A change in leadership at the top of the Singapore government was supposed to herald a new era in Singapore politics, but is there really a "generational change"?
Earlier this year, Lee Hsien Loong stepped down from his position as Prime Minister of Singapore, handing the reins over to Lawrence Wong who had been earmarked to succeed Lee after being endorsed as the leader of the fourth generation (4G) team by other members of Cabinet in 2022. Wong’s accession to leadership marked an end to a political era for the city state, as Singapore had to now navigate a political future out of the shadow of the Lee family who have contributed two of the four Prime Ministers since independence in 1965.
As such, there has been a lot of attention paid to the policies that Wong tries to implement, as observers try to identify any evolution in the Singapore government’s plans for the island and its attitude towards governance. The 2024 National Day Rally delivered by Wong on August 18 was given special attention; the National Day Rally is seen as the most important political speech of the year in Singapore, where the Prime Minister makes key policy announcements and addresses issues that have deep importance to the direction that the government will steer the nation. In Lee’s first National Day Rally as Prime Minister in 2004, he had “slaughtered a few sacred cows” by announcing the shift to a five-day work week for the civil service, a shift in education policy, and proposed the establishment of casinos which was then a controversial issue in the city state.
Wong’s maiden Rally saw him announce policies that while not necessarily slaughtering the remaining sacred cows in Singaporean society, had analysts labelling the announcements as a radical shift in policy, and applauding that the speech was a clear departure in style and tone to previous National Day Rallies. Analysts highlighted how Wong’s speech was akin to one citizen talking to another, with him focusing on his background, coming from an average Singaporean household, having to go to a PAP kindergarten (a government-subsidised kindergarten) and a neighbourhood school (previous Singaporean leaders had come from the elite schools on the island, known as independent schools). Contrasted to previous National Day Rallies, where ex-Prime Ministers in recent memory, Lee and Goh Chok Tong, tended to sound like they were parents giving their child a moral lesson or leaders explaining something to their subjects, Wong’s style made him immediately more relatable to the average Singaporean, which would help in the government’s stated aim of forging a new social compact.
Furthermore, analysts point to the announcement regarding changes to the Gifted Education Programme, priority access to public housing for singles, and most notably, temporary financial support for the involuntarily unemployed as signs of a radical shift in the Singapore government’s policies as all these changes mark a distinct departure from the original structure of the policies. Consider the priority access to public housing for singles, since the establishment of the Housing and Development Board (HDB) as the vehicle for the implementation of the government’s public housing policies in 1960 (the People’s Action Party had been in power since 1959 when Singapore was a self-governing British colony), the government had always reiterated that public housing was focused on meeting the needs of the core family nucleus which is why Singaporeans had to apply for HDB flats as a couple. Single Singaporeans weren’t allowed to buy a flat until the introduction of the Single Singapore Citizen Scheme in 1991, and even then, only those aged 35 and above could apply and there were restrictions on the types of flats and locations of flats available. Allowing singles to have priority access to HDB flats that are near their parents’ house is a big departure from the original structure of the public housing policy that has often prevented singles from accessing public housing.
The introduction of financial support for the unemployed is an even larger change in government policy. Singapore had long decried the European model of a welfare state, as then-Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam remarked in an interview at the 45th St. Gallen Symposium, reiterating that the government believed in trampolines that help those in need bounce back up, providing “help for someone who is willing to take up a job and work at it, and make life not so easy if you stay out of work”, which would help transform and maintain a culture of resilience. In July 2023, Tharman again spoke about the welfare state, saying that Singapore “should not be a welfare state but a welfare society”, highlighting how the success of Singapore was built on a bedrock of self-reliance and such an ethos remained a critical foundation of Singapore’s social culture. For the government to then, a year on, announce the introduction of financial support for the involuntarily unemployed, albeit a 6-month temporary support, seems like a huge change.
However, the idea that these policy announcements mark a radical shift in government thinking needs to be questioned. In many ways, the delivery and policy announcements of Wong’s first National Day Rally recalls a line from a previous year’s Rally: In 2021, Lee famously quoted a Singaporean saying, “Same Same, but Different”, the general gist behind the saying is that things may look similar on the surface but actually, in essence there are differences. In that sense, Wong’s speech arguably seems to be a case of ‘Different, Different but Same’ – when one really unpacks and analyse the speech, it seems that it’s just more of the same. Policy changes such as the priority access to public housing for singles and increase in shared parental leave are continuations of the changes made to these respective policies in recent years, as shared parental leave already exists, while restrictions on singles owning HDB flats had been gradually easing over the years as the restrictions had been rolled back. Even the income support is tagged to the SkillsFuture programme, which means there will be requirements for those getting the support to upskill and re-train themselves, which fits into the Singapore model of self-reliance and a welfare trampoline.
This 4G government under Wong seems to be less about the “generational change” that he spoke of during his swearing-in ceremony, and more about adapting to the changing socio-economic conditions of the city state. The policy direction moving forward can be seen as an evolution of the Singapore welfare state model, which is necessary as realities of being an advanced economy with demographic issues in an increasingly challenging geopolitical environment come to bear. The desire to form a new social compact between the government and its people is as much about maintaining the fabric of society as it is about keeping the PAP’s reign in government intact.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of IIPA and this platform.
Author
Orson Tan is senior research fellow at the Institute for Indo-Pacific Affairs, and has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.