Mr Deputy Speaker, Sir, first, I thank the Members of Parliament for their contributions. The PAP Members of Parliament who spoke supported the Bill. They have not raised any substantive points of disagreement or queries for me to answer. They all support the spirit behind the amendments of the GRC proposal as well as the mechanism of the GRC proposal. The Member for Bo Wen raised three questions which I would like to reply. One, if the population changes in terms of its composiiton, whether there will be changes to the formula for distributing the seats amongst the Malays and Indians and other minority communities. The answer must be yes. But, as I said in my speech, I do not expect that the population composition will change to any significant extent over the next 20 years. So the formula which we have will remain stable for about 20 years. Thereafter, maybe a revision is in order and, of course, Parliament at that point of time has got to debate and see how the allocation will be changed. Would the GRCs be spread across the whole of Singapore? This is a matter for the Elections Department to decide. I would expect the answer to be so. I would not expect GRCs to be concentrated in one area of Singapore, say, for example, the eastern part of Singapore. I would expect them to be distributed throughout Singapore - GRCs in the east, GRCs in the west, north, south, central. Who decides on the allocation between Malays and the other communities of GRCs? The President decides. But the President would have, in this case, to take the advice of the Government on which GRCs will be for Malays and which GRCs for Indians and other minority communities. The Member for Potong Pasir, true to form, opposed the Bill. If you refer to his Second Reading speech, which I did last night, you will find that it was exactly the same speech which he made. The same points were made in January. He has not advanced his arguments further. No new arguments and no new data to back old arguments. He cited again the example of Cyprus to warn us that we are falling into the trap of institutionalizing racialism through the GRC proposal. The Member is less than honest. He is telling us half-truths because he has not told this House that the Cyprus Constitution provided for a system where the Greek Cypriots voted for Greek Cypriots and the Turks for the Turks. When the British gave independence to Cyprus, that was the arrangement for power sharing. The Greek Cypriots and the Turk Cypriots fought it out and they finally agreed on a constitution which distributed power in accordance with the proportion in the population. Not only were seats in Parliament distributed as per the constitution but seats in civil service, in jobs, and right down to broadcasting. I referred to the constitution when I was working on my Second Reading speech. The bargaining went down to details. In broadcasting, the number of hours for broadcast in Greek, in Turkish, was spelt out in the constitution. But that was necessary because they could not agree otherwise on how to share power. But in 1963, the Greeks, because they are in the majority (forming about 70% of the population) decided to change things in their favour - what I call "tyranny of the majority over the minority". The Turkish Cypriots rioted and that led to intervention by the Turks. Far from institutionalizing racialism in our Constitution, we are trying to institutionalize multi-racialism. We are not proposing a concept whereby Malays vote for Malays, Chinese for Chinese, Indians for Indians. The Cyprus constitution which the Member for Potong Pasir cited is similar to the proposal by PKMS - a proposal which he himself has rejected, and that is, a constitution which allows voters to vote along communal lines. So this fine distinction between the Cyprus situation and ours must be understood. If you do not understand this, you may think that maybe we are making a mistake. We are entrenching racialism in our Constitution and we will end up the way of Cyprus which the Member for Potong Pasir feared. No such thing. We will not end up the way of Cyprus because we are getting the communities to come together, to accommodate one another, and for the leaders to stand together as a team. Next, he advised us to look at the USA model, melting pot, where Americans of different races, religions, cultures get together and somehow through the melting pot an American citizen emerges. I do not quite understand the meaning of "melting pot" because watching the current elections in the US for the next President, it is quite clear that Jesse Jackson has got no chance of winning and becoming the next President. His support came from predominantly black areas. Of course, some whites supported him but it is clear that his support came mainly from areas which are predominantly black. If you study the pattern in other parts of the United States, as the Member for Jalan Kayu pointed out, race has not been blurred. So even in the United States, this melting pot concept is only an airy- fairy ideal. When it comes down to real politics, race plays a very important part, and it still does in the US. He then advised us to follow the Swiss model. The Member for Potong Pasir has got to decide whether we use the Swiss model or the American model because the two models are different. One is the so-called melting pot model. The other one accepts the differences between communities. I think his suggestion that we follow the Swiss model is correct. I have also, before this, done some in-depth research into the Swiss model. The spirit in which the Swiss organized their political affairs applies to us in Singapore. Since we last discussed the GRC proposal in this House to provide for election of MPs on a team basis, the more we discuss the more convinced I am that we are on the right track. Soon after our debate in January, the Swiss Ambassador sent our Prime Minister an article on "Federalism in Switzerland". It is written by Vernon Bogdanor, a Fellow and Senior Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford. The experience of the Swiss, as analysed by the author in the article, reinforces our conviction of the soundness of our GRC proposal. The author made three illuminating points which are relevant to Singapore. One, Switzerland succeeds as a politically stable country because it is a state based upon the acceptance of differences between ethnic groups. Acceptance of differences, not a melting pot idea. If you are a Malay, we accept you as a Malay. If you are an Indian we accept you as an Indian. If you are a German Swiss, the French Swiss accepts him as a German Swiss. Two, in a plural society divided by language, ethnicity, religion or race, the