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The Good Life in a Digital Empire
Mr Speaker, thank you for allowing me to join the debate.
In the coming COS, most of my cuts will be largely on MSF issues covering our social safety net, social service delivery, partnerships with community, building resilient families, and how we can further make lives better for women. So, I will not dwell on this here.
DPM and Finance Minister’s Budget is a careful rendering of the bread and butter of our national life. It takes care of all the big moving parts - health, housing, and the big items - defence and education.
Sir, last year, we blew all our savings that we took 10 years to accumulate in one large cushion. As the Finance Minister said, “we averted the worst, and prevented deep economic scarring and permanent impairment of our economic strengths.”
We saved jobs, spent on healthcare, and now we are making sure all of us are protected. This is the clear and visible, the immediate and vital policy goal.
But there are many things that are invisible and take generations to grow. Our sense of identity, what kinds of persons we are, and how we relate to each other. Increasingly, this is not just a matter of real life interaction, but also a matter of online culture — how we speak and write to each other when we cannot see each other face-to-face, when we think of the “other side", not as a human being with feelings, a sense of dignity and to whom we owe duties, but as faceless digits. It is then that we feel free to insult, to complain, to load with vulgarities, expletives and crass innuendos.
Sir, the digital world is now an empire, far reaching and powerful. To live the good life there, we need to develop a good online culture.
A debate on the Budget may seem like an odd place to speak about this because I am speaking of things that money cannot buy — grace, civility, integrity and simple good manners.
These are things that we cannot tax into oblivion or incentivise into existence. Together, they form the culture of our public life and we can only cultivate these by mutual agreement and collective efforts. Increasingly, this means paying more attention to the way we live online.
Basics of a Digital Life
For many of us, using cash has become a rare occurrence, as we move more and more to tap our cards, or to scan with our phones. But online payments require not just a smart phone but also reliable Wi-Fi or broadband - essentials to some, but expensive for others.
We need to do more to make these available to the lower income - in an increasingly digital world, these must not be seen as luxuries but as basic transport into a life of dignity and ease. Providing the basics of a digital life is as much a public duty as it is providing national defence and education.
a. Identify vulnerabilities
In one of my cuts to the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI), I will speak about the trend of rising online scams. We have already put in place a few pieces of key legislation in terms of disinformation and falsehoods. One missing piece I think in our policy to protect Singaporeans against scams and to grow their digital literacy is to identify who among us is vulnerable.
Can the government put together a simple online literacy assessment, or give guidance on a specific set of information that all of us should know so that we can see where our weak spots are? This is a simple “scan”, like the way we would scan our computers, to see where our weak spots are, or a health checkup so we can see if our cholesterol or blood pressure is too high.
I think MCI would be best placed to see this through and provide different scans to different age groups.
b. Provide hardware
The Ministry of Education is already providing the necessary hardware for all students to learn, and in this pandemic, this move to online learning and the use of technology has been very quick and much faster than originally planned.
Today, low-income families can already apply for subsidised computers and free broadband through the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) NEU PC Plus programme.
But “owning a PC” is not enough. We need to make sure that families have devices that are functioning at a high enough standard for good online learning.
More importantly, children from lower income homes are struck much harder - research on a representative sample of Singaporeans has shown that 44% families who lived in rental units did not have a connection, and 44 per cent lacked a computer or a laptop at home.
This is why at our NTUC First Campus, just two months ago, launched a scheme to loan iPads to more than 2,000 low-income families and their children attending our My First Skool centres to help them bridge the digital divide. I hope more can be done on this front by the Government.
I think it may be worth looking at this more closely - of all the families living in rental flats with school-going children, how many do not have a PC, and how many do not have broadband connections?
c. Free Wi-Fi and broadband access to all low-income families
But hardware is only half the story. Since 2014, the Home Access programme has provided tens of thousands of low-income households with subsidised broadband and cheaper devices.
Today, there are hundreds of families who have access to free broadband. I think this is a very useful and helpful scheme that can be greatly expanded. I urge the government to consider giving all low-income households, especially those with school-going children, free broadband connections. I think this will be great equaliser.
