Goh Keng Swee: A Legacy Of Public Service

A Legacy of Public Service

Emrys Chew, Chong Guan Kwa

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9789814390750
• eBook ISBN: 9789814397575
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Dr. Goh Keng Swee's extensive career as a public servant was dynamic as well as distinguished, in many ways decisively instrumental in the making of the Republic of Singapore. This distinctive collection of essays attempts an assessment of the long-term influence and significance of Dr. Goh's major contributions.

Envisaged as a companion volume to Goh Keng Swee: A Public Career Remembered, this volume brings together an exceptional team of Singaporean scholars whose interdisciplinary expertise and cross-generational perspectives offer a balanced analysis and nuanced appraisal of Dr. Goh's lifetime of public service. The book's contributors argue that Dr. Goh's past endeavours bequeathed an enduring legacy, meriting fresh examination and careful evaluation in order to appreciate the heroic scale of such achievement.

Particularly instructive are the examples of Dr. Goh's thinking patriotism, fiscal prudence, strategic pragmatism, and creative imagination at work — technocracy at its finest — which could be of immediate, practical benefit to a wider ‘nation of technocrats’. Further illumination comes from the insights of those contributors who had worked with the former Deputy Prime Minister and knew him personally. For a half-century that witnessed key turning points and phases of development in Singapore's transformation from colonial port city to independent global city, Dr. Goh played a leading role in the crafting and conduct of public policy, as with the creation of public institutions, which made the difference between survival and success.

The organization of this volume reflects both a thematic approach and a chronological arrangement of material, the focus and the order of chapters corresponding to the historical sequence of public offices that Dr. Goh held: social welfare; political and constitutional evolution; development economics and finance; the armed forces and defence industry; the education system, from schools through higher education to the research institutes; Chinese studies, from Confucianism to ‘China watching’; and cultural development, with special emphasis on the creation of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.

Goh Keng Swee: A Legacy of Public Service will be read by present and future generations of public servants, by Singaporeans in general, and by all students and laypersons with an interest in the modern history of Singapore — social, economic, political, military, and cultural — to which a characteristically simple and frugal Dr. Goh contributed both decisively and unreservedly.

Contents:

• Introduction — Goh Keng Swee: Heroic Public Servant and History-Maker of Modern Singapore (Emrys Chew)
• Goh Keng Swee in a Social Welfare History of Singapore (Ho Chi Tim)
• Goh Keng Swee in Politics and Parliament (Kevin Y L Tan)
• Goh Keng Swee, the Development Economist (Lee Soo Ann)
• Goh Keng Swee and Finance (Linda Low)
• Goh Keng Swee and the Emergence of a Modern SAF: The Rearing of a Poisonous Shrimp (Bernard Fook Weng Loo)
• Goh Keng Swee and Singapore's Defence Industrial Policy (Adrian Wee Jin Kuah)
• Goh Keng Swee and the Singapore Education System (Alistair Chew)
• Goh Keng Swee's Contributions to Higher Education, Military Studies, and the Research Institutes (Ernest Chew)
• Goh Keng Swee and Chinese Studies in Singapore: From Confucianism to ‘China Watching’ (John Wong)
• Goh Keng Swee's Cultural Contributions and the Making of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (Bernard T G Tan)
• Concluding Reflections: Goh Keng Swee as a 'Great Man' (Kwa Chong Guan)

Readership: Researchers, academics, undergraduates and graduates, in addition to professionals and the general public interested in politics, history, and Singapore's founding fathers.

1

Goh Keng Swee in a Social Welfare History of Singapore

Ho Chi Tim

***

Scholarship by and about Dr. Goh Keng Swee has thus far brought about a deeper appreciation of Singapore’s economic history, military history, and to some degree, education and cultural histories. The common thread running through them all is their focus on Goh’s political career, more specifically his time as a People’s Action Party (PAP) Cabinet minister from 1959 onwards. Until recently, there were only cursory acknowledgements that Goh was a civil servant in the British colonial government before becoming a PAP minister.¹ Very little is known about those years, particularly his time in the Singapore Department of Social Welfare, also officially known as the Social Welfare Department (SWD).²

Recent publications on Goh have shed more light on his pre-PAP years. In 2007, Tan Siok Sun dedicated two chapters to his civil service career in her biography, Goh Keng Swee: A Portrait.³ Although focused more on the personal aspects of Goh’s life, Tan’s biography would pave the way for more in-depth research into Goh’s role in Singapore’s history, among which is the recently published In Lieu of Ideology: An Intellectual Biography of Goh Keng Swee by Ooi Kee Beng.⁴ In attempting to discern and clarify Goh’s ideological inclinations through an examination of Goh’s writings and speeches, Ooi similarly apportioned two chapters (out of eight) to the period before Goh’s time as ‘nation-builder’. The companion volume to this publication — Goh Keng Swee: A Public Career Remembered — has sought to distil the essence of decades of public service, via oral histories and firsthand interviews of those who worked with him. Almost inevitably, the bulk of the collected accounts are dominated by Goh’s time as a Cabinet minister after 1959.⁵

Still, these three publications together (or aspects of them) have not only demonstrated a pre-PAP period of substantial activity, but go on to suggest the probable impact and continuing effect of such experiences on the ways in which Goh thought and worked. While there is admittedly greater emphasis on Goh’s economic, defence and education policies as they still resonate in present-day Singapore, certain questions still remain: How significant was his time in the SWD? What events or circumstances led him to give up a successful career in the civil service and run for political office in 1959?

