Time for the public sector to walk the talk and transform

I fully agree with what Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat said in urging companies to persist in transformation and “take the slightly more difficult road today” to avoid “hitting a dead end”.

But the most labour-intensive sector is the public sector.

There are about 145,000 public servants to meet the needs of 5.6 million residents.

The Government has grown inexorably over the past three decades. Today there are 16 government ministries and more than 70 other agencies and organs of state.

More insidiously, at a time of labour force constraints arising from very low birth rates and an ageing population, nearly all civil servants are Singaporeans and the average age of the public sector workforce is low compared to that in the private sector.

If the Government wants the moral authority to lecture the private sector, it needs its own ITM or Industry Transformation Map.

In Mr Heng’s words, the Government should “take the difficult road today”, before the workforce becomes dichotomous with a well-paid, insulated public sector stuffed to the gills with Singaporeans and a cosmopolitan private sector forced to deal daily with a reckoning with market forces.

At some point, the latter are going to wonder why they should be funding the former.

The “front line” for Singapore is the economy and not the public sector, a critical enabler though it may be.