'Making people upset sometimes': Desmond Lee on 'difficult decisions' about land use for housing, conservation
ST GALLEN, Switzerland - Making decisions on Singapore’s land use and infrastructure is a balancing act between the needs of today’s generation and future generations, Minister for National Development Desmond Lee said to an international audience on Thursday.
Responding to a question from a British audience member at the 52nd St Gallen Symposium held in Switzerland, Mr Lee explained that there were hard trade-offs in Singapore owing to its small size, making everything “magnified and intense”.
“Ultimately, (it’s about) balancing the needs of today’s generation and tomorrow’s generation, and telling them that yes, we have to control the eligibility for certain facilities and access to housing, because we need to get some land for people not yet born, who can’t vote, who can’t speak up, and keeping optionalities for them,” he said.
Mr Lee was speaking at a plenary session at the St Gallen University on thinking long term in an age of “perma crisis”, following the opening ceremony of the symposium that brings together leaders from business, politics and science.
The other panellists were Deputy Mayor of Huon Valley in Tasmania Toby Thorpe and former Future Generations Commissioner for Wales Sophie Howe. The session was moderated by Bertelsmann Stiftung vice-president and political scientist Cathryn Cluver Ashbrook.
Mr Lee referenced a saying about how people do not inherit the earth from their ancestors, but merely borrow it from their children.
“Sometimes it means making difficult decisions – whether it’s land use, and land use versus housing, land use versus conservation, land use versus healthcare, making people upset sometimes, because it is in the interest of some other group or another generation,” he said.
To illustrate the scarcity of land in Singapore, Mr Lee said that Singapore had two-thirds the population of Switzerland squeezed into less than 2 per cent of its land area.
He said: “We’re a city-state, which means there is no Plan B, there’s no alternative city. The city is the country and (whether) the city succeeds or fails, that determines the fate of the nation.”
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An audience member felt that the panellists’ approaches to crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change seemed “technocratic”, and asked what love or the heart had to do with their decision-making process.
Mr Lee recalled incidents during the pandemic when life-or-death decisions were made, saying: “There were many occasions where it was not the logic or the instruction, it was the sense that we were fighting this together.”
He cited one incident when the Government had to persuade the staff of nursing homes to quarantine with their patients amid the circuit breaker in 2020.
Mr Lee said a decision was made to go to the facilities to speak directly to the front-liners.
“When we arrived, they were waving at us from the different floors, and it was very emotional,” he said, visibly moved.
“It was like, ‘We are asking a lot from you, and we don’t know if it’s the right decision, please trust us, we’ll be with you.’ We got the thumbs up, we got tears and (were) none the worse for wear, thankfully,” he said.
Mr Lee added: “It is not just about the technocratic decision-making. Crisis or no crisis, a decision is an act of faith based on the best-known data that you have and, working with your public officers and the private sector, you make a call and you stand or fall with it.”
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