Introduction
Mr Speaker, my speech titled “taking care of our own” will cover three issues. First, I will speak on the broader geostrategic environment and its implications for Singapore. Secondly, I will briefly discuss the point made by DPM Gan Kim Yong over the Economic Strategies Review mid-term update that GDP growth may not translate into jobs for Singaporeans; before discussing the budget announcements pertaining to AI, skills upgrading and opportunities for our workers. Finally, I will speak about the fiscal position and call for more cost-of-living support measures for low and middle-income Singaporeans and for families with children.
The International Environment
The spectre of the Liberation Day tariffs loomed large over Singapore in April last year. The PAP Government dissolved Parliament just days after the Trump administration's announcement. The political timing of the general elections was calculated to put the PAP in the most advantageous position, with tariff uncertainty serving as a rallying call for voters to back the tried and tested.
Since then, however, there has been remarkably little information of the sectoral tariffs and their actual impact on Singapore. Despite the doom and gloom surrounding the liberation day tariffs, this PAP Government begins its new term with what may be the greatest fiscal surplus any PAP government has seen in decades.
The Trump administration has determined that the United States must rejig, reset — and in some cases dismantle — key pillars of the international system that delivered decades of peace and relative stability in the Asia-Pacific. But the US nonetheless retains deep influence in the region through its economic and military ties with friends and allies: Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Australia, India, Japan, and others. Trump or no Trump, these links will continue to take significant priority and shape the strategic calculations of countries across the region.
As the US moves towards a more confrontational posture with China, temperatures in the Asia-Pacific have risen — and look set to continue rising. The comprehensive electoral victory of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, and the growing domestic political appetite for a more normalised diplomatic and military posture, suggest that Japan's pacifist constitution — held for around eighty years — will finally be set aside. The prospect of Japan, or even South Korea, acquiring nuclear weapons to counterbalance China and North Korea is now closer to probability, not merely a possibility.
The increased militaristic signature reflects a regional circumstance unfamiliar to many middle-aged Singaporeans, and it remains a source of concern for them. Closer to home, recent hostilities between ASEAN neighbours Thailand and Cambodia remind us that regional fraternity and camaraderie do not guarantee peace dividends.
This heightened security environment will keep the Government fully occupied. But for Singapore, the challenge is not just about managing foreign policy — it is what these developments mean at home, for our society and our cohesion. PM Wong's remarks on the back of Prime Minister Takaichi's comments about Japan’s interest in Taiwan’s security in November 2025 are a case in point. A notable number of online voices in Hong Kong and China — including some Singaporeans — raised concerns that the PM's comments were insensitive towards Chinese sentiments.
This points to something we must address directly. More needs to be done to engage Singaporeans — new immigrants and citizens of all races alike — in an interactive and open conversation about our national interests. Without that, the phrase "national interest" risks becoming a shorthand to shut down a conversation rather than to start one.
We are a multi-racial, multi-cultural society — not proportioned equally — with a growing stock of new immigrants whose loyalties, understandably, will take time to take root. In this context, building resilience in our psychological defence is more urgent than ever. The Workers’ Party in Parliament, reflecting the political diversity of our people, looks forward to playing a positive role in strengthening that sense of home and our unity as one people.
I have ended my last two Budget speeches with a call to support our men and women in uniform. It appears that our cyber-defence agencies have already tasted combat in their virtual trenches, even if that domain remains shrouded in operational secrecy. As in previous Budgets, Singaporeans will know there is non-partisan support for the defence-related priorities in this Budget. That consensus remains clear, and it holds.
Making AI Work for Singapore
Uncharacteristically, one of the most politically significant statement this year to date did not come from the Budget, but from DPM Gan Kim Yong at his January media interview on the mid-term review of the Economic Strategies Review. The DPM observed that GDP growth may no longer translate into jobs for Singapore. What this does is to put every job-related policy, initiative, and scheme announced by this government into a sharper perspective than ever before. For each, more so than before, Singaporeans deserve a well-publicised and detailed report card: one that distinguishes rhetoric about promises kept, with measurable outcomes subject to Parliamentary and public scrutiny.
DPM Gan's remarks on GDP growth also call into question whether three of the four National Bonus components — partly used to determine total ministerial salaries — remain fit for purpose. If the Progressive Wage Model is driving income gains for the lowest 20th percentile rather than productivity, how far should it constitute a criterion of the national bonus for Ministers? Is the unemployment rate among Singaporeans still the right measure, or has underemployment among Singaporeans become more telling and a fairer gauge to assess how much bonus Ministers ought to receive? And if GDP growth will no longer reliably create good jobs for Singaporeans, should it remain in the Ministerial bonus formula at all?
