Mr Speaker, this is the first Budget of the current parliamentary term. I like to think of this as an opportunity for us to future-proof Singapore.
In a world characterised by flux, we must stay steadfast in holding on to who we are. Our collective identity as Singaporeans are our roots, keeping us fixed and resolute, as one people, through disruptions and upheavals.
Sir, the Budget is as much about our collective values and identity as much as it is about dollars and cents. In his Budget speech, the Prime Minister identified that “the spirit of our people” is our greatest strength. He also said Singaporeans must be “active participants”, rather than “mere spectators”, in our nation-building efforts.
I agree with these sentiments.
But, Sir, participation requires agency. If the Government is sincere about the spirit of our people being our greatest strength, then we must be equally sincere about giving Singaporeans the means and space to tend that spirit themselves. Too often, however, Singaporeans find themselves as mere spectators in the making of our collective national identity.
The Government recognises the importance of nurturing the shared bonds of civic friendships among Singaporeans. I hope to however convince the House that our national identity and sense of solidarity is something best fostered organically, from the ground-up, in ways that affirm and reflect our citizens’ lived experiences.
In the next few minutes, I will talk about heritage, history, and human ingenuity. First, I want to suggest the importance of heritage conservation, not out of sentimentality or nostalgia, but because these places have meaning for us as Singaporeans. Places, and place-memories, are important to our identity and belonging. Unrelenting change, including those brought about by rampant commercialisation, can degrade our sense of who we are.
Second, I will also suggest that the construction of our national history be more democratised and inclusive. If Singaporeans are to be active participants in nation-building, then we deserve to tell a Singapore Story that is brought forth by the collective memory-making of the Singaporean public.
My final point will address the Government’s focus on AI. I understand that we have to embrace advances in technology and seek to include these tools in our repertoire. My concern is specific: that we do not elevate artificial intelligence to such a degree that we risk undermining the very thing that we are seeking to enhance: our human ingenuity.
Heritage
Sir, our heritage is essential to our civic and national identity. The Government has made it a priority to renew and strengthen our Singapore Spirit in this year’s Budget. I especially welcome the Prime Minister’s plans to strengthen our cultural and heritage institutions, which includes the re-opening of the revamped Malay Heritage Centre.
However, even as the Istana Kampong Glam welcomes the public through its doors once more, it would be a pity if Kampong Glam itself loses its cultural character as a historical precinct which has served, and still continues to serve, local communities.
I spent part of my early childhood in Bussorah Street (which was once known as Kampong Kaji). For me, Kampong Glam cannot be separated from the social and communal practices which are embedded within the neighbourhood.
Kampong Glam thrives because the district remains a living heritage for the communities who live, work, and visit there.
I am sure that the House shares my concern about how traditional and heritage businesses, often with long-standing roots in Kampong Glam, are finding themselves displaced by the challenging operating environment.
On 12th January, a report by Channel NewsAsia revealed that, between 2023 and 2025, the yearly median rent in Kampong Glam rose from $6.02 to $7.54 per square foot, translating to a 25 per cent increase over two years.
During our sitting earlier this month, the SPS for National Development confirmed that a “small proportion” of tenants did face rental hikes of 25 per cent or more in these two years. He however said that these involved leases for shops in high-footfall streets such as Haji Lane and Bali Lane.
However, this is not sufficient as an assurance that Kampong Glam will remain viable for heritage businesses. High rents in Haji and Bali Lanes can easily have a spillover effect on other adjacent streets, such as Arab Street, which still houses some traditional textile retailers.
The disappearance of heritage businesses in Kampong Glam will be an irreversible thinning of the precinct’s place-meaning. We should also not understate the intimate connections between our sense of self, our sense of belonging, and our sensing of the physical infrastructure.
To a large degree, our identity is anchored in places. People know who they are in part because they know where they were — where their grandparents brought them around to run errands, where they posed with their extended family around Sultan Mosque for a Hari Raya photo, or where they socialised over teh tarik with friends, or brought their partner for a date.
Even when I grew older, I continued to bond with my father about Kampong Glam and our shared interests in its history and heritage. Born and raised in Kampong Kaji, my father would regale me with stories of Wak Cantuk and playing with his friends from Gedung Kuning and other parts of Kampong Glam.
