Here goes (from CNA):
SINGAPORE : Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said Singapore has to
continue to distinguish itself from its neighbours by having better
standards of governance.
And key to achieving this is a corruption-free government.
Otherwise, he said, Singapore will degrade and decline.
Speaking at a forum on "Singapore in the 21st century", attended by
1,800 Nanyang Technological University (NTU) students on Thursday,
Mr Lee added that the situation in Myanmar looked
"troublesome".
At the start of the forum, Mr Lee warned of the main setback for
Singapore - unexpected turn of events.
He said because the prospects for the next 5-10 years are
favourable to the country, Singaporeans tend to be complacent and
ignore warning signs that things could go wrong suddenly.
"A first warning was the sudden drop in the Dow Jones Index of the
New York stock market in August. The losses spread right across the
world's stock markets. They recovered only when the US Federal
Reserve Board reduced its discount rate by 50 basis points to boost
confidence in the market and increase liquidity," said MM
Lee.
"But the underlying problem has not gone away. The sub-prime
mortgages problem is still not cleaned up. These were high risk
loans to people who did not have the means to repay. Now there are
nagging worries: commodity prices are rising - oil, gold, corn,
wheat, iron, coal... Inflation is up.
"If the US consumer, suffering from reduced house values, loses his
appetite for consumption, there will be a downturn in the US
economy. That will affect the export-driven economies of China and
the rest of East Asia."
While Asia looks promising, there are problems in the immediate
region. Myanmar, he said, can be a destabilising factor.
Said Mr Lee: "ASEAN leaders realise that if we have volatile and
unstable neighbours, they will destabilise the whole region. Hence
the common reactions from ASEAN leaders, foreign ministers,
presidents and prime ministers are that of sorrow and revulsion,
that Myanmar's generals have again used armed forces against monks
and civilians who are demonstrating peacefully because they are
suffering from deprivation due to their poor economic
conditions.
"ASEAN leaders know that if the situation in Myanmar continues to
deteriorate, there must come a breaking point when much more brutal
force will again be necessary to put their people down.
"We must try our best to help stabilise Myanmar. Singapore is at
the very heart of Asean. An unstable Myanmar is a time bomb in the
whole region."
Turning to the challenges that Singapore faces, Mr Lee said that
when he and his colleagues started out, they did not know what
branding meant.
All they knew was that Singapore had to be different from the way
the neighbouring countries were being run, and that the country had
to make up for the lack of resources to survive.
So Mr Lee said he and his team set out to build up a clean,
corruption-free, secure and safe system, and a government which was
effective and efficient, and one which welcomed investors and
business.
"We had to get the big pieces right - national solidarity, not
racial, religion or language strife. Hence the emphasis on racial
and religious harmony, the mixing of all the races as we rebuild
the city, with everybody sharing the same HDB blocks," said Mr
Lee.
"We avoided clashes over languages. We would have brought troubles
if we had chosen Chinese as our working language and thus
disadvantaged the other races. We chose English - a neutral
language with no special advantage to any race - as the working
language, but we keep our mother tongues," he added.
As for the future, Mr Lee stressed that it depends on every
Singaporean to realise that the country always has to be
different.
Singapore has to have better governance compared to its neighbours.
This will ensure that Singapore survives the competition against
neighbours who have a wealth of natural resources, larger
territories and bigger populations. - CNA /ls
