Thursday, 10 February 2022
Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to speak at today’s AustCham Ministerial Events Series.
Australia and Singapore, a continental size versus a city-state can’t be more different, but actually we share very warm and enduring ties. I would like to thank AustCham and its members for your important contributions to Singapore and to the warm, enduring relationship between our two countries.
A lot has changed around the world since the onset of the pandemic. Grappling with the challenges day-by-day, we may not realise it, but I think looking back, as the pandemic recedes hopefully in the near future, we all will accept that a lot has changed.
But what has not changed, and will not, is our commitment here in our city-state to remain open and connected to the world. COVID has made this much more challenging, even posed existential challenges at the start of this crisis, but we are finding ways to get around it as we move toward endemicity.
We’re opening up in a careful and calibrated way, to protect the health and well-being of everyone who lives and works here. Australia is an important partner for Singapore, and we continue our close collaboration on many fronts.
Today, let me share with you some of the things that we’re doing at the Ministry of National Development (MND), as well as at the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF), both of which I currently serve in. I’d like to highlight some of the areas where we hope to have your support and participation, and I look forward to our dialogue later.
Land-use planning
Let me start with our work at MND.
One of our key priorities is to plan for our overall land-use. Compared to a country of continental size, our constraints are tremendously acute. As a city-state, we need to find space to meet all the needs, not just of a city, but of a fully functional sovereign country responsible for its internal and external affairs.
This is challenging because we are very small. At just 728 square kilometres, we are about 1/17th the size of Sydney, or so I’m told. That really depends on where the boundaries of the city are defined.
We do not have the luxury of large hinterlands, far from the city, where most cities would put their airports and seaports, agriculture, military bases, air bases, reservoirs, incineration plants and all of the other things that a fully sovereign country needs, but that people may not like living next to. Instead, we need to put them all within the confines of our city, sometimes next to or even within residential areas.
It’s a big challenge, so we have to be very disciplined and creative about how we go about doing it.
And even as we grapple with balancing today’s needs, we must also plan sustainably for the longer term – make sure to build in some flexibility, to meet the changing needs and aspirations of each new generation, and make sure we do not consume everything and leaving no space or flexibility for the next generation.
We are currently reviewing our long term-plan for land use, which charts out what Singapore could look like in the next 50 years and beyond. Needless to say, a land use plan is not just a design of land use, but is really intrinsically linked to our way of life – to our priorities and to our needs, our aspirations and future priorities. We refresh these plans every 10 years, and we used to call them concept plans.
As part of this newly-termed Long-Term Plan Review (LTPR), we are preparing our city for the major trends coming our way – climate change, digitalisation, an ageing population, just to name a few.
Not to mention the impact of COVID-19 and possible future pandemics – Which could require, among other things, more buffer spaces for quarantine facilities or to store contingency supplies or just flexible space that can be turned around at a moment’s notice.
And there are many other issues to think about – What will the future of work look like, with the rise of telecommuting? There have been some newspaper reports of firms’ as well as employees’ expectations about the future of work and how telecommuting has become very much part of their expectation moving forward.
How much office space will we need? I visited some newly opened buildings and spoke to the tenants. They shared with me how through this pandemic, they’ve actually been reshaping their plans and making renovation of their offices – totally new things, new ways of working, booths, flexible spaces and so on.
What will urban logistics look like, with the rise of e-commerce and food delivery? How will retail spaces evolve? What will our future transport systems look like, with the rise of electric and even autonomous vehicles? And we have two trials of revenue collecting autonomous bus services; one in Jurong Island and one in Science Park.
These are complex questions, and the Government alone does not have all the answers.
That is why we have to engage the public very extensively, to tap on the collective wisdom of all who call Singapore home. As industry leaders, we hope you’ll share your views and insights with us too, and many of you have been here for a very long time, including some firms that literally helped build the homes that many Singaporeans live in.
We will conclude our Long-Term Plan Review with a public exhibition on the ideas gathered, around the middle of this year. I’d like to invite members of AustCham to come, take a look and share your thoughts with us.
City in Nature
Next, let me touch on one of our key land-use planning priorities – taking care of our natural environment within the city. Today, Singapore is one of the greenest cities in the world. I know there are many other cities with lots of greenery around them, lots of nature, but for a city within the city, we call ourselves a City in a Garden.
Our founding fathers believed in having an abundance of greenery, for all to enjoy. They also knew that a green and well-tended city would give foreign investors, at the time of independence, more confidence when they arrive and looked around, and saw a place that was well taken care of.
Now, we want to go even further, and transform Singapore from a City in a Garden into a City in Nature. This is not just an idealistic vision, but also a very practical strategy.
