Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim: In his Budget Statement, Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong spoke about artificial intelligence, or AI, as a general purpose technology, like electricity in internal combustion engine, the computer or the Internet. As such technology, AI, indeed has the potential to touch every aspect of our lives. Like Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, I firmly believe in the transformative power of AI for the future of our shared economy.
In an earlier speech on amendments to the National Productivity Fund, I explained how AI carries both perils as well as promises. But we truly embrace this vision, I believe that we must also transform how we approach our policies in this AI age. This must go beyond pursuing excellence in AI research, embedding AI in Government services, upgrading our broadband infrastructure or even assure that our firms rapidly adopt AI. Such goals outlined in the National AI Strategy 2.0 are indeed laudable but incomplete. Rather, the impending structural shifts that our economy will face will alter the way that our businesses, workers and students will operate. One can think of this as a complement to the Member Dr Tan Wu Meng as well as Mr Christopher de Souza’s earlier speech, but not just about the policies of today but also of tomorrow.
Researchers suggest that AI adopting firms tend to be larger, younger and relatively more productive. But to fully reap the benefits of AI in our economy, firms that are likely to fall behind, the SMEs, which are especially the incumbent firms in non-tech, non-professional sectors, must be presented with strong and urgent incentives to adopt AI.
This is a non-trivial task. Small firms are almost, by definition, that way because they have been relatively slower in seizing business opportunities and rationalising costs. The owner of a “mama shop”, renovation contractor, hawker stall or car workshop, may feel that AI has no direct implication for how they run their businesses and hence, prefer to adopt a wait-and-see attitude toward adopting AI solutions for their company.
Singapore’s participation in the OECD-led BEPS 2.0 framework affords us a tailor-made channel for creating incentives for AI adoption across a whole range of firm types. Pillar 2 allows for refunds of certain classes of investments to be treated as income rather than tax exemptions. Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s proposed Refundable Investment Credit appears aligned with such qualified refundable tax credits. This suits per additional investments in not just R&D and innovation, but also the adoption of AI-enabled digital and professional services.
Yet, some words of caution are in order.
First, such incentives will be greatest for the largest firms since these are the ones covered directly by BEPS. But we must not forget SMEs and ensure that our mom and pops also see the strong benefits to pursuing Refundable Investment Credits, ideally through expanding outreach and promotion of the proposed scheme.
Second, while there is room for defining the scope of such credits, it is important to be mindful that BEPS rules permit countries to independently apply a top-up tax which they may do if they believe that the tax rates imposed on firms, domiciled here circumvents the spirit of the 15% minimum or subverts the intent of the credit to encourage sustainability or knowledge generation, in particular, if the Refundable Investment Credit is perceived as an instrument designed as a loophole.
And this applies to my mind, especially for investments meant to simply increase production rather than those targeted specifically at the green transition or R&D. They may choose countervailing action and exercise the top-up over on their end, thereby undermining the attractiveness of the Refundable Investment Credit in the first place.
This is why the seeming consensus arrived at in the Budget-related wish lists put out by the big four accounting firms here, all of which stressed the importance of refundable tax credits, may be worrying. If, indeed, the intent was to return to a pre-BEPS world where accounting firms identify sophisticated strategies to enable MNCs to whittle away at the effective tax rates, with the concurrence of our Government.
Third, we need to be aware that the traditional argument favouring tax in capital more favourably than labour under the premise that doing so would stimulate productive investment may have to be re-examined. This is because an AI-driven economy tends to be weightless and encouraging investment in yet more physical capital is nowhere near as important as accumulating intangible knowledge capital.
Fourth, and most generally, it is imperative that we no longer regard tax competition as our primary strategy for attracting foreign capital, a point that I had made in this House before. Rather, we should get the order right. We should aim to create an environment where our businesses are AI-enabled and our workers AI-savvy which will naturally attract investment from abroad.
But we should not stop there. The Big Data machine-learning algorithms and large language models that are at the forefront of the AI revolution are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few powerful firms.
