Speech by Minister for Defence Mr Chan Chun Sing at the Berita Harian Achiever of the Year 2025 on 7 November 2025

Distinguished guests, friends, families, and supporters of Berita Harian, a very good evening to all of you.

 It is my pleasure to join you this evening for the 27th edition of the Anugerah Jauhari Awards. Tonight, we are here to congratulate and celebrate our two outstanding recipients, Aisyah and Fairoz.

Aisyah, I must say that it has been very inspirational, even for myself personally, to see you grow from strength to strength, to overcome all the adversities that you have undergone, and yet be able to continue to always remember the community and contribute back to the community. You are certainly deserving of the award, and we look forward to your contributions to our community. Aisyah, thank you very much for inspiring us.

For Fairoz, I must make a personal declaration: he got the award this evening not because I am his Minister. I have known Fairoz since he was young. Indeed, we were officers serving together. I must tell you a nice little story about Fairoz and my relationship with my fellow officers, including him. When I was young, there was one officer who inspired me a lot. He took care of me, and at one point in time, he was in the same unit as me as my Officer Commanding (OC). If you all still remember him, he is Brigadier-General Ishak. In my first unit, he was OC Bravo, and I learned a lot from him. He is, in the history of the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), one of the few people who taught both the company tactics course and the battalion tactics course. He taught me many things. One of the things that he taught me, which we hope to pass on, is to always take care of the future generation.

I had the privilege of working with many great officers like Fairoz and others in the SAF. Today, Fairoz is the Commander, 9th Division, which used to be my division. He is the Chief Infantry Officer. I am sure he will lead the infantry to greater heights. Most importantly, I am sure he will take care of the men and women under his charge. To me, that is most important, because in the SAF, we believe that if you take care of the men and women under your charge, the men and women will take care of the mission. Thank you very much, Fairoz, for inspiring us and for taking care of our men and women in service. Thank you.

I also want to thank the Berita Harian team tonight for working very hard behind the scenes, not just for this award. I visit the Berita Harian team regularly, and I just visited them recently. Every time I visit Berita Harian, I can feel the family spirit, a team that wants to excel and do well. Today, we have heard from Nazry some of the plans that they have going forward. I must congratulate them for their boldness in envisioning a future for Berita Harian and also for the Malay/Muslim community in Singapore.

It is not easy, in today's internet world, to run a newspaper. You have to do the traditional newspaper. You also have to transition to many of these new media, including videos, podcasts, and many other things. I am quietly confident of this team. I have seen them grow, and I have seen them constantly seek new ideas to innovate, to produce better products – not just for the business, but more importantly, to bind the community together. I hope that we will all join hands to support this team in Berita Harian, as we have supported the previous teams led by the previous generations of leaders, to take Berita Harian to the next higher plane, and also to be a shining beacon for the Malay/Muslim community in Singapore. Thank you Nazry, for your leadership, and thank you to the BH team for organising this and inspiring the Malay/Muslim community. Thank you very much.

I was told that the BH team had a problem tonight. They had a problem because, with each passing year, it has become harder for them to decide who should be the deserving winner for the award. I think it is a happy problem because it is a good sign to see the community getting stronger, more confident, and more successful with every generation. By any measure tonight, our Malay/Muslim community in Singapore can be very proud of its progress over the years. Whether we look at education, jobs, or housing, the trajectory has always been upwards in the last 60 years of our independence. There is much to celebrate, and there is much to be proud of.

Just like every Singaporean, we also know that, as with any community, there will always be areas where we can do better, where we want to do better, and where there are individuals who need more help. We want to do it better, not just for ourselves, but for the whole community. I think the Singapore Malay/Muslim community, just like any other community in Singapore, shares the same ethos and philosophies. Our government remains fully committed to helping all Singaporeans progress, regardless of race, language, religion, or starting point in life. We will always do more for those with less, so that we can move forward together as a society.

Now, having said that, we all know that, as fellow Singaporeans, we are never complacent, and we are never easily satisfied with the status quo. We are constantly aspiring to do better for ourselves, for our community, and for our country. Likewise, I think it is the same for our Malay/Muslim community. In preparing this speech, I have asked myself, "How would we define success for ourselves as a Malay/Muslim community in, say, 10 or 20 years’ time? What would a successful Malay/Muslim community be?" I thought hard about it, and I thought I would share with you some of my thoughts.

There were three things that stood out for me when I thought about our Malay/Muslim community going forward. First, I think we will have succeeded by our own standards if we have a community that is proud of our own progress, self-assured in our diverse accomplishments, and confident of our unique Singapore Malay/Muslim identity.

Second, I think we would have succeeded if we have a community that blends the best of our Singapore values – such as meritocracy, fairness, openness – with our own diverse, rich heritage in the Malay/Muslim community. Third, I think we will have succeeded if we have a community that is strong in our bonds, firmly rooted, yet comfortable in our diversity, grounded in our beliefs, and yet open to the world.

These are my three simple wishes for our community: where we are proud of our own progress and self-confident in the diversity of our accomplishments; where we are able to blend the best of our Singapore ethos with the rich heritage that we have; and where the community is strong in our roots, yet comfortable with our diversity and open to the world.