Cities in larger countries try to limit urban sprawl, as cities grow into metropolises taking up more and more land, so that their cities don’t eat too much into the nature that surrounds them. So that is their conservation approach.
But in Singapore, as I mentioned, we don’t have large areas outside of our city where we can preserve nature. Outside our city would be other people’s countries. Instead, given our intense land-use pressures, we’re finding ways to weave nature into and throughout our city; throughout the common spaces.
For instance, we’ve conserved our most critical natural habitats in the heart of our city, and we’re actively enhancing them. I have two offices; in the one that is closest to Thomson, I can look out of the window and see the nature reserve, the core biodiversity areas, the central catchment nature reserve at Bukit Timah, completely surrounded by the city. We’re setting aside more land for nature parks that can act as buffers for these critical habitats that are not outside the city but right in the heart of it.
We’re naturalising our parks and waterways, and even our street-side greenery, so that wildlife can use these to traverse our city. And by 2030, we aim for every household to be within a 10-minute walk from a park.
All this is part of our Singapore Green Plan, our movement to make our city a lot more sustainable.
Our City in Nature efforts benefit not just the environment, but also our people: Green spaces make our city cooler, and more pleasant. And they help improve our physical and mental well-being. COVID-19 was a clear example – when we have been kept away from crowded indoor spaces, many people appreciated the fact that there were outdoor spaces to turn to.
There are many ways for corporate partners to contribute to our City in Nature, and we hope that all of you will consider coming onboard.
For example, from 2020 to 2030, we are working with the community to plant one million more trees island-wide, as part of the OneMillionTrees movement. These include 170,000 additional trees in our industrial estates, which are some of the hotter areas on our island. To date, over 500 groups and organisations have contributed to our OneMillionTrees movement, and we hope that you will consider joining us too.
We even encourage “skyrise greenery” – the planting of greenery on the rooftops and façades of our buildings. Interested building owners can apply to our National Parks Board for funding support.
Transformation of Built Environment sector
Besides our natural environment, at MND we also oversee our built environment. Here, we are pushing for our buildings, which account for 20% of our emissions, to be a lot more sustainable.
And so we have set three ambitious targets, under the latest edition of the Singapore Green Building Masterplan (SGBMP), which was launched last year. We capture it in three numbers – 80, 80, 80.
First, we will green 80% of our buildings by the end of this decade. What I mean is that by GFA (gross floor area), we want them to meet baseline energy efficiency and water efficiency standards, which, by the way, we have also just raised.
Second, we aim for 80% of new buildings to be Super Low Energy buildings, from 2030 onwards.
Third, this is a bit more of a stretch target, we want our best-in-class green buildings to see an 80% improvement in energy efficiency from when we first started in 2005. And we want to achieve this by the end of this decade.
These targets – “80-80-80 in 2030” – are the efforts that we are taking to make our city, the environment, your offices, your homes, a lot more sustainable.
We are taking a range of measures to achieve these targets – both by raising minimum energy performance requirements for buildings, as well as by providing funding and other support to help companies improve their sustainability.
We also invest in developing innovative solutions and technologies. For example, our Cities of Tomorrow R&D programme funds research that helps Singapore overcome our urban challenges. For instance, we are developing more sustainable construction materials, like a “green cement” that can be produced from waste materials and desalination by-products.
The programme also has a new pillar to support our City in Nature vision, so research to support conservation – for example, by looking into nature-based solutions to help our city adapt to climate change. We hope to get more corporate partners onboard in greening our buildings – It is not just good for the environment, but can also help building owners and users save substantially on their energy and maintenance costs, so that it makes sense in that respect too
Australia is one of the world’s leaders in green buildings1, and we welcome the exchange of knowledge and expertise as we push towards our 80-80-80 targets.
Beyond sustainability, we are also working with industry partners to make the Built Environment sector a lot more productive. The sector has been hard-hit by the pandemic, but that has only strengthened our collective resolve to fundamentally change the way we design, build, and then maintain our buildings, and to reduce our reliance on manpower.
We are encouraging firms to adopt Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD), which uses digital modelling and systems to integrate and streamline design and building processes all along the construction value chain.
We are also encouraging firms to increase construction productivity, through Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA). That is looking at manufacturing process to see how that can help us build our buildings better and smarter; “Lego construction” is what some people call it.
We do this by providing funding and training support to companies, while also driving demand through productivity requirements in our government procurement and land sales contracts.
In transforming the Built Environment sector, we recognise that the value chain is highly inter-connected, across many different players – from developers to design consultants,engineers, project managers, contractors, sub-contractors, and then ultimately facilities managers.