This calls for pre-emptive action by governments, especially those with deep pockets and sovereign wealth funds, to take active exposures in AI companies, whether in publicly traded firms or via private equity. This not only allows the public sector to enjoy a returns upside, but also to ensure that they have a voice in AI developments that is ultimately in the public interest.
Of course, AI will not only alter the prospects for businesses but also our workers. Emerging evidence suggests that generative AI boosts productivity by about 14%. But among novice and low-skilled workers, the gain was far more – something to the order of 34%. This implies that AI augmentation will lead to a compression in the distribution of abilities and skills.
As such, those who have hitherto been able to distinguish themselves, perhaps because of their talent or industry, may now find that edge blunted. The upshot then is that we need to question the sorts of skills that we are pushing our workforce to acquire.
Sir, skills may reside in unexpected places. It is certainly popular and sexy to suggest that the future economy will be in severe need of prompt engineers, cyber security specialists or digital marketers. But the current scarcity of such novel jobs will probably be relieved over the next few years, leaving it more likely that the skills involved will become enfolded into more traditional positions. Professionals of all stripes will need to learn the basics of delivering prompts through generative AI models and marketers and salespeople will need to deliver their message across all media, including digital ones. And while we can never be certain, old-school artisan or craftsman roles could well make a revival as robotics have yet to deliver the sort of sufficient quality or range of uses on this front.
Moreover, certain skills that we may have until recently thought were future proof, such as coding or writing well or statistical analysis, may quickly become devalued when AI tools can do the job better just as well, if not, better, for a fraction of the cost and time involved. Instead, it is soft human skills originality and critical thinking, empathy and teamwork, leadership and communication. That will be ever more important and these are not as easily replicable by AI. These are not skills well captured by certifications alone. Rather, they are nurtured through an emphasis on developing such ability in the classroom, even when they may not be formally evaluated. Or by self-reflection and feedback from managers and mentors, along with the concentrated efforts and experience over time in the workplace.
Economists have long recognised this. Even the most rudimentary models of human capital include not innate talent and years of schooling, but also experience acquired from years of working.
It is imperative therefore that we do not devalue alternative forms of knowledge acquisition beyond the classroom. That is why I believe that not only should the scale of SkillsFuture Credit be ramped up, as Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong indicated in the Level-Up Programme, but its scope should be expanded.
At this point, I declare that I work at an institution that has the potential to benefit from SkillsFuture and this is some of the suggestions that I had suggested to the other Deputy Prime Minister earlier on.
This means that allowing credits to be used not only for academic credentials, but also for alternative learning modes, such as apprenticeship programmes or on-the-job training. I previously raised this possibility of such an expanded scope during the debate on the SkillsFuture Singapore Agency amendment Bill, held in this House last year, and via various Parliamentary Questions.
I wish to elaborate on the idea here but take it a step further. I hope that we can consider allowing companies that are able to submit credible proposals for apprenticeship programmes to take on trainees that apply with their SkillsFuture credits. The offset from SkillsFuture would effectively mean a subsidised worker, which will both increase the attractiveness of taking on such apprentices, while compensating the firm for the cost of on-the-job training provision.
Some may argue that the intent of SkillsFuture was to equip Singaporeans with new skills, not subsidise labour costs for businesses. But this misses the reality of how many modern skills need it and even the most evergreen ones are often acquired while doing the job, not before it.
A close friend of mine who trained as an architect, but eventually went on to a very successful career in finance, once shared that he was offered his first job at an investment bank despite his absent background, because they would have to teach him everything that he needed to know anyway.
Furthermore, training apprentices could ultimately leave for a position elsewhere, which also represents a risk for the business.
If we are truly concerned that companies may abuse the system, to hire a stream of temporary workers with little transferable skills, we can always include a clause in the contract that requires a minimum duration of employment, post-apprenticeship, conditional on mutual agreement and reasonable performance, of course.
Such a change in how we value skills and training in an AI-enabled economy will become more necessary in the future, not less. This is not least, because we cannot yet anticipate what kinds of jobs may become displaced by AI and what would become more important?
