Speech by Minister for Defence at Mindef Volunteers' Dinner 2017

SMS Maliki,

Permanent Secretaries,

CDF, Chiefs of Services,

Volunteers of MINDEF,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Someone remarked to me that time flies that it seems like it was just last month that we were celebrating the same occasion, but it is already been a year, and I see many familiar and old faces. Each time I come to a MINDEF Volunteer Dinner, I notice that the mood is very vivid because many of you know each other. If you look around you, it is almost a cross-section of society, professions, people from medicine, law, engineering, arts, and business. I cannot think of another country that has this kind of civilian-military punch. I think it is very unique. I am not sure what the history is for you but thank you for being here. Let me welcome all of you. As you look around, as I have said, our MINDEF Volunteers have a diverse and rich expertise in various fields including law, medicine, counselling, engineering, science, finance, music and the arts and you make significant contributions to the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), year after year. Please accept my personal thanks tonight. The dinner is a small token for what you have done. You know that this year is NS50, and the theme for NS50 is "From my generation to yours". I can think of no better examples of people who lived that theme – "from my generation to yours" – than you, the volunteers we honour tonight. Your expertise helped us run the SAF efficiently and fairly, whether it is growing public understanding and support for defence, building SAFRA clubs, making important judgements in your medical and legal panels, counselling NSmen or visiting offenders, as civil resource experts, or providing financial or scientific advice – the list goes on. Each of you serve in various capacities and indeed it is true, that some of you have served so long that we had to create new schemes for you because you outlast the scheme. That is why we have the ROVERS scheme and then the Voluntary Extended Reserve Service, and expertise conversion schemes, and so on. Some of you are here, like Justice Choo Han Teck, Justice Chao Hick Tin, Ms Deborah Barker, Mr Fong Saik Hay, and Dr Paul Chui Peng San. I will go on to give more examples later. I thought to myself that for that theme, if the next generation emulates your commitment, then I think our future remains bright as a country.

Needless to say we value the contributions of all you volunteers and I wanted to give a general picture of what the impact of those contributions are. And I only have limited time and I tend to give a short speech and let us enjoy each other's company and tonight's dinner. So let me give some examples. Let me start with safety. Some of you will remember that a few years ago, we had a spate of bad accidents that resulted in injury and deaths. We had a Committee of Inquiry (COI) in 2012. One of the recommendations that I was very happy about which the COI proposed was to set up an External Review Panel on SAF Safety (ERPSS), I thought was a very good idea. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know, you're too much in the system. An external pair of eyes helps us to improve alongside other safety standards. So we had an External Review Panel on SAF Safety, the ERPSS was intended for a three-year cycle to visit various camps both locally and overseas. We brought you to the actual training grounds. I read the reports and I saw the pictures. What struck me was the people that we chose on this panel were busy people, they were CEOs or held high positions in companies or institutions and yet, it was very interesting to see the pictures of them trudging our training grounds alongside our NSmen. People like Mr Alan Chan, CEO of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), Mr Ho Siong Hin, Commissioner for Workplace Safety and Health and a Divisional Director of the Ministry of Manpower, Mr Heng Chiang Gnee, Chairman of the Workplace Safety and Health Council, and Associate Professor Aymeric Lim from the National University Hospital. The contributions of the External Review Panel has had the impact of saving lives. In the last four years, there have been zero training and operations-related fatalities. Safe training raises morale and encourages soldiers to train even harder. All of us know that any country's ability to defend itself depends as much on public support as it does on a strong and capable military force. I will tell you that increasingly the number of countries which has sustained the national service system is declining year after year. When we started NS 50 years ago, it was a fairly long list. That list has shrunk considerably. And if you look around the world, who has given up NS. The Baltic states gave up NS. We have some volunteers who are from the Baltic states, even Finland, they gave up NS when the iron curtain fell. Some reduced their terms, but many gave up their national service because they lost public support. We are among the very few nations that have a strong national service.