Westminster Model view of democracy of majority rule has to be modified. Three, in a plural society, it is the spirit of the constitution, the informal arrangements, the political culture, that will make or break the society, not the formal institutions. It is the spirit behind the constitution that is important, the informal arrangements, not as in the case of Cyprus, the formal arrangement of power sharing between Greeks and Turks. Switzerland has a population of 6(r) million. It has four linguistic groups - German, spoken by nearly three-quarters of Swiss citizens; French, spoken by one-fifth; Italian spoken by 4.5%; and Romanche, by just under 1%. So four distinct linguistic groups. The population is more or less equally divided between two main religious groups - Protestant and Catholic. So like Singapore, it is confronted with the problem of building a nation out of disparate groups. We all know that Switzerland is a peaceful country, politically stable. But it has not always been so. Before the First World War, Switzerland was torn by religious and linguistic tensions - wars between Protestants and Catholics, between German Swiss and French Swiss. And it was indeed the existence of such tensions which drove them to seek solutions to their problems based on the acceptance of their differences. To quote from the article: 'The Swiss Confederation is based upon the cantons, upon territory - it is a territorial state, not, as with Belgium, a state based on language; nor, as with the Irish Republic, a state based upon religion. It is a state based upon the acceptance and entrenchment of differences, not upon a melting-pot conception of pluralism, which seeks to ignore them.' When the Protestants defeated the Catholics in 1847 in a religious war, they did not push the Catholics down the mountain side. They established a constitution which eventually gave the defeated Catholics equal weight. The author added: 'Swiss nationality cannot be linguistic, religious or racial; it must, rather, be founded on a subjective political fact - the feeling of belonging to a single Swiss nation. Thus Swiss nationality depends upon competitive co -existence between groups, and is not compatible with the dominance of any single linguistic or religious group.' Contrast the success of the Swiss example with the failure of examples in Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka. There the respective Protestant and Sinhalese majorities tried to use their political dominance, derived from their numerical strength, to impose their will on the respective minority communities. The result is violence, strife, partition. The GRC proposal of electing three MPs from at least two different communities as a team recognizes and accepts that there are differences between us, even though we are all Singaporeans. These are differences which even over time will not disappear because each community does not want it to disappear. Each community wants to retain its own ethnic identity. The author made a point that the Westminster Model of democracy based on majority rule is not suited for a society divided by ethnic differences. To quote him again: 'Switzerland has carried to the limit its departure from the Westminster Model view of democracy as majority rule. Such a Model may be appropriate in a society in which the main cleavages are based on class or other socio-economic factors, so that there can be a fairly regular alternation of power, or at least the prospect of such alternation. But the Westminster Model has less to offer to a plural society, one divided by language, ethnicity, religion or race; it thus has little relevance to the problem of how to secure democracy in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Belgium, Sri Lanka, South Africa - or Switzerland.' Do you remember the poignant letter from President Jayewardene, which I read out to this House sometime in January? After years of dealing with the problem of civil strife in Sri Lanka, the President came to the same conclusion as the Swiss - that the Westminster Model of democracy based on majority rule by a majority community cannot work in a plural society. We are a plural society comprising people of different ethnicity, religion, race and language. We are in this sense like Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Sri Lanka and Switzerland. We will be wise to learn from the experience of other plural societies, the successful as well as the less successful societies. The GRC proposal is our institutional mechanism to ensure that the minority communities are able to share power with the majority community. But more important than this formal arrangement, this formal institutional change which we are making to our Constitution and Parliamentary Elections Act is the spirit behind it. A constitution, declared Charles de Gaulle, in his press conference on 31st January 1964 "consists of a conception (esprit), institutions and their application". Three parts - the conception or the spirit, institutions and their application. The conception is the spirit in which a country organizes its political authority so as to combine freedom with order. You want freedom, you want order, you have got to have a constitution with the required spirit to allow you to achieve this - combination of freedom with order. Swiss democracy, based on a federal system, works because of the spirit, not because of the formal arrangements or formal institutions. Observed Vernon Bogdanor, the author of the article, I quote: 'It is impossible now to understand Swiss federation by looking at the constitutional framework alone. Moreover, institutional mechanisms must be understood and analysed in terms of the often informal arrangements characteristic of Swiss political culture.' Switzerland enjoys a high degree of consensus about the fundamentals of social and economic life. The Swiss search for agreement, not differences. Again, to quote from the author: 'The essence of citizenship is the search for agreement, with decisions being made, not by majority rule, but through different pluralities.' Search for agreement, not search for differences. The change to our Constitution and Parliamentary Elections Act to provide for election of MPs on a team basis is putting into place an institutional mechanism to ensure a multi-racial Parliament. On its own, it will notensure success in building up or strengthening our multi-racial society. It is a formal institutional arrangement. For us to succeed, we must have the same spirit as the Swiss to search for consensus, to work through informal as much as formal arrangements, to make every citizen, whichever community, he belongs to, feel that he is a Singaporean.