If anything, the lifespan of economically remunerative skills is likely to diminish. But while I fully agree with the importance of infusing the mindset of lifelong learning into our workforce, we need to simultaneously stress that learning and applying must not be equated to grades and certificates.
Inevitably, some workers will be displaced by AI. This is why Deputy Prime Minister Wong’s indication that there will be temporary financial support for the involuntarily unemployed – in other words, support for those that have been made redundant – is important. The WP supports this move, not least because we have been proposing some form of redundancy insurance since 2011.
In my response to the Budget last year, I further elaborated on the desirable features of such an unemployment insurance scheme. In a nutshell, this entails balancing the trade-off between providing a safety net for those who have lost a job, also encouraging those displaced workers to expeditiously return to the labour market, rather than relying on the payouts as a crutch. Optimal schemes tend to combine reasonably generous salary replacement, albeit for limited time.
If we accept that AI will alter how we work, it becomes self-evident that we also need to go upstream and re-think how the AI revolution will alter how we educate. By this, I mean education for the masses, not just building a core of AI scientists and researchers, just to make ourselves a hub for AI innovation.
For starters, it is high time we internalise how straightforward knowledge accumulation, rote learning with constant repetition regurgitated through closed-book exams is no longer tenable – if it ever was, in the information-is-free age of the Internet to begin with.
AI will further erode the relevance of simply knowing more facts and figures, being the fastest at solving known problems or being able to memorise long lists of nomenclatures or taxonomies. Rather, we need to teach our kids how to filter information, to assess and evaluate, rather than accept without questioning. This means that they will need to learn how to ask good questions, to identify the right from the wrong, but more often, to also recognise the new ones and know that there is not any clear right or wrong.
This, in turn, requires fostering a deep, intellectual curiosity in our students – one that instils the habits and imparts the tools necessary for critical interpretation and evaluation of data, as well as information.
Students need to be taught not so much what to think, but how to think. That is why my party colleagues Mr Pritam Singh and Ms He Ting Ru emphasise the importance of access to information, so that we can encourage such thinking even in the policy realm.
This will upend many of our traditional educational strategies.
First, we need to reconsider the importance of high stakes standardised tests as a performance benchmark, since AI already outperform humans in most exams, or they will, in the next few years – in areas ranging from accounting, to law, to medicine, to languages. Indeed, it has even successfully drafted several Bills for legislators.
While standardised testing has long been a mainstay of Asian society, the Keju was first introduced in China in the sixth century, and Indian Emperor Kharavela relied on competitive testing to select his officials in as far back as the first century BCE, its continued use will need to be reviewed in light of the realities of the modern educational landscape.
The tempting, but wrong, solution is to ban our students from using AI altogether. We do our students a disservice when we insist, carte blanche, that using ChatGPT output constitutes plagiarism, because this would disadvantage them when they enter into the real world and are forced to compete with those with greater familiarity of how to integrate generative AI into their work.
But this does not mean that we eliminate assessment wholesale. Rather, evaluations should be performed continuously and holistically. We still need to impart numeracy and literacy, but these can be evaluated through dynamic debates and polished presentations through group projects and collaborative problem solving, and through the ability to pose quality questions, as much as offer quality answers.
Continuous assessment, a term that we have used to describe our model of evaluation since I was in primary school, needs to be taken far more seriously.
And Deputy Prime Minister Wong’s decision to top up the Edusave Endowment Fund has the potential to contribute to realigning our mindsets on competencies beyond grades. But I would encourage the MOE to take bolder steps, such as increasing the number of non-academic awards, making final exams just a small fraction of the overall course grade and allowing through-train education without the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE).
I am aware of the subtle irony of this claim, coming from someone who has accumulated way too many academic credentials and taken way too many exams, and who still relies on teaching for a living. Be that as it may, I believe that we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the preferred path to professional, and personal, success lies solely in climbing the ladder of acquiring yet more academic qualifications.
