In an interview with Deal Street Asia, former PAP MP Inderjit has warned of dire consequences for Singapore under PAP’s brick and mortar economic model.
Inderjit on PAP being the problem:
“It’s scary because we aren’t changing fast enough, especially if you look at disruption by technology and the effects of globalisation. You’re seeing massive disruption … reports and research I’m reading indicates we’ve got to change more rapidly”.
“We should have shifted gears 10-15 years ago and focused on supporting local enterprises that can be grown into large global corporates. The whole bottleneck is the government’s economic strategy and if this doesn’t change, then it’s too late. By 2030, 50% of the jobs as we know now would be gone.”
“The CFE was something that everyone was really looking forward to … show the government realised the changes needed for a future economy. When the report did come out, it was just many old initiatives being rehashed.”
On PAP’s ‘Smart Nation’:
” … we’re stifling our move towards being a Smart Nation. I’ve been in London, Paris and Israel and I’ve seen the momentum in their own equivalents of the Smart Nation initiatives. The world has caught up and overtaken us.”
On PAP’s upside-down/terbalik system:
“China allowed the private sector to develop all these tools. Once they were working, it built regulations around it to accommodate them. In Singapore, we are starting with many rules and regulations, and the private sector is facing difficulty in trying to innovate. The regulator sandboxes are not realistic.”
Inderjit has actually stated what many Singaporeans already know. Problem has always been the self-checking PAP has chosen to bury its head in the sand.
The author blogs at likedatosocanmeh. We thank him for allowing us to reproduce his piece on The Independent.
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https://theindependent.sg.sg/heng-identifies-next-phase-after-industry-road-maps/