While he is no longer here, our conversations still live on fondly through my memories every time I drop by Kampong Glam.
Mr Speaker, it may be said that churn and change is the constant order of the market. However, such indiscriminate churn can carelessly sever the connective threads nested in Kampong Glam that intricately links people and places, history and memory, and identity and belonging.
A nasi padang stall that has operated for decades, or a textile shop that has served both grandmother and granddaughter — these are not merely commercial storefronts peddling goods and services.
They also represent precious repositories of cultural knowledge, community relationships, and public memory. These are simply gone when they’re gone. And no influx of souvenir shops, photobooths, and Instagram-friendly cafes can compensate for such a loss.
Sir, if I may, I would like to quote a line from an essay titled Displacing Singapore, written by Mr. Peter Schoppert, which described the constant physical transformation of Singapore as such: “The past continually makes way for a future that has no time to ripen into a present.”
With Kampong Glam, we however have the opportunity to do things differently, to let the past ripen into a present. We can still balance the forces of commerce and the imperatives of culture.
These include helping the heritage businesses that carry the memory of many generations, supporting the families who have anchored this district through the decades, and taming speculation so that the cultural heritage of the district is not hollowed out.
The URA’s planning parameters for Historic Districts stipulates guidelines for building use. Would it not be possible to amend these parameters to ensure that heritage businesses can remain viable in the areas, such as introducing heritage business licenses specifically for Historic Districts?
This would offer heritage businesses some measure of protection from open-market competition as well as prevent the over-commercialisation of a historic district.
History
Sir, I turn now to the topic of our national history.
Recently, I visited the Albatross File exhibition at the National Library, which I thought was quite remarkable: since it is not often that the state offers a revisionist account of its own historical narrative. As a student, the narrative of Separation that I was taught was one of expulsion. A Straits Times report from 21 December 2025, quoting a former secondary school history teacher, confirms this.
That aside, the declassification of the Albatross File is a good move. Yet the existence of the file was only first revealed in 1996 by Dr Goh Keng Swee during an interview with Dr Melanie Chew, and it took around another 27 years for it to be fully declassified.
Must Albatross really wait for 30 years before its existence was to be publicly acknowledged, and almost 60 years after independence before its contents were to be fully revealed in public?
Even then, the declassification process of Albatross seems tightly managed. I refer to the 7 December speech by SM Lee Hsien Loong, who shared how a specific team went “through the material carefully, picked out the key documents and sections, annotated them, and wrote up the editorial apparatus”.
I don’t mean to downplay the considerable work and effort of these scholars. However, was there a reason that the File was not released to the public domain in the first instance, so that the wider community of scholars and the public can read, discuss, interpret, and construct their understandings of the past in a more democratic and collective fashion?
As the Minister for Digital Development and Information stated in her written answer on 12 January, a “deeper appreciation of our history and how we got here will strengthen our national identity”.
I however doubt that our more mature and discerning citizens can truly have this deeper appreciation if the Government’s approach to history remains didactic, where history is meant to be consumed by the people, rather than constructed by the people and for the people.
Historical narratives gain resonance when it is written by the many, not dictated by the few.
Sir, in the spirit of encouraging and facilitating a deeper appreciation of our history, would it not be more reasonable to have, as a default, an automatic declassification and public release of records once 25 years have elapsed?
Currently, even government documents that have been transferred as public records to the NAS — the so-called “public archives” — are not easily accessible.
In 2023, the then-SMS for Communications and Information mentioned that the NAS had made the metadata of around 780,000 records available to the public. However, most of these records still require permission from the originating agency before they can be read. In the SMS’s statement, it was also revealed that only 68,000 file records have been declassified and made accessible to the public.
Sir, surely any “public archive” deserving of its name should have its records readily available to the public without the need to seek permission from a government agency. An automatic declassification process would make records generally available to the public by default, instead of requiring interested Singaporeans and researchers to undertake an opaque approval process to gain access.
I understand that a more transparent and open declassification policy may cause some anxieties.
However, the Government can heed the advice of SM Lee, who once said: — quote — “In teaching the Singapore Story, you will have to deal with delicate issues, especially race and religion, and sometimes relations with our neighbours. We must treat such issues sensitively, but we cannot gloss over them. Amnesia is not an option. We cannot pretend that incidents involving race and religion never happened. They are part of our history” — end quote.