We inadvertently sell the rich diversity of gifts and talents of our population short, when we insist on holding fast to a mindset that the potential of a student is determined by how they fared in an exam when they were 12 or 16 years old.
Second, even as we implement AI in our pedagogy via the EdTech Masterplan 2030, we should not forget that customised learning, fostering digital literacy and equipping students with 21st century skills, all come back round to our teachers. Even as we fully empower our teachers with AI tools, we must also confer to them additional latitude to deliver the curriculum as they see fit, and make them facilitators rather than lecturers, or else learners will never fully exploit the full potential of AI.
Doing so will unlock what Sal Khan, founder of the online learning platform Khan Academy, characterised as “infinitely patient tutor[s]”, a development that our tuition-obsessed nation will surely appreciate.
Finally, we also need to ask if the usual Nitec/Diploma/Degree pathway is still relevant in a world where the correlation between doing well in tests and translating that to practical performance is being increasingly challenged.
Deputy Prime Minister Wong’s announcement of ITE Progression Award – an effort to provide additional financial support to ITE graduates seeking to enrol in diploma programmes – should thus be viewed light of what AI means for credentialism. While upgrading skills is undeniably important, promoting the acquisition of “yet another” paper qualification may be an incomplete assessment of the upgrader’s abilities, or even worse, proffer a misguided reassurance that doing so will necessarily translate into a job and hence, be disappointed.
I will conclude. Mr Speaker, while my speech has stressed on the importance of relying on AI to reshape our businesses, workers and students, we must not also forget that AI will transform the manner which we, as policymakers, approach our task. The last thing we want from a 21st century government and legislature is more canned answers and pro-forma solutions that look like they came out of ChatGPT.
More crucially, we need the courage and conviction to forge a new way forward that is unshackled from our old ways. This is something that AI, designed to riff off the existing corpus of knowledge, can never do.
27 February 2024
https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/#/sprs3topic?reportid=budget-2338
The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance (Mr Lawrence Wong): Many Members, including Leader of the Opposition Mr Pritam Singh, Assoc Prof Jamus Lim, Mr Christopher de Souza, Mr Gerald Giam, Mr Desmond Choo and Mr Syed Harun, all spoke about this. There were many suggestions, such as to expand the scope of the SkillsFuture Credit, to reduce the qualifying age or to provide additional incentives and support.
I appreciate the strong support and interest. The Level-Up programme is a significant new addition to our SkillsFuture system. Let us make this move first. We have not even talked about the details yet, which will be announced by the Minister for Education at COS. So, we will make this first move, we will consider all your feedback and suggestions, and how to further finetune and enhance the scheme, as we gain more experience over time.
In any case, any revenue impact from the Pillar Two moves will only materialise from FY2027. So, this is not something for this financial year. We have some time. We are making the assessments. We are doing the detailed projections and we will come back with detailed revenue updates.
Of course, the actual amount of revenue gain and how long it will last will depend on how the competitive landscape evolves and also how much we have to re-invest into the economy. Several Members said that the whole point of BEPS is to tilt the playing field in favour of governments and make MNEs pay more taxes. I think Mr Louis Chua and Mr Jamus Lim highlighted that. I agree. That is the intent of BEPS.
Mr Speaker: Assoc Prof Jamus Lim.
Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim (Sengkang): In an MAS macroeconomic review paper published in October 2022, a breakdown of the sources of inflation here attributed between a third to as much as three-fifths to domestic drivers, depending on the sector.
What might some of these domestic drivers be? I would contend that the decision to hike GST would likely have contributed to domestic inflation. To be clear, the data used in the MAS study predates the GST hikes, but we have plenty of examples globally that VAT hikes do, indeed, spark inflation. So, my first question to Deputy Prime Minister Wong is whether he still believes that the timing of raising GST was justified or if at least a postponement – especially given how the country has bumper tax receipts from other sources in recent years – may instead have been wise.
As an aside, I would state that the Workers’ Party categorically objects to the insinuation that we are less fiscally responsible, not least because while it is true that it is Deputy Prime Minister Wong’s prerogative to think that the alternative levers of revenue that the Workers’ Party has suggested are untenable, but is not true that we do not think about fiscal balances.
