PM Lee Hsien Loong at the Dialogue Session with the Community Leader’s Forum (CLF) 2010 Forward Planning Exercise Participants

Minister Yaacob Ibrahim
Community leaders
Participants in the Forward Planning Exercise
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen

I am very happy to be here this morning for your FPE presentations and to have had a chance just now to have a chat and an exchange with some of the key participants in this exercise. Minister Yaacob has briefed me on the work which the sub-groups have been doing and I am most happy not just at the content of the work, but at the fact that young Malays, successful young Malays, are engaging themselves to come up with new ideas to strengthen the community and our nation.

The Malay/Muslim community has made steady progress over the last decades. We can see this year by year, decade by decade, in a gradually shifting profile which, if you look back ten years, 20 years, adds up to a tremendous change in the community. I will not go through all the statistics because we have put them out from time to time, but just to give you a brief summary of the progress -- in education, we have brought the dropout rate way down. At primary school, the numbers are now negligible. In secondary school, over the last ten years, we have brought the dropout rates down by two-thirds and they are still steadily falling. At the upper levels, at the tertiary education, more Malays are making the grade and we are on target to have the community reach 40 per cent of the students completing tertiary education by 2020. As education improves, so too the profile in the workforce has improved and we see increasing proportions of Malays holding PMET jobs - professionals, management, executives and technical jobs - from 24 per cent, less than a quarter in 1999, a decade ago, to 29 per cent last year. In housing, too, standards have improved. Malays families are making it into bigger dwellings. Now about seven in ten have four-room or bigger HDB flats or private housing. It is a good sign, but at the same time, we have to be careful to watch for financial prudence, as Mendaki says, bijak belanja, and not to over-commit yourselves.

Of course, the community still faces some challenges; all communities do. So we have problems still faced by low-wage workers; we have health issues, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity; we have problems with dysfunctional families, keluarga pincang. We have spoken about them before and I do not want belabour this point today, only to remind everybody that it is important for the community to keep pushing ahead, together with our other races, in a challenging environment.

We see many opportunities for Singapore in the next ten years because around us, Asia will prosper, even though the world economy may have problems. Our own economy is doing well, but it has to do well based on skills in a globalised world, and that means based on educating our young people so that doors will open for them and they will be able to climb up the ladder and find new opportunities for themselves. Those without skills will have a tough time and, therefore, our emphasis must be to make sure that as many of our young people as possible, and even those not so young but still working, have improving skills year by year.

So the Government has been emphasising education and training. Regularly every few years at my National Day Rally speeches, I come back to education and present another angle on it - secondary schools, tertiary education, languages, science and maths, but coming at it from different directions and gradually building up so that we have a first-class system where all our schools are good schools, where all our students have full opportunities, where those who are doing well can go to the limit and those who are having difficulty will get all the help which we can muster, from the government, from the schools, and from the community. And we are also investing in continuing education and training because through CET, our workers can upgrade themselves and improve their lives and their families' lives too.

We also emphasise families as being important because hard as the schools try, as hard as the teachers work, the family's influence on the child is equally if not more important than that. It has to have a nurturing, enriching environment at home. Kids have to have parents who love them, care for them, guide them, discipline them, bring them up properly and therefore give them the best start in life. Therefore we have to work not just with individual students but also with families and with households and with the community, and community organisations therefore play a role. They have strong links to the ground, they can work with these individuals and families and deliver help and advice and encouragement with a warm personal touch.

Therefore, I am very glad that the community leaders have gathered, established ones, experienced ones, veterans as well as new recruits and new volunteers, to come together for this annual community leaders’ forum. It is a successful format for volunteers to touch base, to share ideas and experiences, to collaborate on the way forward and to bring in new people who will join the battle and carry the struggle forward. Many useful programmes have come out from this effort, from the CLF exercise, working with the Malay-Muslim organisations. For example, you have got intensive tuition programmes for the kids who fall behind; you have got outreach and help for the poor families; you have got drug rehabilitation and support for ex-addicts who are trying to come back and get their lives together again.

