REACH (Telegram) 14 - What are your views on the National Day Rally speech? How can we continue to keep Singapore strong and united as we reset our policies for a renewed social compact?

(SK)

19 Aug 2024 (10am - 7pm)

REACH (Telegram)

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 9:45 AM]

Dear contributors,

Welcome back! 😊

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The topic will be posted shortly. 

Thank you. 

Megan 😊

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 10:01 AM]

📢 Topic 📢 

Prime Minister Lawrence Wong delivered his maiden National Day Rally speech on Sunday (Aug 18), announcing measures as part of what he described as a "reset" of policies to realise a "refreshed Singapore Dream".

PM Wong said Singapore needs a renewed social compact where every Singaporean feels there is hope. It is also where all citizens, even the most disadvantaged, know that they can get a fair shot in life and can get ahead if they make the effort and work hard, he said as he outlined enhancements in areas such as families, jobs, housing and education.

💬 What are your views on the National Day Rally speech? How can we continue to keep Singapore strong and united as we reset our policies for a renewed social compact?

📌 Shared parental care leave and mandatory paternity leave 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Parents will get an additional 10 weeks of shared parental leave, to be shared by both spouses. This will replace the current arrangement where husbands can share up to four weeks of their wives’ 16 weeks of maternity leave.

The new initiative will start with six weeks for babies born from April 1, 2025, and be increased to the full 10 weeks a year later, said PM Wong.

And while paternity leave had been doubled from two to four weeks earlier in 2024, employers had discretion whether to offer the additional time off. From April 1, 2025, this will become mandatory.

📌 SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support scheme 👷🏽

A new SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support scheme will give temporary financial support to those who have lost their job.

These workers will get up to $6,000 over up to six months while they go for training, career coaching and job matching.

📌 Increased housing grants for lower-income, priority access for singles 🏘️

The Enhanced CPF Housing Grant, which offers lower-income couples up to $80,000 to get their first homes, will be increased.

Singles applying for Build-To-Order (BTO) flats will get priority when buying a home near their parents from mid-2025. Currently, married children and their parents who are buying new flats to live with or near each other get priority access to BTO flats. This will soon be extended to all parents and their children – married or single.

📌 Revamp of Gifted Education Programs (GEP) ✨

The Gifted Education Programme (GEP) will be replaced with a new approach for high-ability learners in primary schools. Instead, each primary school will have its own programmes to "stretch" students in their areas of strength and interest, and these students will remain in the school.

📌 Higher Mother Tongue Learning 📖

More students will be able to take higher mother tongue as a subject, with plans to lower the criteria for eligibility, said PM Wong in his Mandarin speech.

Instead of looking at PSLE overall score requirements, the change will allow students who are strong in their Mother Tongue to take Higher Mother Tongue from Secondary 1.

📌 Kallang Alive Masterplan 🏅

The Kallang area will be rejuvenated with a view to consolidating sports facilities for both high-performance athletes and regular Singaporeans.

National training centres will be moved to Kallang, along with the Singapore Sports School which is currently at Woodlands. New sports science and sports medicine facilities will be built there as well.

📌 Reducing regulatory burden for companies 📊

To ensure a "business-friendly environment", the government will actively review rules and processes, "pruning" them where possible and helping businesses, especially small and medium enterprises.

📌 New Singapore College of Islamic Studies 🏫

A new Singapore College of Islamic Studies will be built, which will nurture future generations of Singapore’s Islamic leaders.

👉 https://str.sg/3Z8h9

👉 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/national-day-rally-2024-ndr-key-things-know-4553156

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REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 11:00 AM]

[ Poll : Which of the key announcements in PM’s National Day Rally speech resonated with you the most? ]

- SkillsFuture job seeker support scheme

- 30 weeks of Shared Parental Leave

- Enhanced CPF Housing Grant for first time homebuyers

- Priority for singles to buy BTO flats near their parents

- More Community Care Apartments for seniors

- Gifted Education Programme to be replaced with new approach

- Kallang Alive Masterplan

- Others (please share your views in the chat below)

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 11:01 AM]

Dear Contributors,

Please take a moment to participate in our polls 📊 and share your opinion 💭. The poll questions are pinned for easy reference, and your vote is anonymous.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on today’s topic!

Thank you.

Megan

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 11:33 AM]

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 11:34 AM]

LCL (Danny 心), [19/8/2024 11:41 AM]

1. Jobs are the most important anchor for all households to ensure there are income to feed the family.

2. Hence when a worker is retrenched, it will put the family in tremendous stress to put food on the table and pay essential services.