Now, this brings me to something more fundamental about how we think about our identity as fellow Singaporeans. Perhaps this is the Singapore story. Our Singapore identity has never been monolithic or homogeneous, and I do not think it will be. As a recent study by the Institute of Policy Studies, or IPS, reminds us, every Singaporean carries multiple layers of identity. There is the national identity that unites us as fellow Singaporeans. There are also racial and religious identities that give us our roots and meaning. There are then also our professional identities, personal interests, and even the communities that we belong to, that shape our identity. Our identity is a multi-layered, multifaceted one. These layers and facets are not mutually exclusive, and they need not be.

The Singaporean identity is not about homogenising everyone or ignoring our differences. It is about building a shared identity upon our diverse heritage – one that recognises yet embraces our differences. This is what gives our society resilience and balance, especially in a fragmenting world. We might think that this is quite natural in Singapore, but actually, if we reflect on this, with comparisons around the world, it is not so simple, nor natural. Some countries have chosen seemingly simpler paths when faced with people from diverse backgrounds. Some try to homogenise everyone with the same identity, while others try to keep the different groups apart and separate. We have chosen perhaps the harder but, in my view, more rewarding way – to celebrate our diversity and build our unity upon it.

This is not always easy. As an open society, there will always be external forces trying to influence us or pull us in different directions. We know that, in Singapore, we cannot close ourselves off from the rest of the world, nor should we ever think of doing so. Yet, at the same time, we must always remember to put our national interests first – that Singapore must not be a proxy for others, to be used for their purposes. We must stay anchored, clear about who we are, what we stand for, and what kind of future we want to build together.

Building this shared identity will take time, but we are making steady progress. With every shared experience, from our schools to national service, from housing to work, we build trust and understanding. Every challenge over the past 60 years that we have been able to overcome together makes us stronger and more united. Every success that we celebrate together strengthens our shared purpose. Just as tonight, the success of Aisyah and Fairoz does not just reflect on the Malay/Muslim community; it is our shared success, because we all know that whenever we receive an award, whether it is tonight or anywhere else or anytime, it is not just because of our hard work or intelligence. It is because in Singapore, we have the shared ethos to give our best to the fellow Singaporeans around us – that we define our success not just by how well we do for ourselves, and certainly not just in this generation alone, but by how well we enable the rest to do even better than us. That is the unique thing about the Singaporean identity, and I think that is also part of the heritage that we have from the Malay/Muslim community, where we want to give our best to the next generation and not just for ourselves.

At the same time, we must also recognise that there will be differences now and then. We must seek to deeply understand the forces operating in each of us, the strengths of the different individuals, so that we can put each person in the best position to contribute to our society. We should not chase optical equality or tokenism if that means violating the shared principle of merit. This is how we have tried to blend the best of both worlds – having a shared set of values that we all, as fellow Singaporeans, share, but yet at the same time, never forgetting our rich heritage from the diverse communities. Upon our diversity, we build our unity.

I have seen the progress of how we have become stronger and closer as a nation, despite our different starting points. Every generation has done its part to lift the next, and every challenge we have faced has brought us closer together as one people – whether it was in the early years when the British withdrew east of the Suez, the 1970 oil crisis, the 1980 economic crisis, the 1990s Asian financial crisis, SARS, the global financial crisis, and most recently, COVID-19. Through all these challenges, we have come closer together than ever before, drawing upon the strength of our diverse heritage, but always remembering that we will give our best to the next generation. Therefore, I am confident that we will become even stronger and more united in time to come.

We can only do this by appreciating the diversity of strengths among us, which is also becoming increasingly important for our collective resilience in an uncertain world. In an uncertain and volatile world, we never know what will be the strengths that are required for us to overcome the next challenge. But we do believe that we need a diversity of skills and strengths for us to put ourselves in the best position to overcome these challenges. That is why, in Singapore, we never believe in trying to homogenise everyone or have everyone chasing the same narrow yardstick, because if we do, we will be strong but brittle. This is why we must always remember and appreciate our diversity, and build upon it something that can unite us going forward.

I have always said that we may never be united by a common past, but we can definitely be united by a shared future with a shared sense of ethos. We will falter if we deny our differences or try to make everyone the same, but we will thrive if we respect those differences and draw upon them to complement one another. So let us continue to celebrate our diversity and build a shared future on a set of shared ethos – of trust, fairness, and opportunity for all – an ethos that brings out the best in each of us to be the best versions of ourselves together: the best of Singapore, the best for Singapore. This is the ethos that has guided us since independence, and it must continue to guide us in this onward journey towards SG100.

Finally, on a lighter note, I always like to share this. When I was young, someone told me, "Don’t worry, you are never completely useless. Minimally, you can be a negative example." I thought about it. Maybe he was trying to make fun of me, but I learned one thing – that each of us, regardless of our station in life, can make a contribution. We all can do something for the society that is bigger than ourselves. That is why the most inspirational stories in my constituencies may not come from the rich or the powerful, but from the one with the least – staying in the one-room flat, who is prepared to take that step to help and serve the community. That is the power of our Singaporean identity – that regardless of where we are, we can always inspire and be an inspiration to others by making our own contribution.

On that note, may you enjoy the rest of your evening. Thank you very much.