Arising from this year’s Budget initiatives, I would argue that the National Bonus should be anchored to one objective outcome: good jobs for Singaporeans in the age of AI.
AI dominated this year’s budget, the first of this term of government. Yet more than three years after ChatGPT changed the world, AI remains an enigma for much of our workforce and many of our businesses. I will make two sub-points.
First, the Budget speaks of employing AI to facilitate end-to-end business transformation. That is an ambitious ask. MNCs and companies like DBS and Grab have the resources to experiment, to sandbox bold ideas, and even to absorb failure. SMEs are not necessarily in the same position. For some of them, navigating AI to improve productivity is not just challenging — it can feel impossible. I look forward to the actionable strategies from MTI on the Champions of AI programme, and specifically how SMEs will benefit from it.
On AI-related subsidies through the Productivity Solutions Grant and other initiatives such as the Entreprise Innovation Scheme, clear standards and requirements must be established before grants and subsidies are paid out. AI-related grants and subsidies must be ring-fenced for genuinely transformative productivity gains — so that these taxpayer subsidies are not gamed or abused.
Singaporeans would remember the Productivity and Innovation Credit (PIC) scheme of yesteryear, and how some individual and businesses exploited it. “Promoters” helped set up shell or dormant companies solely to claim PIC benefits with false documentation or listing phantom employees to meet qualifying conditions. Other reports questioned how many genuine R&D breakthroughs were operationalised for businesses through the PIC scheme; and whether they moved the productivity needle in proportion to the subsidies that were paid out. We cannot repeat that mistake with taxpayer money with this latest productivity push through AI-related subsidies.
For workers, the redesign of the SkillsFuture website to make AI learning pathways clearer is a welcome step. At an overarching and strategic level, the AI Council must take a special interest in ensuring that AI-related outcomes are properly scoped — because done right, this raises Singaporean businesses and workers to higher productivity.
My second point covers what the phrase used by the Prime Minister - "Because we take care of our own." That was arguably the most significant line in the entire Budget speech when it comes to AI's impact on workers.
Last week, both Channel News Asia and The Straits Times ran a Financial Times opinion piece by Sarah O'Connor in online and in print respectively titled "We have to stop calling some jobs low-skilled." She wrote that nobody — not your teachers, not your parents, not even the OECD's head of skills analysis — knows which skills will be most valuable tomorrow.
If that is daunting for our students and parents, one can imagine how it feels for a mid-career worker worrying about the next mortgage payment and their family while trying to retrain for a world appears to constantly shift beneath their feet.
There is an age-old problem that manifests itself - workers take up courses, earn new certificates and qualifications, but still find jobs hard to come by. Compounded with that now, is a requirement to master AI. With the merger of WSG and SkillsFuture into one agency, there is an opportunity to improve one-stop support for our workers — especially for those who have been retrenched or displaced — steering them toward areas of real opportunity, not just available courses.
I note the MCCY Minister's comments about greater private sector involvement in supporting job placement for workers at the media interview on the mid-term update of the Economic Strategy Review some weeks back. I welcome that, and look forward to seeing developments in this area.
On that note — Ministry of Manpower should present a report card on the Job-Skills Integrators initiative announced at Budget 2023. These integrators were supposed to bridge the gap between industry needs, training providers, and workers. To my knowledge, Parliament has not received a full account of how many workers have benefited, what the shortcomings have been, or how this initiative will evolve. That account is overdue.
To round up, I wish the Government, our businesses, and our union leaders and workers every success in the colossal undertaking of making AI work for Singapore and to create good jobs for Singaporeans.
Fiscal Surpluses and the Cost of Living
Mr Speaker, no opposition response to the Budget is complete without an assessment of past announcements — and a call for a report card on their success or shortcomings. Singapore's budgets are rarely stand-alone exercises.
Take the Forward Singapore exercise. At Budget 2024, the Government announced plans to spend $40 billion on Forward Singapore initiatives through to 2030, with $5 billion committed at that inaugural Budget. To my knowledge, there has been no well-publicised tracking of cumulative spending since then.