Culture of Negativity
The above are some things that money can buy. Now I come to the things that money cannot buy. First, I call attention to the rising culture of negativity in the way we relate to each other online. We have had, for many years, ambitions towards a kinder, more caring and inclusive society. While there has been good progress, there is much scope for further improvement.
First, I suggest we turn our good intentions into action. DPM Heng has announced that a $20 million fund will be set aside to match Community Chest donations raised through spontaneous acts daily, under the new Change for Charity Grant.
Corporations and public alike should give it full support to make it work and bring cheer to the disadvantaged in our midst. Hopefully, this will become a regular feature in future. Again wearing my NTUC Enterprise hat, we are already doing some of this but I have asked my colleagues to see how we can participate and support this programme in a stronger way.
Lastly, something simple — can we ourselves to be more considerate before we demand others to be so? Can we cut everyone some 'slack' especially when they get it right most of the time? Can we be less entitled?
Let me give you an example - SIRS is a Covid-19 assistance programme which provided self-employed people with three quarterly cash payouts of $3,000 each in May, July and October. And this is open to those who earned a net trade income of up to $100,000 and live in a property with an annual value of no more than $21,000. I had a resident staying in a nice $6 million house complaining and demanding to know why she was unable to get the SIRS payout.
A second example - another resident of mine who - without fail will on a regular basis send me photos of how a particular staircase in his block would be littered with tissue paper.
Fortunately - for both him and me! - this problem has been resolved.
Sir, having spoken out against complaining, I must say that I am not now complaining – but there are examples of where I feel we could improve on in our public life, to reduce this culture of negativity.
This culture is leading to a certain type of online persona, where cynicism, anti- establishment, is a shorthand for intellectualism and political sophistication. In this trend, general negativity towards all things Singaporean is taken as proxy for moral courage, especially when it includes a dose of disdain and disrespect for public institutions.
This is a poor reflection on us, at a time where we have done so much that we can be proud of.
Defining the Good Life: Respect and Pride
So, what can we do?
First, we need to recognise that being a nation of champion complainers is not all there is to being Singaporeans. This indeed, is a part of us, we cannot help it, and taken in moderation, complaints are a vital part of public life. We must notice mistakes, we must raise our voices, and we must hold each other to the highest standards.
I do not want to be a Pollyanna about our political landscape — there indeed is much to fix and improve on. But I ask today for us to consider whether we have gone too far in the other direction — to feel every pin prick as a broken bone, to raise our voices and abuse our fellow countrymen, especially those in the public services, as if they are in our debt.
Building a culture of unity and a strong sense of identity has always been a challenge in Singapore, a country that is too small to count on its own domestic market, but an ambition too large to be denied. Too diverse to take our nationhood for granted but united enough to agree, over 50 years, on things which have torn other countries apart — race, religion, language, politics.
Before I end, I want to highlight my strong support and thanks to the Government for the continued enhancements and incentive schemes for organisations to build and strengthen their local core and strong support for mature workers.
Wearing my NTUC Enterprise hat again, this is close to our hearts. We are proud that we have a strong local core at all levels – management as well as rank & file. Looking at the demographics of our workforce at our largest SE, NTUC Fairprice our mature workforce speaks of our value system and we see it as a strength: 66% of our staff are more than 40 years old; 46% more than 50 years old and 22% more than 60 years old. These statistics all outperform the national workforce demographics. Yes, the more senior staff may be a tad slower, less physically agile but they make up for it with their patience, their dedication, their competence and their reliability. Every worker young and old matters. Every worker matters.
As a country, we must welcome diversity; we must look out for each other and always make sure we bring people along in our transformation journeys and leave no one behind and most importantly, we must accord respect to all.
These threats towards fragmentation and polarisation have become ever more important, as the reach of the Digital Empire grows. To combat the dark sides of this Empire, we must recall what we owe each other — an obligation, and a duty to respect each other. We must recognise the role each of us play in our public life and join together in this with maturity and common purpose.
And for my fellow Labour MPs and the many union leaders and Industrial Relations Officers working hard on the ground, the NTUC, led by our Sec-Gen Ng Chee Meng, will continue to walk the talk, pushing for workers’ interests, and always striving to do better with our actions amidst the complaints.
Sir, I support the budget.
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