Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to participate in this debate. I would like to say, at the outset, that I thought that the presentation of the Budget by the Finance Minister was an extremely good presentation, and that it is a Budget which is deserving of praise. I do not think it is necessary for me to highlight all the good points about it, because so many of my colleagues in this Chamber have done so before me. So, what I intend to do is just to raise three areas in which I have specific comments. The first is, of course, my concern that it does not sufficiently address the needs of the SMEs. For that, I had prepared a segment, but here I want to thank Mr Inderjit Singh for saying some of the things which I had considered and many more things which I had not, and I would like to endorse what he has said and fully support that. The second point is on the GST offset. I understand the need for the offset. Government financial policy is not like Newton's law of gravity. It is not a situation where what goes up must come down. When you are trying to balance a budget, clearly if something comes down, something else must go up, and I think we fully understand the need for it. The only thing though about the GST offset is that it is, in its very nature, a short-term solution. It does not address the problem which is really the employability of older workers, especially those who have a lower level of education. I have heard it said in this House that, ultimately, we hope that with the restructuring and with the financial and fiscal incentives, in due course, the economy will recover and there will be jobs. This is true, but the way we are trying to restructure our economy is to attract the high value-added industries. And for the older workers with lower levels of education, it will still be extremely difficult for them to find employment. So, as far as this segment of people is concerned, the GST offset is a short-term solution but, ultimately, we have to find a way to make them employable and keep them employable. In that respect, I was encouraged somewhat by hearing the Minister for Manpower talk about the skills upgrading programme and the amount of money that we spend on that. This is something which I think needs to be taken further. The second thing, of course, is to change the employers' mindsets. I am not sure that subsidies alone will do that, but it is a mindset change that employers have to go through. Thirdly, to identify certain types of industries where these older workers would be more suitable to participate in. But, clearly, we have to do something in that regard. That was my second point on GST offset. My third point is on the falling birth rates. Financial policy is wonderful if we are planning to build the economy, we are planning for the future. Of course, if we have falling birth rates, there may not be many Singaporeans left by that time to enjoy the fruits of what we are planning now. I had noticed that in the Budget Statement, no specific things were put in the Budget to address this concern. The Prime Minister, at the opening of Parliament, had very kindly responded to my plea for housing for singles and, in the course of addressing that, he said that the greater problem was the falling birth rates. Our birth rate in 1988 was 1.
96. It has been on the downward trend since then. In 1999, it was 1.48; in 2000, it was 1.59; and in 2001, it was an all-time low of 1.
42. And we have to ask ourselves why this is the case. Partly, it is a personal decision. But, partly, I think it is also a result of the somewhat incoherent policy that we have had in trying to encourage the birth rates to go up, and I will explain exactly why I say our policy has been incoherent. There are two groups of people we have to look at when we are looking at falling birth rates. One is the group of people who choose not to get married at all. The second group is those who are married but choose not to have children. And we must never confuse the two groups, because their reasons are quite different. I will take the second group first, which is married couples. When dealing with married couples and encouraging them to have children, the problem with our policy is that the measures so far have been essentially financial or fiscal. We have treated what is, by its nature, a social problem as if it is an economic one, and that is why we have not been successful. Because Singapore, as a country, is excellent at economic policy. We are very good at fiscal measures. And over the years, we have restructured, managed, boosted, designed, tweaked, pruned our economy using financial and tax incentives. We have pioneer tax status, we have ERP, we have car ownership, and somewhere along the line, we have come to believe that Singaporeans have an almost pavlovian response to cash stimuli. We put a monetary incentive and Singaporeans will react. That is fine when, ultimately, the end objective is profit. They will react in that way. But when the end objective is a social thing like having children, then money has very little to do with it. And if we want to address the problem, we have to ask ourselves what are the things that people actually think about when they decide whether or not to have children. There are various reasons. One, they look to see whether or not they are ready, because having babies is a heavy responsibility. And, increasingly, we find amongst young couples that they actually want to spend some time with each other first before they actually have children, and that is why they put off the decision to have children. Of course, if they wait too long, they could run into medical problems, but that is another area altogether which I do not intend to touch on. Secondly, it is whether they can manage their work commitments if they have a child. This is perhaps less so for men who are expected to be the breadwinner. But I think we constantly underestimate the desire of women to actually continue working even if they have children. So we have to take