The APPSMO Advantage: Strategic Opportunities: Evolving Defence Diplomacy With the Asia Pacific Programme for Senior Military Officers by Keng Yong Ong & Mushahid Ali & Bernard Chin

Author:Keng Yong Ong & Mushahid Ali & Bernard Chin [Ong, Keng Yong & Ali, Mushahid & Chin, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General, Security (National & International), Public Policy, Military Policy
ISBN: 9789813147577
Google: VyioDAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 31156804
Publisher: World Scientific
Published: 2016-01-15T06:25:30+00:00

CHAPTER 16

GOOD GOVERNANCE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani

Dean and Professor in the Practice of Public Policy,

Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore

APPSMO 2015

Iam very happy to be here to speak about good governance, and I’m going to be talking mainly about Singapore, and why Singapore succeeded.

I want to begin by saying that as we are celebrating our 50th anniversary tomorrow, I got a request from a publication called World Post, which is run by Huffington Post in California, to write a piece on Singapore on its 50th anniversary, so I decided to write something very provocative. The first line of my column, which was published two to three days ago, was that, not since human history began a few thousand years ago, has any society improved the living standards of its people as well as Singapore has in its first 50 years. Now, you can tell that is a fairly outrageous claim to make, and to my surprise, that column I gather from the editor, has gone viral. It hit about 300,000 views. I don’t know how many attacks I’m getting, but so far, surprisingly, not many people have attacked me for making that outrageous claim. The reason why I made that claim was actually to instigate a debate to understand better what exactly Singapore achieved in its first 50 years, because I do think, and of course, my opinion is biased as I am Singaporean, that Singapore’s achievements are quite remarkable. The real story about Singapore is not just its economic success story which everyone, in a sense, knows about; it is actually the other aspects of Singapore’s development that are equally remarkable.

Indeed, in my column, I said that when I was ambassador to the UN 30 years ago, the then head of UNICEF Jim Grant, an American, and I were talking; I would talk about how well Singapore had done economically. He’d say “Kishore, forget about your economic success, it’s no big deal. What’s really impressive about Singapore is the way you reduced your infant mortality rate faster than any other society in the world has done so.” And he said that was a much more powerful indicator of how well a society is doing because babies are almost, by definition, the most vulnerable members of a society, so when babies begin to live, it means that the surrounding ecosystem is keeping them alive and supporting them. That is a much better indicator of progress; and that’s the kind of progress that Singapore has made, in that and in many other areas.

So the big question is, why did Singapore succeed? The conventional answer, of course, is leadership. It is, of course, true that Singapore had exceptional leadership. Looking back now, I realise that one of the great privileges of my life over the last 45 years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with the three great founding leaders of Singapore, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Dr Goh Keng Swee and Mr S Rajaratnam. And

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