Grace Fu confirms that we are the best

At the Ong Teng Cheong Labour Leadership Institute’s graduation ceremony Grace Fu cautioned against some pitfalls that Singapore should avoid while running the country. She spoke about Sweden and Japan, two of the model countries in the developed world.

In the case of Sweden, despite having one of the best labour relations, remunerations and benefits for workers, there are problems of high cost of employment, loss of competitiveness of the companies and youth unemployment. Sweden thus has one of the highest ratios of youth unemployment in Europe. This in a way could see Sweden facing more problems in the years ahead. This is something that we should avoid if we want to remain competitive and continue to provide full employment to our people. In my view this is our greatest achievements, to be able to provide our workers with good jobs and also helped to provide more than a million jobs to foreigners.

In Japan’s case, it has serious flaws in its healthcare system mainly due to its stubbornness not to employ foreign nurses to take care of its ageing population. The quality of healthcare has dropped and there are long waiting queues in clinics and poor emergency health care. Must be worse than Singapore.

In short, we are the best in both labour management and creating jobs, and also in our healthcare services. Our healthcare system is so efficient that we don’t have long queues in clinics except only one or two wait for appointments to see specialists. But actually this is not true as well.  The waiting time can be cut to immediate if one has the money to pay. So it is wrong to complain of ridiculously long waiting time for medical appointments.

Now who is so stupid to send delegations to Japan and Sweden to learn from their flawed systems? These countries should be learning from us instead. We are the best. But one proviso, we are so good because we imported the best foreign talents to run and manage our systems. Without the foreign talents, we will have the same pitfalls as Sweden and Japan.

She should recommend to Hsien Loong to forbid sending delegations to these countries to learn their pitfalls. It is a waste of public funds, unless we are there to confirm that we are doing the right thing.