Policy experience vital for exercising judgment on reserves: Halimah

SINGAPORE – Making a decision to unlock the nation’s reserves is not just based on numbers but involves exercising judgment gleaned from years of experience in policymaking, said Presidential hopeful Halimah Yacob.

“Numbers are important – what is the amount, how much will it affect our reserves, is this sustainable, how many years will this programme go on (and) what will be the impact. Those are the questions you ask in terms of numbers,” she said in an interview with TODAY held on Monday (Aug 14) at the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) Centre in Marina Boulevard.

“But the real issue you’ve got to ask yourself is, how do you exercise judgment?” added Mdm Halimah, who remains an adviser to the Ong Teng Cheong Labour Leadership Institute as well as several unions after she stepped down last week as Member of Parliament and Speaker of the House to run for President.

Apart from Mdm Halimah, Second Chance Properties chief executive Salleh Marican, 67, and Bourbon Offshore Asia Pacific chairman Farid Khan Kaim Khan, 62, have announced their intention to contest. Among the three, Mdm Halimah is the only one who checks all the boxes of the eligibility criteria, having spent at least three years in a key public office.

One of the main roles of the Elected President is to safeguard Singapore’s reserves by holding the “second key”, and the bar for private-sector candidates was raised recently to require them to helm a company with at least S$500 million in shareholders’ equity, up from the current requirement of S$100 million in paid up capital.

While some have questioned her financial acumen, Mdm Halimah pointed to her decades of experience in the labour movement and as part of the public policymaking process.

In 2009, amid the global financial crisis, then-President S R Nathan gave the Government permission to draw S$4.9 billion from the reserves to fund schemes to save jobs and to ease credit for businesses. This was the first time that the Government had sought the President’s approval to draw on past reserves.

Mdm Halimah said Mr Nathan would have known the dire consequences if he did not give the green light for the draw down. “He must have had to use that judgment ... that judgment is truly very critical and that’s the judgment that we have to make all the time. Because if it’s just dollars and cents, it’s very simple,” she pointed out.

At that time, Mdm Halimah was the deputy secretary-general of NTUC. “I had to go to a factory at 6.50am to wait for the workers to (finish their shift) ... the managing director said ‘we are going to retrench the workers’, so I had to go down with my officers,” she recalled. “I understand the impact,” she added.

While the President does not have policymaking powers, Mdm Halimah noted how each of the past office holders had defined society in his own way. For example, Mr Ong Teng Cheong was “into arts and culture” while incumbent President Tony Tan had set the tone of getting Singaporeans to “work together, chip in ... to create a better society through raising funds”, she said.

For her, if elected, she would like to continue the work of the President’s Challenge, which was initiated by Mr Nathan in 2000, as well as to support children from disadvantaged backgrounds in terms of their educational needs and welfare.

Given her “terrible struggle” as a child — after her father died, her mother raised her and four older siblings by selling food on a push cart — this was a cause that she could relate to.

Lauding the Government for “doing a good job in terms of education, social services and so on”, she pointed out that this was the “only way to break the poverty cycle”.

Ultimately, she wants to give a sense of hope to underprivileged children. “(If) you start from nothing ... the only thing you have is hope,” she said.

Her mother used to sell food by the roadaside across Singapore Polytechnic. Seeing the students gave her hope as a little girl, she said. “I was thinking to myself, ‘Cannot be everybody comes from rich families, right? Surely there are some kids from poor families’. So, maybe one day I will end up like that,” she added.

Speculation was rife for several months before Mdm Halimah made public her intention to run for President earlier this month. She explained that she had wanted to ensure arrangements were in place to minimise any disruptions from her resignations. “It’s not as if I decide and then one month later I resign,” said Mdm Halimah, who was first elected to Parliament in 2001 and appointed as Speaker in 2013.

The reserved election has inadvertently cast the spotlight on the “Malay-ness” of the potential candidates. On this, Mdm Halimah said: “My father is an Indian, my mom a Malay ... to me, the community can judge for themselves the contributions I’ve made. I've worked with so many Malay-Muslim organisations, and support a lot of their objectives and projects. I think that speaks for itself. The record speaks for itself.”

“Not a single person” has gone up to her and asked whether she is Malay, she said. “I think that’s a sense of confidence — acceptance of the person that I am. Even members of the Malay community whom I’ve met have not raised that question with me.”

Stressing that voters should assess a potential candidate based on the contributions that he or she can make, she added: “That should be the most important thing.”