this into account if we want women to have children. The other thing that they take into account also is time and stress. The pressures and demands of work in Singapore are enormous. This pressure has been exacerbated by the use of information technology. Generally speaking, Singaporeans have very little rest. We cannot escape, because there is SMS, there is e-mail and there are all sorts of things. We just cannot switch off, and work follows us everywhere - back home, to the office, in our car, when we are on holiday, work comes with us. And with all this kind of pressure, people are so busy just trying to live their own lives, let alone think about having children and worry about that additional responsibility. These are the three main factors. The other thing about our policy regarding financial incentives to have children is that it has a very off-putting effect to Singaporeans. It is off-putting because many of them feel that when we do this, it is as though I give you money, I pop it in and out comes a baby. They are not baby-making machines. It does not work that way. It is not correct to think that financial or fiscal measures will address the problem. So then, what will? I applied some thought to this. I certainly do not have all the solutions, but there are a couple of ideas which I think may help. One is a more coherent approach towards the issue of maternity leave. There are currently two pieces of legislation on maternity leave. First, there is the Employment Act which provides for two months of maternity leave for employees who are covered by the Act. I have no issue with two months of leave. But when you look at the Employment Act, the provision was enacted at a time when it was a stop-at-two policy. So that allows for paid maternity leave for the first and second child, and it provides for protection against termination of employment during a woman's maternity leave for first and second child only. Then somewhere along the line, we decided that having a third child will be good. So we have the Children Development Co-Savings Act. What that Act does is that it allows for paid maternity leave for a third child and it imports the provision of the Employment Act. So it provides for protection against termination of employment for the third child. The thing is that the Employment Act does not cover professionals, executives, managerial or confidential staff. That means women professionals, executives and secretaries are excluded. They do not have the protection of paid maternity leave. I know in the market many employers do follow the Employment Act, but it is not compulsory for them to do so for the non-Employment Act group of women workers. This leads to a very inconsistent situation because for Employment Act women, first and second child, it is protected in the sense that a woman cannot get terminated when she is on paid maternity leave. And for all women under the Children Development Co-Savings Act, they get paid maternity leave. But for women executives, for their first and second child, they are not protected, because legislation does not provide that they have maternity leave there, and certainly not for the fourth, fifth, sixth child. So we have got this very incoherent policy. The thing about maternity leave is that it is not supposed to be regulating the number of babies one churns out. The thing about maternity leave is that at the end of nine months of carrying a child - mind you, I have no personal experience, but I have it on good authority that it is very tiring - the woman needs some rest, and she needs some time with the child to bond, and that is the purpose of maternity leave. The trouble is that we use paid maternity leave as a means to regulate the number of babies that a woman has, but that misses the purpose altogether. And I think if our target is to encourage more women professionals to have babies, this is an area that needs to be looked at. The other thing I should mention is that maternity leave should be across the board, not just for first, second, third child, but for any child, and it should also be for unmarried mothers. I know that, as a matter of policy, we do not wish to encourage people to have children outside of marriage. That is true, but mistakes do happen. These things do happen and we cannot ignore it. And if the purpose ultimately at the end of the day is to allow a mother some time to rest, allow her some time with her child, then I think we should have maternity leave for this group of people too. I do not think if we had paid maternity leave for unmarried mothers, that it would suddenly result in a rash of children born outside of wedlock. Because I think the societal pressures are still strong enough that people would prefer to have children within marriage and not outside. So that is the first thing that would help. The second thing is greater childcare facilities. What is the one thing that will make a woman want to have more children? If she has a child and she wants to work, the thing that would really help is her feeling that the child is looked after while she is at work. There are many mothers who choose to give up their jobs. That is not a problem. If they are happy to do that, that is okay. They stay at home and look after their children. But like I said, we have under-estimated the desire of many Singapore women to want to work. If we force them to choose between having a child and maintaining a career, they may very well choose the latter, and that results in a falling birth rate. So something that would help them is better childcare facilities. And knowing Singapore parents, it is not just childcare facilities where they can just drop their children, and that is it. It would have to be childcare facilities that are good in terms of the people who look after the children, the kind of not only teaching but care that they can give their children, and also the age at which they look after the children. Because now, most childcare centres would be happy to take them in at two years old, some