My second question has to do with what Deputy Prime Minister Wong said about keeping Singapore competitive in the face of BEPS. Unlike what he said, I have no illusions, in fact, about the practicality. Indeed, the design of BEPS took into account the practicality of a race to the bottom and grants countries the right to apply a countervailing top-up tax if they believe that countries have not played by the rules or at least the spirit. So, my fully non-theoretical question that I have for Deputy Prime Minister Wong is: what will the Government do if other countries choose to apply this tax top-up in response to a belief that our RIC contravenes the spirit of the refundable tax credit scheme?
Mr Lawrence Wong: Sir, on GST, does it impact on inflation? Yes, it does impact on prices, but the impact is once-off. It is not permanent. We have made that point clear. MAS has made that point clear. If you look at the overall impact on inflation, actually, we have seen the impact on that monthly inflation when GST went up. But if you look at the subsequent trends down the rest of the month, inflation continues to moderate as it has in other advanced economies.
You can look at the situation last year and we are quite clear that it is very likely to continue this year as well. So, the impact of GST is not the key driver behind our inflation spike. I have explained what the key drivers were and neither will it cause us to have inflation remaining high because disinflation trend is happening globally, we are seeing similar trends in Singapore and our inflation rates are also coming down.
So, that is on the first point. And to be very clear, even with the GST in place, we have deferred the impact of GST on the lower-income groups with the Assurance Package by more than five years for the vast majority of Singaporeans, and it is not even a temporary relief because, for the lower-income groups, we have enhanced the permanent GST Vouchers so that GST does not hurt the poor in Singapore. We have gone through these debates extensively and I think we are in a good position to explain why the GST was needed and why, in fact, the additional revenues are needed because we can already see the rising expenditure trends very rapidly. It will happen in the next few years. If we had not done it at the time we did, when will be a good time to do it? And if we were to do it this year or next year, will the Opposition therefore support it? I seriously doubt so.
So, I think our approach is, let us do it correctly. Let us do it in good time, put in place, make sure that our fiscal system remains sound and always ensure that we have sufficient revenues to cover our spending. That is what we have done.
On BEPS, the RIC is compliant with BEPS. This is something that was discussed as part of the BEPS conversations. These sorts of refundable tax credits are allowed under BEPS rules. That is why we are doing it. And that is why we need to understand the realities of the world. Governments all are doing it.
Mr Speaker: Mr Sitoh.
Mr Sitoh Yih Pin: Sir, I also do not want to prolong this, but as I said, if there can be a surplus of $40 billion over X number of years, sure, everybody is happy to top it up.
But on another point, I heard the hon Member Assoc Prof Jamus Lim as he spoke just now. Not too long ago, he was talking in this House about pawning your assets and borrowing when interest rates were very low. Had we followed that advice, we would be in trouble today, because subsequently, interest rates rose. So, let us be very careful and let us be very conservative in our fiscal policies.
Mr Speaker: Assoc Porf Jamus Lim.
Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim (Sengkang): Mr Speaker, perhaps it is worth clarifying, when I spoke in the context of locking in the interest rates at the time, it was in the context of SINGA bonds. In particular, I said that had we locked it in at that time, we would be able to lock in a low interest rate, which actually, if anything, I would argue circumstances have proven to be the case, because interest rates have since risen and we did not lock it in at the time.
Mr Speaker: Mr Sitoh.
Mr Sitoh Yih Pin: Sir, I have got that video in my phone, but never mind that. It is not like that.
I read a speech recently. In 1977, then-Foreign Minister, Mr S Rajaratnam, said about pawning our assets. When I had that debate with Assoc Prof Lim, I hesitated using the word “pawning”. I think I used the word “mortgage”. But since Mr Rajaratnam used it in 1977, I think I can use it.