It is the result of sustained efforts by senior community leaders over many years and I thank and applaud these senior leaders, the older members who have put in years of sweat and toil for the community. They may be old and experienced in years, but they are passionate and I hope many of them are still young at heart. But we also need younger volunteers, people who will commit themselves to the well-being of the community, who will participate in the work, who will grapple with the problems we have been grappling with some success over the years, to understand and learn for themselves how difficult it is but also how we can make progress and we have been making progress through steady and patient effort. And as we bring in new people, so we bring in fresh enthusiasm and imagination to tackle the problems and the challenges we have, both the old problems as well as new issues which arise and new opportunities which open up as the world changes, as our community progresses. Not only do we hope they will come in themselves - either they feel the calling or they may receive a phone call - but I hope they will also place some phone calls and bring in their friends and their peers and that way, widen the net of leaders and strengthen the whole structure of leadership which the community can enjoy.

Leadership renewal is vital to the Malay/Muslim community and to Malay/Muslim organisations, as well as for organisations in many other fields. It may be a big firm, it may be the labour movement and of course also in politics. It cannot happen overnight, but it has to take place systematically and we have to work at it continually to find new people, bring them in, induct them and progressively hand over responsibilities, and entrust them not just with a job but with a mission. We are all not working for ourselves but to serve a larger cause. That is the spirit in which we should all participate, to serve, to groom others and when the time comes, to know that the time has come and to hand over the reins with good grace to a new team.

I know there are many young people keen to get involved. The pool has enlarged because the community has progressed. There are many more young people doing well, many more PMETs, many more pursuing their careers, breaking new ground, asking themselves what can they do, how do they participate? When you read the Berita Harian, do not just read it as something happening in another world, but that this is our community, how can we be part of it? You do not have to be reported in the Berita Harian, but make things happen which the community will benefit from. Many of you are just starting out in life, building careers, raising families. But nevertheless I know you are keen to engage your energies in worthy causes, whether it is helping the less fortunate, improving the environment or building a more gracious society. We are a small country, but because Singapore is small, if you have vision and passion, you can make a difference, you can make things happen and you can do this much more easily than if you were in a large country. If you are in America or Australia, it is such a huge place, you can push and push, it takes a long time to get the country moving. But in Singapore, five million people of whom three-plus million citizens, you push hard, you have energy and drive, people will notice, something will happen.

So I hope more young people will come forward and contribute their ideas and their time and their energy to society. Malay/Muslim organisations should find ways to tap this resource and therefore stay vigorous, stay abreast of the changes, and so I hope the organisations will proactively attract young members and constantly self-renew themselves. I am glad to see that some MMOs are doing this and many young people have been involved in this Forward Planning Exercise. You have had four sub-groups on youth, on family, on education and on employability and you all have been hard at work since last December, and this morning you had some presentations on what the groups had been doing. You have come up with quite a number of interesting ideas. For example, there is a proposal to have a mobile hub for community learning, which is a mobile centre where parents and children can borrow educational games and resources. And we can have community learning coaches who will be available on hand to advise parents on their children's development, their difficulties, and give them some tips how to guide their kids, how to bring up their kids. There is another proposal for a Community Talent Development Programme, to provide promising young Malay Muslim professionals with training exposure and skill sets and nurture young leaders with keen social conscience who are ready to contribute to community and national organisations. As Minister Yaacob said, I learnt a new word just now, kepedulian.

We should not leave it there because if we really care about it, then it is not just a matter of coming up with the ideas but to carry it forward and try them out and implement the more successful ideas. Therefore, I am happy to see that there is also a proposal for CLF-Labs to come out from this Forward Planning Exercise. This is a proposal to give support to youth-led organizations and other informal groups which may get together and want to implement the ideas. Mendaki will fund them, will assist in the administration and other implementation matters, the overheads, so that you can focus on doing the work. We will link you up with the relevant agencies or experts, people who have knowledge in this and can guide you and help you to avoid pitfalls and mistakes. In brief, to help the young people do good work and succeed. I hope this will grow and more young people will come up with more good ideas and volunteer to make things better. I support this approach too, and the government agencies, you can be assured, will extend you full cooperation.

I commend all the participants of the Forward Planning Exercise for a job well-started and now please proceed. It shows that the Malay/Muslim community has initiative and resolve and is determined to tackle its challenges and is able to bring in energetic new blood to work at them. The Government will support you and I am confident of the community's resilience and continuing progress to achieve its vision of a community of excellence.