When we do our public polls, it is quite amazing. 94% of Singaporeans support strong national service and the SAF. I believe that is because of what you have done. Members of the the Advisory Council on Community Relations in Defence (ACCORD). Some of you are present tonight, Mr David Boey, Mr David Chua, Ms Claire Chiang, COL(NS) Edwan Nizar Bin Ahadan, Mr Edward Leong, BG(NS) Ishak Bin Ismail, Mr Henry Kwek, Mr Peter Lam, Mrs Laura Hwang, Mr Roland Ng, Ms Sylvia Lim, Mr Tony Chew, Mr Kurt Wee and Dr Yek Tiew Ming. Diverse fields but your passion shows through and because of your leadership, the ACCORD members are equally passionate in their tasks. I give one example, Ms Joanna Portilla. Ms Joanna actively engages women on the importance of NS and defence. She is our women representative. This year, she organised visits for almost three hundred women leaders and their families to the Army Open House. It allowed us to better reach a sector of the community that we do not have traditional links. We have Mr Tan Hee Teck, is another example, who is the CEO of Resorts World Sentosa (RWS) and a member of the ACCORD Employer and Business Council, and he encouraged RWS to recognise our NSmen by putting up NS50 messages around the resort. He got them to wear NS50 badges, and provided promotional deals to servicemen at RWS attractions and retail partners over the past month.

We need artist and creative directors because they help us reach out to Singaporeans. But sometimes, persuasion is more powerful than other means. We have people like Mr Venka Purushothaman, who is Vice President and Provost of LaSalle College of the Arts and a member of the SAF Music and Drama Company (MDC) Artistic Advisory Board, and he helped us with the NS50 performance at the Chingay parade, with 40 over volunteers from LaSalle College of the Arts. We have Mr Jack Neo a member of the MDC Advisory Board and he is helping us with an NS50 album to celebrate the achievements of NSFs and NSmen over the years.
 
We need professionals, medical and legal professionals, volunteers like Dr Kenneth Mak, who is Deputy Director of Medical Services (DDMS) in the Ministry of Health, and who has served in our various SAF boards since 2011. We have also Mr Phang Hsiao Chung, Senior State Counsel in the Attorney-General's Chambers, who served on the Subordinate Military Court since 1996 and Mr Phang has heard over 800 cases and actively participates in the development of several disciplinary guidelines.

I want to mention one last category that we have great need and that is our scientific and technology experts. People in the Temasek Laboratories who collaborate with NTU, NUS and SUTD on defence technology. And that is because in 2030, we will have one-third reduction of manpower and we need technological means.

Celebrating 50 Years of National Service

What I have tried to do in the last 5, 10 minutes is to paint this picture of what you do. Over 300 of you in 36 boards that run a microcosm of society in the SAF. But collectively, I think there is a more important element that your individual acts of volunteerism contribute. I think you are an infectious lot. You infect others through your optimism and sacrifice. And it was because of our positive experience with you that gave us the confidence to launch the more formal and structured SAF Volunteer Corps. Some of you may have read about this, where we allow new citizens, Permanent Residents (PR) to volunteer to join the military. We started it in 2014. It was an experiment because the worse case scenario is you launch it, and have very few applicants. But we were very confident that that would not be the case. And indeed, up to today we have over five hundred PRs and Singapore Citizens who are part of this SAF Volunteer Corps, who undergo basic training, spend their time playing a part in national defence and with many more applicants than we can take. Many of them have interesting backgrounds and you ask them why did they do it, their stories are similar to yours.

That infection of volunteerism is spreading. We have now an expanding pool, we call them Commitment-To-Defence ambassadors. These are ambassadors who talk to students and the young NSFs to make our history alive, help them understand why we need a strong defence. They have started to go to the museums as well to share with a broader audience their experiences and the need for defence.

This year also, for the first time, the six local universities, NUS, NTU, SMU, SUTD, SIT and SUSS have come together to create a common course called "Singapore: Imagining the next 50 years". I think that encapsulates what this year's NS50 theme is, "From my generation to yours", to help them think about why we do certain things the way we do, why we should do things differently, why some things should be kept as steady as possible and that includes a strong defence. And I have been told that the feedback from this course is very good.

Conclusion

So let me conclude by thanking all of you for your individual efforts and contributions. I know that you spend many hours and you meet often to help us. As I said in the beginning, this citizen-military partnership is very unique, it is an outstanding aspect that sets Singapore apart. I hope that you will continue to be good role models and I believe that if we continue this, then I think we would have discharged our duty and our generation can pass on good values and good foundations to the next.

Thank you very much.

More Resources

Honouring MINDEF Volunteers