3. Temporary retrenchment grants for retrenched workers up to $6,000 for 6 months to ensure retrenched workers have time to look for jobs and retrained under Skillsfuture with the appropriate assistance will be a very good programme.

4. That's provide fish for the time being while preparing a good stable fishing rod to fish.

xXx.SCAR.xXx, [19/8/2024 11:49 AM]

Not complaining - but it would be good if the Skillsfuture program comes with a job placement scheme afterwards.

Miku 👿, [19/8/2024 11:51 AM]

Totally agree 👍🏼

LCL (Danny 心), [19/8/2024 12:28 PM]

1. Train and placement is the most ideal scheme in Skillsfuture.

2. Hopefully, companies are willing to participate in such scheme.

3. Not too long ago, there is a collaboration between Skillsfuture, cybersecurity training and companies participating in the train and placement program to train and convert other workers into cybersecurity professionals.

4. Such a programme will guarantee trained workforce with the relevant skills, give assurance to workers that after training, they will have a job.

5. Also participating companies can monitor the potential of the trainees like in internship and assure of quality staff.

6. 3 wins for workers, companies and the government.

LCL (Danny 心), [19/8/2024 12:34 PM]

1. Ensuring a competitive business environment, low cost for business to operate - there is a need to facilitate business with less bureaucracy.

2. Regulations are needed to protect the consumers but must not be too costly or onerous for business to comply.

3. Hence periodically, relooking at the regulations to revamp them - will help business lower compliance cost while at the same time protecting consumers and workers interest.

4. This will help business to be viable and profitable while doing so continue to create jobs for our workers.

LCL (Danny 心), [19/8/2024 12:47 PM]

1. Making every schools a good school rather than consolidating gifted students into some elite schools will have the merits of:-

a. Not giving the parents and children to scramble to enter the elite schools.

Creating elite schools will trigger parents and children to behave in a social consciousness of elitism - trying all ways and means such as buying houses close to elite schools lah, alumni lah, donation lah, pressure children to excel until parents and children mental stress lah, see MPs, see Ministers lah - die die must go elite schools lah etc. 

Then when inside elite schools, parents and children mental stress again - cannot keep up with the pace of those super-elites.

c. Unwittingly creating a social class and cementing social class inequality - by distinguishing elite schools from neighbourhood schools.

It is precisely what I told my child, if you are good, whatever schools you attend, you will excel.

No need to crave to enter elite schools and trigger unnecessary stress.

The approach is proven to be sound & set an example for my siblings children to follow.

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 12:59 PM]

[ Poll : Which of the key announcements in PM’s National Day Rally speech resonated with you the most? ]

- SkillsFuture job seeker support scheme

- 30 weeks of Shared Parental Leave

- Enhanced CPF Housing Grant for first time homebuyers

- Priority for singles to buy BTO flats near their parents

- More Community Care Apartments for seniors

- Gifted Education Programme to be replaced with new approach

- Kallang Alive Masterplan

- Others (please share your views in the chat below)

LCL (Danny 心), [19/8/2024 1:00 PM]

1. Creating a new Singapore college of Islamic studies is a good move because by formulating Islamic classes all the way up to train Islamic leaders locally, it is possible to adapt to the needs of integrating with other religious groups and races that are unique to Singapore.

2. Kudos to our Malay Muslim Ministers who started this program.

3. In ensuring the core wholesome values of Islamic studies are maintained, visits by our Islamic scholars to various overseas countries to look at the curriculum and courses are conducted, come back to adapt to local culture of various races and religions - will ensure tolerance to diversity, social integration and mutual coexistence.

4. In future, this college can open up to train some interested foreign scholars who aspire to emulate Singapore ways of Islamic studies with aspirations to integrate harmoniously and coexist with other races and religions.

5. Understand that Singapore also conduct Buddhism teachings course under Singapore Buddhist college at Phor Kark See temple offering diploma certificate.

Not sure whether degree certificate are offered or not.

6. The core values of Buddhism and practices are taught in the college and emphasis are also place in harmonious coexistence with other races and religions.

LCL (Danny 心), [19/8/2024 1:08 PM]

1. Learning our mother tongue has many merits :-

a. We understand and keep our own roots.

b. It will help us to preserve our culture and value system.

c. There are many profound moral ethics, philosophy, history, cultural heritage, ties that we have to make us a better wholesome community.

d. Able to conduct business with mother tongue languages with our native ancestors' homeland.