Sir, a society that can collectively author its history is one that is confident about facing the future. To future-proof Singapore, amnesia is not an option.
If we want Singaporeans to be active participants in their own country, if we want our citizens to deepen their appreciation of our history and to strengthen our national identity, then the Government must believe that Singaporeans can be trusted to participate in the construction of our national history.
Human ingenuity
Sir, my final topic: artificial intelligence. A focal point of the Budget speech was on harnessing AI as a strategic advantage for Singapore. The Prime Minister outlined the Government’s commitments to strengthen AI literacy for our IHL students, and to help workers automate routine tasks so that they can concentrate on performing “higher-value activities” that would involve “judgment, creativity, and human insight”.
These are pragmatic measures to familiarise Singaporeans with AI and integrate its use into our daily routines. However, I wonder whether we are in danger of becoming an AI-reliant society rather than an AI-resilient society.
My worry is that such indiscriminate habituation to AI may risk undermining the very things we want to augment, those things that the Prime Minister talked about — judgment, creativity, and human insight.
Sir, human ingenuity is a precious thing. And we must not let it be the case that the more we rely on artificial intelligence, the more we end up dulling our critical faculties for human ingenuity.
Sir, as an undergraduate, I remember struggling through dense academic texts, picking apart the writings of scholars such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx — trying to figure out what their words meant, and what it is that they wanted to convey. Had AI been available then, it would have been convenient and very tempting for me to have ChatGPT summarise the content, or generate ideas for an essay or seminar discussion.
However, there is value in undertaking the sometimes slow, often uncomfortable, and always arduous task of reading a text and grappling to understand it on one’s own terms.
This is the process through which we sharpen our cognitive skills. This is how we learn to decipher and interpret the meanings of the written word, and by extension, make sense of the world which those words reflect and shape. This is how we develop our sense of judgment and our capacity for creativity.
I appreciate the Prime Minister’s reassurance that the Government will “define how AI is developed and used in Singapore”, including setting out clear rules for its responsible and safe implementation. I await more clarity in this direction.
One last point, Mr Speaker. We should remember that every AI query has a physical and environmental footprint. We may think of AI as performing virtual magic on our computers, giving us answers in almost an instant — or even helping us to generate pantuns for Parliament. But this “magic” has to piggyback on a vast infrastructure of data centres that consume voracious amounts of electricity and water.
Globally, data centres (or DCs) are straining power grids and depleting water sources. Needless to say, the energy and water demands of these DCs also have third-party effects, such as increasing the utility costs for everyone else—including residents.
This has become such a serious issue in the United States to the extent that the New York Times reported on 15th January that politicians and lawmakers have started mulling over legislation to oblige tech companies to pay their fair share for electricity consumption, including paying upfront for the costs of upgrading the power grid.
Locally, DCs accounted for 7 per cent of Singapore’s total energy usage in 2020. Moreover, DCs also contribute to the urban heating of our island, because for every 1 megawatt of heat removed from data centres by the cooling systems, 1.2 megawatt of heat is ejected into the environment.
In fact, resource and sustainability concerns prompted the Government to issue a moratorium on DC construction in 2019, which has been lifted in phases since 2022. In May 2024, the IMDA released the Green Data Centre Roadmap which established energy and water efficiency targets for DCs for the next ten years.
I hope that the Government is confident that we are on pace to not only meet these efficiency targets, but to also ensure that the DC’s energy and water consumption does not create upward pressure on the utility costs for households and small businesses.
Sir, I highlight these issues not as a reason to abandon or shun AI. But the world is facing the existential challenge of climate change. And the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health recently warned of a “global water bankruptcy”. Given these circumstances, it seems only pragmatic for us, in this House and as a country, to consider the ethical and environmental trade-offs involved as we embark on the national quest to integrate AI into our personal, social, and working lives.
Conclusion
Sir, the Prime Minister has identified the many challenges that Singapore is facing. I hope that the Government reads my remarks as I intend them to be: constructive amendments for the purpose of strengthening our civic endurance and our collective resilience to navigate the challenging days ahead.