On that same note: this Budget revealed that the next cycle of the Research, Innovation and Enterprise plan — RIE2030 — stands to be funded to the tune of $37 billion, up from $25 billion in the previous cycle from 2021 to 2025. Yet there was no comprehensive report on how the previous $25 billion was used — how many jobs were created for Singaporeans, where outcomes met their objectives, where they fell short, or even whether it is simply too early to tell.
There is real value in reporting such outcomes publicly — at minimum, through an occasional paper at the close of each RIE cycle. Such transparency allows Members of Parliament, on both sides of this House, to fulfil their duty in scrutinising public expenditure as part of their responsibilities as MPs. It also gives our people — and our youth in particular — a clearer picture of the opportunities ahead, and helps attract the best minds to Singapore. There is much work still to be done in demonstrating how efficaciously taxpayer dollars have been spent.
Across most budgets, there is a lack of easy-to-track outcomes once the headlines have been announced. The Government should be conscious of the public cynicism and detachment that grows when Singaporeans cannot see a clear accounting of how public funds are being used communicated for ease of understanding, and what results have been achieved. That is not good for Singapore — and it sits in contradiction with the participatory spirit that Forward Singapore was meant to embody.
I will speak further on this during the Ministry of Manpower's Committee of Supply debate, with specific reference to the Progressive Wage Credit Scheme — a scheme that was due to end but has since been extended in this year’s budget.
On the fiscal position: the Government begins this term on a firm footing — with a surplus of $15 billion for FY2025. An $8 billion surplus is expected for FY2026, with more anticipated as corporate tax collections are expected to rise from FY2027. These surpluses already far exceed the two to three billion dollars or thereabouts in additional annual revenue that the GST hikes of 2023 and 2024 were supposed to generate. There will be significant public interest in how these surpluses are ultimately deployed, especially given the pressures of an ageing population and the persistent concern over inequality.
Before I turn to address some specific measures in the budget, it is worth noting the results of NTUC's 2026 survey of economic sentiments, released last month. The findings are instructive. The top concern, cited by 37% of workers, was wages not keeping up with the cost of living. Second was having enough savings for retirement, at 28%. Job security came in third at 19%, followed by caregiving demands at 9% and concerns about AI disruption at 6%. These are not abstract anxieties — they are the lived concerns of working Singaporeans, and they should shape how we evaluate what this Budget delivers. I believe more should be done to assuage cost-of-living concerns of Singaporean workers and families.
On the cost of living: this Budget introduces yet another tranche of CDC vouchers. Singaporeans can be forgiven for treating the scheme as a permanent one — it was not originally conceived as such in 2021 when the CDC vouchers were set at $100 per household. With another $500 tranche to be disbursed in 2027, the time has come to refine the CDC voucher scheme to better help Singaporean families.
Currently, the vouchers are distributed on a per-household basis, regardless of household size. That is not equitable. A household of two individuals receives the same as a household of five. I propose a simple and targeted adjustment: retain the base $500 for all households of three members or fewer. For owner-occupied households with more than three members, provide an additional $150 per person. Based on the average Singapore household size of 3.06 persons in 2025, this is a modest and practical refinement — one that better reflects the actual cost-of-living burden larger families carry.
On families with children: this Budget raises the monthly household income threshold for Student Care Fee Assistance to $6,500. I welcome the expansion in reach. But I ask the Government to also review the subsidy calculation framework in favour of greater subsidies as it reviews this sector.
Currently, there are eleven subsidy tiers for households earning between $1,500 and $4,500. The top tier provides a 98% subsidy up to $295 per month; the lowest provides just 20%, or $59. The can be simplified further with starting at the new LQS figure of $1800 with two to three additional tiers to better support parents with school-going children with the lowest tier receiving at least 50% subsidy.
Alternatively, the preschool subsidy framework provides all qualifying families with a meaningful base subsidy regardless of income, with additional support determined by income. That design is both simpler and more reassuring to families navigating the system. I ask the Government to consider a similar approach for student care subsidies. The redistributive cost is relatively modest especially when we consider our chronically low Total Fertility Rate — but the impact on families, and their confidence that the system is always working for them would give the reassurance of a more generous helping hand.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this Budget was delivered against a backdrop of genuine uncertainty — a shifting global order, the disruption of AI, and the anxieties of working Singaporeans who worry about whether their wages, their savings, and their children's futures will keep up to say nothing of the continued relevance of some jobs, particularly entry-level ones. In this context, “taking care of our own” represents one standard by which all Government policies will be unpacked, measured and scrutinized by the Workers Party in this term of Government.
The Workers’ Party supports Budget 2026.