LCL (Danny 心), [19/8/2024 1:19 PM]

e. Recall that during a video conferencing call with a China national on a business conversation, we started off with English.

The China national is struggling with an accent and quite difficult to comprehend.

f. The conversation started off quite awkwardly.

g. I and my colleague then decide to use Mandarin, and the conversation suddenly become warm and everything go on smoothly.

h. Thereafter, I prepare a business plan for the projects in English, and I need to convert it into Chinese.

i. This time it is my turn to struggle.

Luckily I got Google translate and automatically it convert the whole project plan into Mandarin.

But as I read, all the technical jargon sounds very funny.

j. Fortunately, my boss found another colleague of mine who is Chinese national, he looks at my translated Chinese project plan and can't help laughing.

He say very difficult to understand my Chinese project plan as the translation is not accurate.

k. Hence I send him the English project plan and he then start to amend the Google translated Chinese project plan before it can be submitted to the Chinese business partner.

So indeed, higher mother tongue is essential if we need to do business with China.

Else relying on Google translate - I cannot imagine what the Chinese business partner will do without my colleague help in translation.

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 1:58 PM]

📢 Topic 📢 

Jun Ming, [19/8/2024 2:23 PM]

Nice to see college of islamic studies although I am not islam

LCL (Danny 心), [19/8/2024 2:44 PM]

1. However a concern is the cost of living - not sure how it will pen out going forward.

2. There are some developments that may tamper the inflation rate which currently shows a slight downtrend.

a. Likely announcement of interest rate cut coming 17 to 18 Sep by Fed.

With lower interest rate, business borrowing and individual borrowing may increase, resulting in more money supply and may chase up prices.

b. Higher wage spiral inflation - as NWC may recommend higher wages to cope with higher inflation that may impact business cost and trigger pricing goods and services higher to maintain profit margin.

c. Didn't see any positive news coming from the Ukraine and Gaza war front - hence continuing disruption of food supply and ship delivery resulting in higher food costs.

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 2:59 PM]

[ Poll : Which of the key announcements in PM’s National Day Rally speech resonated with you the most? ]

- SkillsFuture job seeker support scheme

- 30 weeks of Shared Parental Leave

- Enhanced CPF Housing Grant for first time homebuyers

- Priority for singles to buy BTO flats near their parents

- More Community Care Apartments for seniors

- Gifted Education Programme to be replaced with new approach

- Kallang Alive Masterplan

- Others (please share your views in the chat below)

LCL (Danny 心), [19/8/2024 3:11 PM]

1. Doing a comparison of WP proposed retrenchment insurance versus the MOM proposed temporary retrenchment grants under Skillsfuture.

2. WP say workers pay for their retrenchment insurance premiums whereas MOM use taxpayers money.

a. The truth is, all workers need to subscribe to retrenchment insurance and pay premium.

When some workers are retrenched, the rest of the workers are subsidising the retrenched workers payout.

MOM use taxpayers money are funded by a larger tax base including GST taxes unlike WP proposal whereby all workers are paying which is a smaller basket and will likely pay higher premiums for insurance companies to be viable and profitable.

3. WP retrenchment insurance does not include - career matching, career coaching, training and job matching to look for jobs or train and placement program which is a requirement to receive the temporary financial relief.

4. Workers funded by retrenchment insurance benefits will be less motivated to look for jobs once they receive monthly payout.

Because searching for jobs is a big chore, very painful and more likely decide to give up.

This is the demerits of embarking on retrenchment insurance payout versus MOM version of retrenchment temporary grants design to provide temporary relief with the main objective of getting retrenched workers to boost themselves up with new skills and get a better paid jobs else no temporary financial relief.

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 3:58 PM]

📢 Topic 📢 

Prime Minister Lawrence Wong delivered his maiden National Day Rally speech on Sunday (Aug 18), announcing measures as part of what he described as a "reset" of policies to realise a "refreshed Singapore Dream".

PM Wong said Singapore needs a renewed social compact where every Singaporean feels there is hope. It is also where all citizens, even the most disadvantaged, know that they can get a fair shot in life and can get ahead if they make the effort and work hard, he said as he outlined enhancements in areas such as families, jobs, housing and education.

💬 What are your views on the National Day Rally speech? How can we continue to keep Singapore strong and united as we reset our policies for a renewed social compact?

📌 Shared parental care leave and mandatory paternity leave 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Parents will get an additional 10 weeks of shared parental leave, to be shared by both spouses. This will replace the current arrangement where husbands can share up to four weeks of their wives’ 16 weeks of maternity leave.

