Leon Perera: Are we Singaporeans more confident or more fearful about the future?

SINGAPORE: On the eve of the roll-out of Budget 2026, former Workers’ Party MP Leon Perera posted on Facebook a photo of a letter he wrote that was published in the Straits Times Forum in June 2012.

In it, Mr Perera had called for “targeted social expenditures as an investment, so as to cultivate more confident Singaporeans and thus raise productivity, innovation, entrepreneurship, fertility, and other important things that we need to meet the challenges of the future head on.”

Nearly 14 years after the letter was published, he is asking if the transformations he called for have actually occurred. He pointed out that the Singaporeans are facing even more challenges today, which he summarized as good growth, geopolitics, and global warming.

He then went on to ask if Singaporeans are “more confident or more fearful about the future” and whether the breakthroughs needed in innovation, entrepreneurship, fertility, and so on that would drive sustainable, productivity-led growth have been achieved.

Mr Perera opined that rates of anxiety are higher, especially among the young, with their concerns over employment, salaries, housing, and affordability. He added that there are also many among them who are concerned over the added financial burden due to geopolitics and global warming, as these may “crowd out other Budgetary priorities.”

He also noted the challenges small and medium enterprises (SMEs) face, adding that the number of businesses closing has become alarming, especially in the food and beverage sector, amid the high wealth and income inequality that erodes a sense of solidarity among Singaporeans at a time when global conditions make it more necessary than ever.

“While short-term mitigation measures are necessary and some policy tweaks have been good, time is running out to choose deeper, longer-term reforms,” he wrote, calling for “bolder measures to support entrepreneurs, bigger investments in specialized skills training, more capacity and access to career conversion programs, smaller class sizes in schools and much else besides.”

These are all needed so that Singapore can go beyond addressing present problems and move toward better conditions that will ensure a better future, he wrote.

“To get this done, we don’t need only incremental tweaks done by good managers, as important as these are. We need genuinely transformative leaders driven by conviction and vision – in both Government and Opposition,” Mr Perera wrote, adding a link to the first speech he gave in Parliament in 2016 about “a confident Singapore.”

Mr Perera served as a Non-Constituency Member of Parliament from 2015 to 2020, and as an MP for Aljunied GRC from 2020 to 2023. He stepped down from his position in July of that year. /TISG

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