So we have to take a holistic approach to transform the entire value chain, connect them using a digital spine, because no one segment can be transformed on its own. In particular, we work closely with developers who play a very influential role in pulling their contractors and suppliers along in their transformation journey – literally able to bootstrap them through their expectations.
For those of you who represent firms in the Built Environment sector or as developers, we hope that you will lend us your insights and expertise, and work with our local industry to transform how we build and maintain our buildings here in Singapore.
Social Services Integration
I have covered many of the big pieces of work at MND, save for public housing, in the last 10 to 15 years. Let me now just touch briefly on some of the work we’re doing at the other Ministry I am serving in, the Ministry of Social and Family Development. For this Ministry, we focus on society, on inequality, on families, children and disability.
But we’ve found that despite significant support from the government and community partners, from religious and secular organisations, from charities and corporates alike, some vulnerable and lower-income families in Singapore continue to be weighed down by a complex web of challenges. These could include health conditions, difficulties at school or in the workplace, drug abuse, crime and offences, or other issues – Issues which are interrelated; issues which compound and complicate one another.
But each agency and each charity tends to focus on specific issues or demographic groups, to build deep expertise. That is the case here, that is the case actually in almost every other part of the world.
This is understandable and important, as social issues become more complex. But it makes it harder for any one organisation to make a decisive difference in supporting the family to overcome their multi-faceted challenges. That was our experience over the decades. When we started, it was broad-based support, and then we had more support for the lower-income, and then we gave even more support in the last decade. What we are finding is that the lowest income households are beset with a lot of difficulties. Many others who were stable have progressed, grasping the opportunities, they have done better. The families that continually remain at the bottom of the economic pile, so to speak, face tremendous challenges.
So we have been significantly transforming the way we deliver social services.
We aim to become a lot more family-centric, individual-centric, rather than focus on programmes or agencies. I know it is a bit of a disjoint for you when I talked about infrastructure and conservation earlier, and now we talk about society. But we are looking very carefully at how we tackle inequality and tackle the challenges that the Gini coefficient symbolises and recognising the lived realities of people in our communities. And I have just articulated the challenge, which is the fragmentation of care and of support. In fact, two or three years ago, I spoke to an Australian expert who came to give us a talk about rehabilitative care as well as family justice. I asked him whether there were some things we could learn from Australia, and he shared really useful ideas, some of which we have incorporated as well. But how we are doing it here in Singapore is this – move away from focusing on our programmes and our agencies, and on individuals and their lived experience.
In the past, a family that needs help will go and seek help. It was a passive approach – you come, we will help. Now, our approach is to first befriend the family, reach out to them proactively, understand their unique needs and goals.
Second, with their consent, pull the relevant information about them from all across government, so that we have a 360-degree perspective of their challenges.
Third, we then work with the family, speak to them to develop a common and comprehensive case management plan. We are talking about our poorest families, living in rental housing. These are the families in the bottom ten per cent or even lesser.
Once we work with them, understanding the whole context of their family challenges, work with them on a set of goals that they aspire towards, that we can support them on, then we start pulling in all the organisations and programmes to fit those needs, rather than the other way around of making them go around to look for help.
That I think is the right sequence to take. This way, we can reduce duplication of resources, synergise the efforts of different agencies and partners, and have a much greater impact on the family. And the families they are serving can avoid having to approach multiple different organisations for their help, and having to provide information repeatedly and undergo the means-testing requirements over and over again.
Now, this is an ambitious effort. Not just because we have to change the way we share information, the way we engage families and the way in which we structure our support, but the whole mindset through which both welfare organisations and society at large look to participate in helping families that face the greatest challenges on our island.
We are rolling out this approach through various initiatives, including our flagship Community Link, or ComLink programme. This programme supports lower-income families with children, who are living in our public rental housing. Public rental housing is highly subsidised HDB housing rented out at subsided rates to those who have no housing alternatives.
And we will need as much help as we can get – Including from corporate partners like yourselves, who may want to contribute volunteers, programmes, schemes or even your expertise. If you are interested in this area, please contact us and we will put you in touch with the relevant organisations.
Conclusion
Let me conclude by reiterating that we are always on the lookout for like-minded partners in our various efforts and priorities – whether it is land-use planning, protecting our natural environment, transforming construction and our Built Environment, or strengthening the way in which we tackle inequality.
We hope that you will join us in these endeavours. Australia and Australian companies have always been great partners for us in Singapore, and we look forward to our continued warm friendship and close ties.
Thank you.
1 As of Oct 2021, Australia’s real estate sector has ranked number one in the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) for 11 consecutive years.