What he said was interest rates are low, go and pawn your assets and go and reinvest. I said then, he was in a stage of euphoria. He is assuming that tomorrow will always be better than today. If we had used that approach, Singaporeans may be waking up thinking that today will be bleaker than yesterday and tomorrow darker than today. That is the point I am making.
Mr Speaker: Assoc Prof Lim.
Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim: Mr Speaker, just a quick point. I am afraid I cannot speak for Mr Rajaratnam. My point was very clear.
28 February 2024
https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/#/sprs3topic?reportid=budget-2341
Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim (Sengkang): Thank you, Speaker. I appreciate Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat’s discussion of the importance of SkillsFuture. In principle, I do not disagree with the potential benefits of the scheme. Yet, as my hon friend has shared, statistics reveal that in recent times, take-up remains low. And, in fact, many have yet to exhaust their SkillsFuture credits, even as the Government has proposed that we increase them. But, perhaps, what is even more damning is that older workers, exactly the group that we hope will take on this task of reskilling, display significantly lower take-up rates.
My question is, in light of the wrenching changes that AI will usher in, how would the Government ensure that SkillsFuture will actually be able to increase its take-up rate and fulfil the objective of reskilling that it was meant to accomplish; or is it revealing that there is a continued skepticism among our workers of the benefits of the scheme?
Mr Heng Swee Keat: Mr Speaker, Sir, I hope that Assoc Prof Jamus Lim is not a pessimist, because you said that the take-up rate is low and so on. You can look at it as a glass half empty or glass half full.
Name me a country which has started such an extensive SkillsFuture framework. I was the Education Minister for five years. Our students have done so well and now, our older workers are working hard to learn new skills. Name me a country where the NTUC is not only accepting change, but is embracing change and be a partner for change, in working on the Company Training Committee, in working with companies to do, not just training, but surprisingly, OpsTech roadmapping. They were trained by researchers from A*STAR to look at how companies can adopt technology and in the process of adopting technology, how jobs can be redesigned, reskilled, so that workers can take on better jobs, with this huge amount of SkillsFuture and the range of courses. I think the Education Minister and the Minister for Manpower will speak more on this later.
So, we will have to take a different approach for different groups of workers. For those who are able to go and take ownership and do the courses on their own, who want to change their jobs, there is a range of options available. There are many companies that are taking action to redesign their workflow. I have been working very closely with the Singapore Business Federation (SBF) and that is why I mentioned earlier that the SBF has also set up an Alliance for Action on business leadership development. I have met the team who are doing this and, in fact, they are making very good progress. So, we got to upskill everybody at all levels, including the CEOs of companies to embrace change.
It is very good, in my view, that we are able to achieve this progress over time. And in fact, instead of saying that, “Oh, I am skeptical, I am pessimistic”, if you have good suggestions on how we can do this better, play a constructive role, because with your professorship, you would know this well. Play a constructive role, be part of the team. We have so many members of the academia, who are working with us and giving us excellent ideas. So, if you have great suggestions, I am open to considering.
Mr Speaker: Assoc Prof Jamus Lim.
Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim: Just a quick clarification on my part. I absolutely agree that the SkillsFuture is a good programme in principle. And the challenge that I would put to the Government is how to ensure that it fulfils its original objectives. As for our participation in various suggestions for how we can improve it, I have made suggestions within the context of this House, but if we receive invitations from the various Ministries for us, or any of my WP colleagues to participate in these kinds of discussions, we would be more than happy to do so.
Mr Heng Swee Keat: Assoc Prof Jamus Lim, you do not need an invitation. You are free to provide your suggestion. After all, are you not from the Workers’ Party (WP)?
And by the way, let me make it clear that I have heard MPs on both aisles speaking about workers and we have a very strong presence of our union MPs here and they will be speaking even more on this.
So, we all care about Singaporeans, and we want to do the best for them. So, you are welcome to give me your ideas, if you have very specific ones. But, let me say that I would have to consider it, together with all the other good ideas. But good ideas are always welcome. And I am just waiting for them.
