For the last one week, Parliament debated the motion to endorse the Government’s White Paper on Population entitled “A Sustainable Population for a Dynamic Singapore”.
The Workers’ Party MPs voted against the Amended Motion in Parliament today. Although the Amended Motion captures some of the Workers’ Party’s concerns about the White Paper, fundamentally the White Paper still forms the basis of the roadmap forward to 2030, which the House was asked to endorse.
The Workers’ Party believes that the path proposed by the White Paper will further dilute the Singaporean core and weaken our national identity. It will also lead us to require unsustainable population injections in the future. We believe that the greater well-being of Singaporeans lies in sustainable economic growth driven by increases in our productivity and in our resident workforce, rather than further increases in our dependency on imported foreign labour.
Singapore’s demographic challenges must be addressed fundamentally and urgently by focusing on increasing the total fertility rate (TFR) and growing our resident labour force participation rate. In short, we should instead strive for “A Dynamic Population for a Sustainable Singapore”.
Sylvia Lim
Chairman
The Workers’ Party
8 February 2013