My journey in Parliament as your NCMP, together with fellow PSP NCMP Hazel Poa, began on 24th August 2020 when we were sworn in as parliamentarians.
This wouldn’t have been possible without the strong support from many Singaporeans. Voters, residents of West Coast, members and volunteers of PSP.
Thank you for sharing this journey with me. Let us progress with compassion, together. For Country, for people! This marks the beginning of a new chapter for the PSP in our journey to make lives better for Singaporeans.
In my maiden speech in parliament on 1 September 2020, I stated that PSP supported an open economy and society. Truth be told, given our limited size, it is the default choice. Any difference in opinion should be about how we can achieve that. One difference is that PSP believes that Compassion should be added to the policy equation.
Today, we see an urgent need to rebalance the current foreign talent policy championed by the Government. This is because the Government’s approach did not give sufficient consideration to our citizens.
We are a small city state. Any form of discrimination will be felt when the composition of foreigners increases beyond a certain threshold, often at the expense of our citizenry. At the same time there must be a process in place to ensure localization and skills transfer to our workforce.
All citizens are and should be treated equally in Singapore, as espoused in our National Pledge. Whether they are locally born or naturalised, once they become Singaporean citizens, they should be treated as one of us, no more no less.
As a nation, we have prided ourselves with a high degree of openness to foreign talent and necessarily so. Calling for more emphasis to develop Singaporean talent to lead our businesses is not a statement against foreigners amongst us but rather a grim reminder that we do not undermine or shortchange our local workforce.
The foreign talents in our midst who are considering citizenship would also take comfort from the fact that we have policies that safeguard existing citizens because they too might be at the receiving end of such policies in the future.
I sincerely hope the debate on creating better opportunities for our citizens will continue, without insinuations and casting aspersions on the intent. While I advocate that current processes adopted by the Government need rehashing, I am against Singaporeans perpetuating personal attacks on Mr Piyush Gupta or any others because they are just following the policies.
Singaporeans deserve better.
