“What is public policy?” It has often been broadly defined as a set of actions the government decides to take when approaching a problem that affects society as a group. When Global-is-Asian decided to explore the question of public policy and its impact on Singapore, one faculty member stood out as the perfect person to speak with to get their input: Lim Siong Guan is Professor in Practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, instructing on leadership and change management, and his depth of experience is impressive
He was the Head of the Singapore Civil Service from 1999 to 2005. He has been the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance.
He has also served as Chairman of the Singapore Economic Development Board, the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore, the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority and the Central Provident Fund Board.
And these are just a few of his accomplishments. We were very lucky to have a few minutes to discuss, “What is Public Policy?”
David Austin: From that perspective, and now sitting at the school, The Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, what do you think of when you think of the term public policy? Is that even too broad a term, or what does it mean to you?
Lim Siong Guan: Oh, to me, public policy is whatever the government takes on which affects the lives of people. I don't make any distinction in my mind between what is public policy and what is government policy.
The only big difference is that you can study public policy in school, like Lee Kuan Yew School, and sometimes not think too much about execution, whereas when the government comes up with a policy it has to think very clearly about execution.
I think when you run a government, implementation is policy. The public doesn’t care what you wrote to the cabinet. At the end of the day, it’s how the public experiences that policy which defines the policy. That’s something the government has to bear in mind all the time.
In public policy school, you can study all the various permutations and discuss all the various possibilities, which is good because you want to make informed decisions, but sometimes you forget the execution part of it.
There's another aspect of government to appreciate, which is that you're in a position where sometimes you have to make decisions without knowing all the facts. You have to make decisions without knowing everything, as happens with COVID-19, where you are having to make decisions along the way, while you are discovering things as you go.
And sometimes you discover the things only because you've decided to do something about a situation, and then only can you discover more about the effectiveness or otherwise of what you're trying to do. This point, again, is something which public policy schools have to think a lot more about. It is Learning by Doing.
While as a student, you may have the privilege of being able to keep analysing a case. But when you run a government, sometimes you don’t have that luxury. Sometimes you are simply driven by the crisis on your hands.
You cannot consult endlessly and refrain from taking the decision to act, but you could thereby lose the people's confidence in your ability to lead. You have to be prepared to take decisions, even when you don't know all the facts you wish you had to make a good, informed decision. Bear in mind also that there can never be a decision that gets a hundred percent support. You will always have cynics and sceptics. It is good enough to simply have a significant majority on your side.
David Austin: But what is it like in the government when you're in that decision-making process? Knowing that you have the responsibility of implementing it as well?
Lim Siong Guan: You have to start out deciding what is it that you're trying to address. And to me, I think the first question you have to actually ask yourself is, “Are you trying to bring in a policy which is long-term in its orientation, or are you simply trying to decide what is good enough for the moment? To think long-term is to recognise that the primary purpose of the policy is to assure the survivability and sustainability of success for the country over the long term.
You have to decide whether you are thinking long-term or is this a policy you are bringing in just to address a crisis which is on hand? If you have a crisis on hand, you better go solve the crisis, or at least manage the crisis. But the solution you work out may or may not fit into long-term thinking. So, what are you trying to do? You need to be very clear.
Being clear about what it is you're trying to do helps you a lot in being clear about what it is you're trying to formulate.
A big challenge for government, as I said, is you have to decide whether you're working on a long-term basis or short-term. Long-term has tremendous challenges, the most critical of which being that the government is trying to do something, which in a good number of instances, the public itself cannot appreciate, cannot visualise. If there's a crisis on hand, the public knows there's a crisis and the government is reacting to that crisis, for which the public need only make the judgement as to whether the government is making sensible decisions or not.
But if a government is trying to do something which is good for twenty years down or 30 years down, that's a different game. Because the public may not appreciate what you're trying to do.
In a sense the public elected you hoping that you will be able to do that long-term job for them, because they can't do it. The government certainly has more resources to be able to do it, not that it can do it perfectly.
You can't even tell what the world is going to be like two years from now or one year from now. I mean, what about 30 years from now?
For example, if you look at education. Let us consider the education starting from kindergarten. You have two years kindergarten, six years primary school, six years secondary school, that brings you to 14. And then two years in junior college that brings you to 16 years. It takes you four years to get a university degree, that takes you to 20 years.
So, if you have to decide changes to the education policy, you are making a minimum 20-year decision. And when a graduate comes out of university, you don't even know what you’re getting until you see how he performs on the job.
So, you're making a 25-year decision, 30-year decision. How do you tell the public, this is what I'm trying to do because we think this is important for us 20 years down the road?
So, similarly, if you go into defence systems. Any major defence system is minimally a ten-year look into the future. That seems a ridiculous demand. And if you try to justify your decision by naming a potential enemy, you make an enemy. So, what do you do?
Another point. These days we think a lot about social media. Many people have lots of comments, but a lot of the time, they are just commenting for somebody else to do the job. They're not commenting on the basis of, “I'm going to try help solve the problem.” If you were to turn to them and say, “you have made all these comments, so what ideas do you have to help solve the problem?”, they are more than likely to say, “It’s not my job to have ideas for you, that’s your job.” So that makes things difficult. That makes it challenging.
But at the same time, let’s recognise that it's the job of government to solve problems, not just today’s problems, but the challenges likely to arise in future.
If the government does a good job, setting the foundations for the future, if you are able to say “I'm trying to build something here, it's a policy that is good for 20 years, it's good for 30 years.” If your decisions are good, you'll be in good time for the future. If you decide wrongly, you’ll be in serious trouble in time to come.
David Austin: How do you face that challenge of a decision that takes 20 years to see if you were right or wrong?
