% of the licences have validity period of at least three years. This will increase to 80% of licences by year 2029.

In parallel, we also started the SME Pro-Enterprise Office last year to cut red tape and to help our businesses address regulatory challenges, especially where it involves multiple agencies or emerging nascent sectors. This approach keeps our enterprise ecosystem vibrant as Government and regulations stay responsive to the needs of our businesses and to the needs of our SMEs.

And recently, just three months ago, in May this year, JTC streamlined lease transfers for smaller industrial sites with remaining tenures, reducing the processing time from two months to one month, to help our businesses acquire space and respond more quickly to changing needs.

Mr Deputy Speaker, Sir, the close consultation and support provided to our SMEs can also be found in a network of 10 SME Centres across Singapore. We recognise that many SMEs do not have dedicated teams for strategy, technology or business development. As mentioned by Mr Azhar Othman very passionately earlier, SME Centres help our SMEs identify opportunities, navigate available Government support and chart practical next steps for their growth.

Just last year, our 10 SME Centres with 75 business advisors supported close to 30,000 companies in one year. That is about 2,500 SMEs in a month.

Assoc Prof Jamus Lim earlier in his speech has called for simpler grant application processes and we have continuously been reviewing ways to improve. For example, under the Productivity Solutions Grant, Enterprise Singapore has streamlined the processes, and reduced processing times significantly to two weeks.

Together, these efforts strengthen Singapore's enterprise ecosystem, which in turn underpin the success of our enterprises. They ensure that the businesses are supported, not only through Government programmes but also through strong partnerships, responsive institution and a business environment that enables growth.

Mr Deputy Speaker, please allow me to say a few words in Mandarin.

Mr Deputy Speaker : Please proceed.

Ms Low Yen Ling ( In Mandarin ) : [ Please refer to Vernacular Speech .] Mr Deputy Speaker, fellow Members of this House, Singapore's economic performance was strong, with the economy growing by 5% in 2025. This year, although we are affected by adverse factors such as uncertainties in the Middle East, energy prices and tariffs, we still forecast an economic growth of around 2% to 4%. This achievement is the result of the collective efforts of businesses, workers and the Government, that is, our tripartite partners.

Maintaining long-term, sustainable economic growth and ensuring that Singaporeans have good jobs and can live and work in peace and stability have always been our goal. Strong local enterprises, especially SMEs, are crucial to achieving this goal.

Across Singapore's economy, SMEs make up 99% of all enterprises and employ more than 70% of the workforce. They are a very important part of our overall economic ecosystem. SMEs create many job opportunities for Singaporeans, strengthen community cohesion and enhance Singapore's economic competitiveness.

Over the years, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, together with other Government agencies, has continued to roll out many measures and programmes to help local SMEs grow and thrive. We have focused on three areas:

(a) First, creating a pro-business environment and encouraging Singaporeans to start businesses;

(b) Second, working closely with local TACs to strengthen the capabilities and resilience of each of the sectors; and

(c) Third, encouraging and helping local SMEs venture into overseas markets.

In my English speech earlier, I also mentioned many successful examples of enterprises that have received practical assistance. When facing exceptional challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent conflict in the Middle East, the Government will also adapt our measures based on the circumstances and introduce timely support measures to help enterprises tide over immediate difficulties.

But Mr Deputy Speaker, Sir, we must remember that Singapore is a small country with no natural resources, a small market and an ageing population. In the last 61 years of our independence, although we have accumulated a certain level of economic strength, we cannot simply rest on our laurels and live off past successes. Like businesses, the Government must also maintain an enterprising spirit, consistently upgrading, improving and adopting so as to secure a better future for our next generation.

During the Economic Strategy Review, we held extensive discussion and engagement with 7,700 enterprises as well as representatives from TACs across various sectors. These included local heritage businesses and representatives from heartland merchant associations. We listened to their concerns and gathered their views.

Mr Deputy Speaker, every enterprise is unique. Every company is also at a different stage of development, with a different starting point, different customer segments and different challenges and opportunities. The key is whether the business owners, partners and employees have the will to find ways to ensure the business can sustain in the long term and achieve continued success.

We all know that yesterday's strengths do not guarantee tomorrow's success. Businesses that continue to work hard to upgrade their capabilities will be able to go further.

Mr Deputy Speaker, Sir, Singapore's economic development and future success will depend on our country's enterprising spirit and the unity of our people. We believe that as long as local enterprises commit themselves to upgrading their capability, seizing development opportunities at home and abroad and cooperating with one another, they will be able to sustain their operations and achieve sound growth.

The Government will continue to create favourable conditions for businesses to flourish, and work hand in hand with businesses and Singaporeans to build a better tomorrow together.

( In English ): Mr Deputy Speaker, we have debated this Motion and heard a range of views and suggestions. We share the same vision – to see Singapore's economy succeed, businesses thrive and good jobs created for Singaporeans.

The Government continues to support and stand alongside our Singapore enterprises. Our goal is not just to help businesses weather the new storm, but to help them grow, to help them improve their competitiveness and strengthen their resilience to scale and compete internationally. We will continue to create the conditions of a vibrant and effervescent enterprise ecosystem to help them flourish and thrive. While we catalyse the ideal environment, it is the enterprises that continuously innovate, adapt and strengthen capabilities that will thrive and conquer new markets.