The new initiative will start with six weeks for babies born from April 1, 2025, and be increased to the full 10 weeks a year later, said PM Wong.

And while paternity leave had been doubled from two to four weeks earlier in 2024, employers had discretion whether to offer the additional time off. From April 1, 2025, this will become mandatory.

📌 SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support scheme 👷🏽

A new SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support scheme will give temporary financial support to those who have lost their job.

These workers will get up to $6,000 over up to six months while they go for training, career coaching and job matching.

📌 Increased housing grants for lower-income, priority access for singles 🏘️

The Enhanced CPF Housing Grant, which offers lower-income couples up to $80,000 to get their first homes, will be increased.

Jun Ming, [19/8/2024 4:40 PM]

perhaps a welfare society is not that bad. When your basics is fulfilled you can focus on what makes the world better

Jun Ming, [19/8/2024 4:41 PM]

For higher Chinese what are the requirements

Jun Ming, [19/8/2024 4:41 PM]

If someone failed English are they allowed to take higher Chinese

LCL (Danny 心), [19/8/2024 4:47 PM]

Not exactly a welfare state that will deplete our reserves but providing the means for people to fish for themselves while temporary giving them relief while they acquire the means to fish for themselves thereafter.

Adam, [19/8/2024 4:56 PM]

I assume they will allow students to excel in their own areas

Adam, [19/8/2024 4:58 PM]

If we become a welfare state the question then becomes, who is entitled to the benefits, and where the funding comes from.

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 4:59 PM]

[ Poll : Which of the key announcements in PM’s National Day Rally speech resonated with you the most? ]

- SkillsFuture job seeker support scheme

- 30 weeks of Shared Parental Leave

- Enhanced CPF Housing Grant for first time homebuyers

- Priority for singles to buy BTO flats near their parents

- More Community Care Apartments for seniors

- Gifted Education Programme to be replaced with new approach

- Kallang Alive Masterplan

- Others (please share your views in the chat below)

Adam, [19/8/2024 5:04 PM]

Like all residents benefit from our strong defence, efficient police and emergency services, but only a subset of our citizens paid it with their time in service. This cause friction in our society.

If we give welfare benefits, can we as a society agree who is deserving? Maybe we can see people celebrate more leave for parents. Even the gov pay for it! But what is the details? Does the gov and taxpayers have to pay for foreign or pr childcare leave? Will employers have a disincentive for hiring parents? How about gig workers or those with no set 9-5 mon-fri schedule?

xXx.SCAR.xXx, [19/8/2024 5:28 PM]

A large number of receipants for GST & CDC vouchers are older folks who are no longer working or can't work; also unable to upskill.

xXx.SCAR.xXx, [19/8/2024 5:30 PM]

I don't think giving out these vouchers are sustainable in the long run tho..

Adam, [19/8/2024 5:30 PM]

Im pretty sure almost everyone received the voucher. But of course lower income benefits more.

But if they are old and cannot work, gst voucher is a band aid imo long term they need something better

xXx.SCAR.xXx, [19/8/2024 5:31 PM]

Ya, I agree. Something better ks needed. Food stamps is not the way to go for our economy/ welfare.

xXx.SCAR.xXx, [19/8/2024 5:31 PM]

*is

G, [19/8/2024 5:32 PM]

Yes.. SG govt should only foot the childcare leave / extra paternity maternity leaves bill for Singaporeans. This will strengthen the value of citizenship

Adam, [19/8/2024 5:33 PM]

Thats the dilemma. The leave is mandatory. So what if the parent is pr with pr children studying in singapore. Maybe child even has ns obligation.

Adam, [19/8/2024 5:35 PM]

Also, the gov caps paying at 10k a month. So employer has to foot the bill if the employee very high income

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 5:58 PM]

📢 Topic 📢 

Thian Lee, [19/8/2024 6:08 PM]

Young couple already have difficulty to got BTO...now add add single group

Is HDB over supply now

Thian Lee, [19/8/2024 6:10 PM]

I support the use of drone at per project as firework is so expensive

Firework should b restrict to national level n not GRC

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 6:44 PM]

Dear Contributors,

⏰ We will be closing the chat in 15 minutes ⏰

Thank you very much for being part of our Telegram chat and participating actively.

Goodnight!

Megan 😊

REACH Singapore, [19/8/2024 7:00 PM]

Dear Contributors

We will be closing the chat for today.

Thank you very much for being part of our Telegram chat and participating actively.

Goodnight!

Megan 😊

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