i do love tharman, and the articulate but unprickly way he gives this interview at st gallen. sure, he does skirt a few of the awkward questions with set pieces, but otherwise he puts the singapore case intelligently and eloquently here without resorting to the idea of singapore exceptionalism (in fact, the answer he gave to a question on exceptionalism was a real surprise.) and in a manner that is less defensive than you would expect, from a singaporean. i don't agree with everything he's said here, and a few of the things said are not new, (i take sackur's point on several of them) but i love his explanation of our HDB policy (which is both cynical in its assumptions and pragmatic in its effect) and what he says about the importance of neighbourhoods and the unconscious daily influences that shape the way we live with other people and particularly (i like the way he put it) "the traps we fall into."



THARMAN:
Not just in Singapore, but anywhere in the world. The natural workings of society would likely have led to mistrust, discomfort, bigotry and what we see in abundance in many countries in the world today. The most intrusive social policy in Singapore has turned out to be the most important. And it has a level of intrusiveness that doesn’t come comfortably to the liberal mind.


SACKUR:
What is it?


THARMAN:
Housing estates. Eight-five per cent of Singapore live in public housing. Because when it’s 85 per cent, it covers the lower-income group, the middle-income group, the upper-middle-income group. These are middle-class housing estates. But every single block of flats and every single precinct requires an ethnic balance. That’s intrusive, because you’re constraining. So once a particular ethnic group gets beyond a certain quota in that block or precinct, the resale market has to adjust. You can’t just get more and more of the same people concentrating themselves in the same neighbourhood. And I’d say when this was first done, I don’t think we knew how important it was going to be.


SACKUR:
I mean it sounds extraordinarily … authoritarian!


THARMAN:
It was intrusive. And it turned out to be our greatest strength. Because once people live together, they’re not just walking their corridors together every day and taking the same elevators up and down; their kids go to the same kindergartens, the same primary schools. Because all over the world, young kids go to schools very near to where they live. And they grow up together.

The lessons coming out of Baltimore, the lessons coming out of France’s large cities, the lessons coming out of all our societies, show that neighbourhoods matter, place matters, where you live matters. It matters much more than economists thought. It matters tremendously in the daily influences that shape your life and the traps that you fall into.


SACKUR:
But will Singapore always be the kind of society where the government says, ultimately, you can't live there because the quota for your particular ethnic grouping has already been reached, you've got to go and live there? Is it going to be that kind of society forever?


THARMAN:
That's an imponderable. I think it will be naive to think that you can lift it and people will automatically gravitate towards diverse neighbourhoods and you won't in fact get the reverse. Because if you look at the most advanced democracies, that's exactly what's happened. In the UK, half of the Muslim population lives in your bottom 10 per cent of neighbourhoods. Did it happen because of some random chance? Or did it happen because that's the natural workings of society?

We have to address these facts honestly and realise that human beings aren't perfect; everyone has biases, discomforts, a sense of liking or distrust for each other. And there is a rule of government to unify people. And it doesn't happen through speeches. It means you need mechanisms, you need instruments. They mustn't be too constraining on individual choice, but you do need to constrain something.

And you end up a better society or you don't - that's the test, not whether the government is right. You end up a society that people feel more comfortable in. That's the real test.

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