28 February 2024
https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/#/sprs3topic?reportid=budget-2338
Mr Speaker: Assoc Prof Jamus Lim. You have a clarification for Mr Pillai?
Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim (Sengkang): Thank you, Speaker, for the opportunity to clarify some points made by the Member Murali Pillai. I would just point out two things.
First, I would respectfully disagree first that, with his claim that just because all the necessary information was provided by Prime Minister Lee with regard to this back-of-the-envelope calculations, it would be therefore reasonable for us to take his calculations as self-evident.
Let me be clear, far be it for me to challenge the first Wrangler in Cambridge for his Maths. But I believe that he introduced a number of assumptions about expected returns to reserves and GDP growth and, indeed, about the amount that would be returned to the reserves based on the way that the Government calculates the primary surplus vs the IMF recommendations.
So, my question is: if the Member accepts that these assumptions are not necessarily self-evident, is it reasonable, in a debate, for us to question these assumptions?
My second point builds on this and I ask if the Member would think that the Government would be comfortable with making the kind of public policies that they have proposed just based on the publicly available information that is currently available to the Opposition or whether the Government would actually require more information that is not made publicly available.
Mr Speaker: Mr Murali Pillai.
Mr Murali Pillai: Thank you, Mr Speaker, Sir. Sir, in reference to the hon Member Assoc Prof Lim’s first question about the propriety of the assumptions, this is a point which has been discussed at length. Let me just say that what is relevant for the purposes of the Budget is the proportion of NIRC. Even if we were to put aside the assumptions of growth, the fact is that the NIRC, which is reflected in the Budget, has been relatively stable and it is now for every dollar that has been spent, 20 cents comes from NIRC. So, from the perspective of anybody proposing to spend more, these facts would be important.
I do accept that my hon friend across the aisle may have a different view about the extent of the information that is needed. But the point I am making, and I guess we can agree to disagree, and I said this advisedly, that this actually is a red herring. Because all the information needed to calculate revenue is there, in terms of NIRC, in terms of the operating revenue expenditure which falls more or less within a defined variance as well. So, for these reasons, I think we are not disadvantaged.
As far as the second point is concerned, and I stand corrected, I think my hon friend mentioned about whether the Government would be comfortable—I am sorry that I kind of stopped there, if the hon Member could just clarify the purport of his question, I will try my best to answer.
Mr Speaker: Assoc Prof Lim.
Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim: Yes, my clarification is simple. The Government routinely makes policy. So, my question is whether the Member thinks that the Government would be willing to be comparably hamstrung in terms of only making public policy on the basis of all the publicly available information or they feel that the Government can only make policy when there is additional proprietary information.
Mr Speaker: Mr Pillai.
Mr Murali Pillai: Thank you, Sir. I think there is a false premise in the question. It is about the Government being hamstrung in relation to public information. I mean the point is this. As far as the Government is concerned, it puts out the operating revenue, it puts out the proposed operating expenditure and there are, of course, constitutional requirements to make sure that the Budget is balanced and it is against that backdrop that we can do the analysis as to whether the proposals meet the aspirations or the requirements of Singapore and Singaporeans for now and the future. So, I see this as based on a false premise and, therefore, I will not answer the question.
Mr Speaker: Assoc Prof Lim. Hopefully, it is the last clarification.
Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim: Much obliged, Speaker. I will be very brief. So, the Member Murali has mentioned repeatedly that there is a red herring, that we have all the information that is required based on the fact that the share of NIRC is stable. My question to him is simple. Does he think that this stable share has nothing to do with the assumptions about expected returns or GDP growth?
Mr Speaker: Mr Pillai.
Mr Murali Pillai: Mr Speaker, Sir, as far as the issue of it being stable, that is an empirical fact. So, that is something that is being set out in the Budget Statement. So, as far as contributions are concerned, of course, there is a certain projection and is made by reference to a certain framework. So, there is no — I mean, subject to the assumptions inbuilt in the framework, it is not just plucking a figure out of the air.
26 February 2024
https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/#/sprs3topic?reportid=budget-2328
Office of the Leader of the Opposition 