In a recent interview on On the Record with 938 Live, Senior Minister of State for Education and Law, Ms Indranee Rajah said that there are still opportunities even during the global economic gloom. She said, “If you look at it globally, everybody feels that there is a sense of impending change and people aren’t sure how to deal with that change so there’s a holding of breath, wait-and-see attitude. But this is not something that we have not undergone before.”
She emphasised that the Government is working to ‘identify the right strategies and doing the right things to set things off in the right direction’. She added, “So that is actually what the Committee on Future Economy is intended to do, in tandem with the Budget.”
With initiatives such as TechSkills Accelerator, and support from agencies such as SPRING Singapore, Ms Indranee said that there is still a need to find the right kind of formula that allows companies and individuals to be able to use what’s available to experiment, and meet their own specific needs.
Ms Indranee also said that the Singapore Government is open to receiving feedback. “A lot of what we do is really trying to address needs and you cannot address needs if you don’t know what the needs are and you don’t know what the concerns are.”
She added, “You don’t want to be doing things just for the sake of being seen to be doing them.”
On the state of politics in Singapore Ms Indranee said, “I think that our Parliament is still a lot more civil than many other Parliaments. I do think though that some of the arguments put forward by the opposition can be better thought-through and sometimes, the way it has come across is “it’s not good enough, do more”, without putting forward an alternative or a viable alternative… I think we are duty-bound to scrutinise it (alternatives) as well because if you think about it, at the end of the day, if you’re saying that this is a policy, imagine if it were to be implemented.”
She also added that the policies and its alternatives debated about in Parliament affects the people, and their lives. “It should be questioned and subject to scrutiny, just in the same way government policy is. I think that there is room for the opposition in our Parliament to do a bit more in terms of – If you don’t like this suggestion, put forward what you think is a viable alternative so that it can be scrutinised.”
Photo credit: Ms Indranee’s Facebook
