{"id":249,"date":"2014-03-23T16:40:55","date_gmt":"2014-03-23T08:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tembusu.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/?p=249"},"modified":"2025-09-25T16:47:51","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T08:47:51","slug":"engaging-tembusians-in-active-citizenry-reach-dialogue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/2014\/03\/engaging-tembusians-in-active-citizenry-reach-dialogue\/","title":{"rendered":"Engaging Tembusians in active citizenry: REACH dialogue"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tembusu has a history of engaging with current affairs and issues relevant to Singapore\u00a0<\/span>and the world, predominantly through Tembusu Forums which are typically held twice a\u00a0semester. This semester, however, such efforts have been complemented by a student\u00a0initiative: a REACH dialogue session with a local minister, which took place on 29 Jan.<\/p>\n

About 50 Tembusians attended the dialogue session with Ngiam Siew Ying, the director of the\u00a0National Population and Talent Division. The topic of discussion was population\u00a0issues, as Ms Ngiam had headed the committee in charge of the Population White Paper.<\/p>\n

Population may seem like a topic that is far away for the typical student, but has far-reaching implications. However, its seemingly distant nature often results in the typical\u00a0citizen being able to view the topic of population from an individual perspective. Yet, this\u00a0seemingly distant topic lies much closer to Ms Ngiam’s heart, as she mentioned that \u201cshe\u00a0thinks about population during lunch and car-rides\u201d.<\/p>\n

Ranging from the aspirations of the future workforce to falling birthrates and taking care of\u00a0the ageing and vulnerable, the students tackled the topic of population from multiple angles,\u00a0often leading to contentious viewpoints. Among these include the tensions of whether\u00a0Singapore could improve its fertility rate (most were pessimistic on this) to whether we\u00a0would allow a company to bring in investments, subject to significant foreign expertise.<\/p>\n

Indeed, while participants initially expressed strong agreement at bringing in foreign\u00a0investment, different students started to express reservations when the subtleties\u00a0and trade-offs were outlined more explicitly. A participant had serious concerns over\u00a0a proposed \u201c40% Singaporeans and 60% foreigners\u201d ratio, while another participant\u00a0raised the question of whether \u201ccompanies will obey the Singapore government and train\u00a0locals to eventually fill these jobs\u201d. There existed only one consensus: the issue was not\u00a0straightforward and demanded more thinking. One challenge during the session was that\u00a0not all the issues and angles were immediately familiar to everyone.<\/p>\n

The question and answer session deviated in many different directions from the\u00a0presentation Ms Ngiam gave on the central issues of population. Participants were very\u00a0concerned about finer aspects of population. Kicking off the question and answer session\u00a0was a question about classifying the population under the traditional race framework,\u00a0and whether Singapore would be more open to a more defined race category. The\u00a0conclusion? Don’t expect any changes any time soon. Yet another student quizzed Ms Ngiam on retirement, which generated further discussion on whether the \u201cretirement age\u00a0will increase\u201d, or even the definition of retirement and its meaning to the elderly working\u00a0population. The questions have indeed left students to think about problems in population\u00a0which would probably not have happened if these questions were not asked.<\/p>\n

The Tembusu-REACH dialogue, organized by undergraduate student Donavan Cheah, was born of the\u00a0problem of Tembusians having difficulties finding \u201csafe havens\u201d to express their views. The\u00a0event was initially meant to be chaired by PAP minister Ms Grace Fu, who backed out at\u00a0short notice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About 50 Tembusians attended the dialogue session with Ngiam Siew Ying, the director of the National Population and Talent Division. The topic of discussion was population issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":257,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","publication_type-report","theme-college-affairs","theme-society","scope-singapore"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":386,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions\/386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}