Together, we can build a strong and resilient economy for the future, for better lives, for Singapore. I support the Motion as amended by Mr Edward Chia. [ Applause. ]

Mr Deputy Speaker : Assoc Prof Jamus Lim, do you have a clarification? Of whom? Please proceed.

6.36 pm

Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim : Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I have two supplementary questions for the Senior Minister of State.

The first concerns her point about internationalisation through Enterprise Singapore. During her speech, she offered more than a few examples of local SMEs that have successfully internationalised. This is without dispute something that both sides of the House can agree on.

The relevant question, however, is that this is a selection on what we have seen. Successful cases. I wonder if she will be able to share how many Enterprise Singapore-supported SMEs, out of those that have applied, have actually succeeded in their internationalisation plans. What is the ratio of applicants to these programmes versus those that have successfully managed to break into foreign markets and remain there after, say, five years? And what is the internal rate of return for Enterprise Singapore's internationalisation grants.

My second question has to do with the F&B sector, which Senior Minister of State Low also spoke about.

One notable difference between this sector and other SMEs is that the vast majority of our hawkers, coffee shop operators, restaurateurs deal with essentially a non-tradeable product. This is why suggestions that erase profits by scaling up often ring hollow to them, at least based on our conversations with them. Rather, what they seek is some form of relief from business costs, principally, rent and manpower.

I had suggested two channels in my speech on rental rate increase controls and different dependency ratio ceiling quotas, but if this is not something that the Government will entertain, I wonder what other suggestions, other than trying to scale up, which is something that these companies struggle with doing —

Mr Deputy Speaker : Assoc Prof Jamus Lim, if I could invite you to promptly come to your second clarification?

Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim : My second clarification is what the Government is doing to help these local F&B operators with their business costs.

Ms Low Yen Ling : Mr Deputy Speaker, I want to thank Assoc Prof Jamus Lim for his questions.

Earlier on, when I talked about the range of support that we gave to SMEs, I had also taken a focus on F&B. I talked about how we have within the last 12 months rolled out – and these programmes were not rolled out in isolation – for example, Enterprise Singapore rolled out what they called the F&B Process Optimisation Programme. Allow me just one minute to explain what this is.

Like the Member mentioned, these are domestic companies, they cannot really go overseas unless through franchising. They are very much looking at how they can overcome manpower constraints. Based on our focus group discussion with them, we understand their pain points. That is why we came up the Process Optimisation Programme.

The Kopi & Tarts example is a simple example, but it is quite powerful. If you google them, do support them. They serve really wonderful ayam merah – it is really good – and protein bowls. They outsource the ingredient preparation for these two dishes.

For example, we shared with the F&B, you do not have to outsource everything. Just try a few things. They themselves were pleasantly surprised because by outsourcing the ingredient preparation for these two dishes, they can save 40 hours a day. That is 1,200 hours a month. This allows them to then redeploy their four full-time staff, who have to come in early into the kitchen and so on, into other positions. So, we are tackling, step by step, based on their pain points.

We have also done a productivity study together with the Singapore Productivity Centre and identified that the process optimisation really helps the top 10% of F&B achieve three to four times higher revenue than the bottom group. That is one.

The second one is FoodX that I talked about sharing of resources and so on.

More recently, at Restaurant Asia 2026, we launched the F&B AI and Digital Integration Programme. Elsie's Kitchen is one good example where they have done that. They plan to use AI to help them to achieve better kitchen planning and a logistic fleet so that they can have route optimisation as well as to ensure food safety.

It is a lot of grunt work. I want to assure him that we are working with the trade associations, like what Mr Mark Lee has mentioned. In this case, it was the RAS who addressed the issues and helped them to grow their top line and as well as bottom line.

The first question is on internationalisation. He asked about some of these big numbers. If I could request for him to file a separate Parliamentary Question, we will surely look into it and come back to the Member. But suffice to say, within the enterprise ecosystem, it is not just Enterprise Singapore that account manages each of these companies. I have talked about the 10 SME Centres. Within a year, we supported 30,000 SMEs. And earlier on, some of the Members talked about GoBusiness.gov.sg. Some of our business owners are very adept at that. They are gleaning a lot of information from that as well.

We will continue, just like how earlier on I responded to the Productivity Solutions Grant processing time, we will continue to look at how we can use technology to ensure that we can serve our SMEs better.

On internationalisation, it is not just companies, like Space Matrix or the Mlion or the manufacturing company I talked about, ForeFront AM, let me cite an example called Hegen.

I have known Ms Yvon Bock for close to 10 years. Ten years ago, Hegen was a startup, some Members are smiling because they probably used the company's products. We connected them overseas. They took part in "double 11" back then. That was how we helped them to leapfrog to China, to various provinces. Hegen has grown into a global consumer brand with a very significant international footprint. In fact, their products are available in more than 25 markets.

I am using Hegen to say one thing. I am using Hegen to say that, if we work together to ensure that in Singapore, we have a vibrant, effervescent enterprise ecosystem, our companies are not just selling products and services. Our companies can also twin it with a Singapore brand, which stands for integrity, quality, reliability, which is what Ms Yvon Bock told me.

Mr Deputy Speaker : There being no further clarifications. Leader of the House.