may be at 18 months, but certainly not many that I know of that would take them in at perhaps six months. In the Scandinavian countries, I think they do take them on from six months onwards. So if we want to increase the birth rate, that is something that has to be looked at. That is the first category of people - the married couples. Then there is the group of singles who do not want to get married. And we have to ask ourselves why this is the case. At the Opening of Parliament, in his speech, the Prime Minister identified the two groups where there seem to be the largest problem. For single men, it was those that have secondary school level education and below. And for single women, the largest proportion of the unmarried women was the graduates. What this suggests is that non-graduate women are marrying either graduate men or non-graduate men. So they have a larger pool to select from. And for the graduate men, it also suggests that they are marrying either graduate women or non-graduate women. So they also have a larger pool to select from. And that is why we have the two ends, which is the non-graduate men with secondary education and below and, of course, at the other end of the spectrum, graduate women. Again, the reasons why these two groups tend to remain single are different. For the men in the lower education group, I think it is more difficult for them to marry someone with a much higher education qualification. And if the women with the same or similar education qualification with them are marrying upwards, so to speak, that leaves them with little choice but to look outwards and perhaps to non-Singapore women. But if they do that, they run smack into the SIR. Because during my meet-the-people sessions, I have many men who come to me to ask for PRs or citizenships for their wives, or they have difficulty getting permission to marry in some cases. I fully understand that we need to be very cautious in terms of immigration policy because we have to be quite careful about where our society is going. But if we do want to look after the needs of this group, then I think we do have to examine the criterion for immigration policy afresh and see whether there is a way in which we can strike some balance so that at least for this group, they will have a certain measure of access, shall we say, to spouses. For the single women, it is quite different. Although it has been put as the largest group being graduate women, I think the "true" group is actually career women, not so much graduate women, because we can have non-graduate women who are also career women. What has happened, I think, is over the years, there has been a change in gender expectations of one another which has led to this current situation. For the men, they have not really had to change their own roles. Forty years ago, a man was seen as a breadwinner, a protector and a provider, and today he still sees himself in that light. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. For women, 40 years ago, they may not necessarily have seen themselves as career women. What has happened in the 40 years is that they have actually come a long way. We have education, and because we have a meritocratic system, we have been able to advance in terms of careers. So a lot of changes have happened in women's life over the last 40 years and their perception of themselves has changed, and the perception of the role that men play has changed as well. For women, they see the men today less as a protector and a provider, although I think many still do. But many see them as a person whom they can look to for their emotional or intellectual needs. By this, what I mean is that in the past, many women would have married for financial security. Today, because they can actually earn for themselves, this is not the reason to marry anymore. They have the option of not marrying, which means that they do not look for a man for financial security. They look to him and would consider marrying him only if he meets their emotional and intellectual needs. And I am not sure that this problem has been sufficiently identified or realised because the way we treat the problem is one of, "Oh, well, you know, maybe they are not meeting one another enough. Maybe they don't have opportunities for interaction." So I asked a friend of mine, who is single, after the Prime Minister's speech, and I said, "Well, you know, you think it would help if you get to meet more men?" And she looked at me with a slightly incredulous expression and said, "What will I talk to him about?" She obviously had this difficulty. So that is actually the real area of the problem. And if it is something that we want to address, then this is what we should be looking at, not so much of fiscal measures. The role that SDU and SDS play in helping people to meet, I am sure, is helpful, but it does not actually address the crux of the problem. Just a brief word on the role of SDU and SDS. I am not sure that the public actually appreciates the distinction of one organisation for graduates and another for non-graduates. Because what we are actually doing is sending out a message that there are two classes of society. Singaporeans have been born and bred to believe that we are a meritocratic system and, in many respects, we are equal and there are equal opportunities for all. Certainly, there are many graduate women I know of who do not appreciate the distinction, and they automatically switch off when they receive something from SDU. This is not to denigrate the efforts of SDU whose officers work extremely hard and are very diligent. I know because when I became an MP, I received a packet on dating tips which I have not yet made use of. But they do work very hard. But they are fighting against something which is not within their control. So if we do wish to address the problem, I think maybe this distinction between graduates and non-graduates should be done away with. And we should see Singaporeans as a whole, as equal people. With that, Sir, I support the motion.