Lim Siong Guan: As I said, being clear in your mind, what is it that you're trying to do is so terribly important.
Let's say, if you work on something with a 20-year perspective, of course you are going to review your actions and direction at least every five years and make the necessary mid-course corrections.But it's the clarity of the objective that helps you decide the mid-course corrections.
If you have the clarity of where you are trying to get to, you can clearly decide on what you need to measure in the course of getting there. Virtually everything can be measured, either in terms of the outcomes you're looking for along the way, and a review every so often to answer the question “Is this leading me to where I need to get to?”, or, if you can’t measure it directly in terms of the outcomes, you can always measure it indirectly through surveys, through checking with other practitioners.
Virtually everything can be measured if important. You just have to set your mind to it because, as has often been said, if you don't measure it, people will simply not take the task seriously.
A lot of people are caught up with the idea that you have to measure progress directly, when in fact a lot of these attitudes of the public, their perceptions, their self-confidence, etc. are only amenable to indirect measures.
David Austin: Do you have an example of one policy that you could explain that you were clear at the beginning and then you set out and achieve the goals?
Lim Siong Guan: I would mention Total Defence. When I was in the Ministry of Defence, there were two things that we had to do. The first was how to raise the morale, the motivation, of the people in the Singapore Armed Forces. The second was how to set the SAF within the overall context of the peace and security of Singapore.
On the first point, we can say anything we like about technology and so forth giving the operational edge to the SAF, but we must never forget that the people who think about the technology, the people who operate the technology, they're all people who need to be motivated to do their best and reach for their utmost.
So, one important thing we had to address at the Ministry of Defence was how to build up their self-confidence. How do we build up their sense of purpose? And particularly since we were running a national service army, how do we maintain high morale and commitment. We decided to run a major public promotional campaign. It was the first time any government ministry had ever used the mass media for purposes of promoting the public image of a national enterprise, in this case the SAF.
That was when we came up with the slogan “There's a part for everyone." It was a call for everyone to play their part and do their best. It was a challenge to be good enough to be in the Army. It made the point that the Army was a critical national institution. So, Singaporeans should be grateful for all these national service men in the Army instead of saying they were wasting two years of their lives in the SAF. They were not wasting their lives. They were building up a national capacity for effective deterrence, and thereby maintain peace and security for the benefit of all.
Keeping the peace was critical for Singapore to be able to succeed in economic development. You wouldn't get foreign investors coming in if they could not be assured about the capacity of the country to assure peace and security for their investments and that sort of thing. Seen in this way, peace and security for the country went beyond the military and encompassed the economic capacity of the country. Thus, the concept of Total Defence.
Total Defence asserts that fundamentally defence is not just about the armed forces, not just military defence. You need to also have good civil defence, sound economic defence, unity in social defence and commitment in psychological defence.
The national service army is totally dependent on the morale and let's say the determination of the public. So, if the public doesn't support national service, you can’t expect the national service men to be proud and committed in standing up for the country. And capable and committed national servicemen are such a critical part of what we were trying to achieve, which was about having a respected defence force that could attain the effective deterrence we were looking for.
So that's long-term policy, which is why Total Defence is still here, still running and still critical.
David Austin: I know you have been out of the government for a while, but how do you see them keeping up with the times?
Lim Siong Guan: I would say there are two things which give us a big advantage. First is that Singaporeans by and large have an instinctive sense of vulnerability. Like ex-minister George Yeo said in a recent speech, we are small, but we are in a region of the world with large neighbours. We are different because we're highly urbanised. We are different because in terms of economic development, we are ahead. How do we assure our survival and, how do we assure the sustainability of our success?
So that's one point, strangely perhaps, this intrinsic sense of vulnerability. This demands a continuing awareness of the world and a willingness to adjust and to change.
And the second thing, very important, is national service. The security of the country rests on the active participation of its citizens. It’s quite remarkable that Singapore has been able to maintain the institution of national service in a way that many countries all over the world have had to cut back.
David Austin: Is there anything else that you would want to say, from the perspective of a young student entering the school, what should they be trying to learn while they're here?
Lim Siong Guan: I would say that they should be coming here because they want to do good for their country and their people. That's why they are in this “business” of studying government and public policy. You're not in the business of saying that this is a nice area to study academically.
I believe that the Singapore government is one which tries to be as objective as possible, to try to be as rational as possible, in the policies it adopts.
So, I'm hoping that the students who choose to come here would find Singapore a “living example” of reasonably good governance and public policy. They have the opportunity to ask of public policy instructors, if what you are saying is so good, how come they're not doing it in Singapore? Or how is it your conclusions on what is good policy do not appear to have come to Singapore? What is the political culture which responsible government should seek to promote which will give the country the best chances of survivability and sustainability for the long-term future? Should government simply be in the business of responding to public concerns today, or should government also be in the business of shaping the way the public understands and prepares for the future?
There’s a big difference between thinking of government for the long term as opposed to government for the immediate term. If you're thinking just the next general election, you don't think too much about this issue, but if you think more than the next general election, you have to think long term. Then reshaping the views of the public becomes very important. Reshaping of the views fundamentally involves addressing the mental models in the public mind.
As an example, the parents of today have succeeded very largely because of hard work, studying hard, building up their skills, and being dependable to deliver their best; but the question that needs to be asked it, Is this enough for success for their children’s future? If it's enough for the future, nice. The parents are going to shape the way the kids are. But if it's not good enough for the future, then the parents will not be good enough to mould their kids for success. What can the government do about it? What should the government do?
Those are the kinds of questions that you have to think about in government. And I hope those are the kinds of questions the students will seek to raise and to discover relevant answers for their own nations and governments.
David Austin: Thank you so much. Wonderful.
Image credit: Bing Hui Yau