This chapter attempts to address these questions by focusing on those years at the Department of Social Welfare. It examines from a historical perspective some of the more prominent work he did there: in particular, the social surveys of 1947 and 1953–54. From there, by ‘remembering’ Goh as a civil servant in a colonial administration, it may be possible to make some inferences as to how his time in the SWD influenced his eventual departure and approach to politics and nation-building.⁶

Towards a Social Welfare History of Singapore

The terms ‘social welfare’ or ‘welfare’ are invariably treated like the proverbial four-letter word in Singapore, or at least from the position of the incumbent PAP government. Official rhetoric has always eschewed any notion of Singapore being a welfare state, or to be more specific, providing European-style state welfare.⁷ But such rhetoric is perhaps based on a rather narrow interpretation of the term ‘welfare’: welfare as a form of income maintenance, the dole, or an overall sense of dependency on the state.⁸ While this perception of welfare is by no means incorrect (and is indeed perhaps the more common understanding of the term), there are broader definitions of welfare that could allow for more nuanced analyses. The generic understanding of welfare — the general well-being of society, or what is ‘good’ for the people⁹ — is also not entirely helpful for our purposes, leading as it may to philosophical musings rather than a discussion grounded in historical context.

But if ‘welfare’ or ‘social welfare’ are both understood within the narrower framework of social policy, specifically the ‘provision of social services — principally health care, housing, social security, education, and social work’¹⁰ — then it is very possible to think of a social welfare history in terms of how and why social services developed over time in Singapore. In her broad overview of social services in Singapore, Ann Wee has demonstrated that there is a history — still largely unresearched — of how the state provided social services since colonial times.¹¹ Her straightforward but extremely instructive narrative began with a discussion of the liberal non-interventionist policy adopted by initial colonial administrations, a ‘hands-off’ period which came to an end when the late nineteenth century ushered in a more paternalistic approach — as exemplified by the establishment of the Chinese Protectorate in 1877, arguably the first instance of state intervention into the well-being of a specific section of Singapore’s colonial society. She also included a discussion of the social services provided by various voluntary welfare organizations (VWO) before and during the Japanese Occupation — many of which continued into the post-war era; and ended the narrative examining the functions of the SWD when first established in 1946, and with it, the unapologetic adoption of a planned, organized approach to social welfare in Singapore.

Wee’s narrative provides a useful platform for further research into Singapore’s social welfare history, not least the ideas and circumstances that had encouraged the shift from a laissez-faire to a more paternalistic social policy — which directly led to other interventions such as the establishment of the Singapore Improvement Trust in 1927 and the Silver Jubilee Fund in 1935; and a detailed examination of the impact of the Second World War and the Japanese Occupation on colonial social policy, specifically British imperial acceptance of responsibility over their territories and peoples. While the state did become more prominent after 1945 in the area of social welfare, it was by no means the sole provider of social services. Various VWOs and other socio-economic communities or groups, each organized along ethnic or religious lines that provided similar social services to their members, could be seen as critical in contesting or complementing the more state-centric version of welfare provision.

The origins of most of these services and agencies can moreover be traced to Singapore’s colonial period. Hence, it is also possible to think about social welfare history within the framework of colonialism and decolonization. For instance, we could draw attention to the various ideas and policies the British borrowed from the metropole and attempted to implement in their colonies, as well as the extent to which those ideas and policies were accepted by the colonized.¹² From the ensuing interaction between metropolitan ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ colony, various histories are possible, including the impact and legacy of colonial social policy on former colonies (and vice versa), comparisons of welfare provision across different colonies, and the stories of individuals and institutions that were affected by the historical forces of colonialism, decolonization and nationalism.¹³ This chapter attempts to develop that final point by treating Goh and his work in the SWD as a point of reference within a broader historical narrative of social welfare in Singapore.

Goh Keng Swee in the Department of Social Welfare

Goh spent about seven years working in the SWD, which were further divided into three different periods (1946–48, 1951–54, and 1956–58). In between, he attended the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), studying for and obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree with first-class honours in 1951, and later his doctorate in 1956.¹⁴ Along with several former colleagues from the prewar War Tax Department, including Monie Sundrum and Woon Wah Siang, Goh rejoined the colonial government in September 1945 to work in an Emergency Relief Centre. Based in Victoria Memorial Hall, the centre was set up by the British Military Administration (BMA) to coordinate post-war relief efforts, such as resettling people displaced by the war, providing much-needed food and financial relief, and administering services for youths orphaned by the war.¹⁵

The staff and functions of that centre provided the foundations for the SWD when it was established in June 1946. Housed in what was known then as the ‘Old Supreme Court’, the SWD retained most of the functions of the emergency relief centre but also co-opted and initiated several more permanent welfare services, such as protection of women and girls (co-opted from the Chinese Protectorate), overseeing homes for children and an island-wide feeding scheme.¹⁶ In the same month of the department’s inception, the People’s Restaurants were also launched. The feeding scheme, as it was called by the department, was launched not just to feed the Singapore working population at cost price, but also to counter the ill-effects of a rampant black market on the basic human need that is food. Both T.P.F. McNeice, the first Secretary for Social Welfare, and George Bogaars, a former Head of Singapore’s Civil Service and one-time Permanent Secretary to Goh’s Ministry of Interior and Defence from 1965 to 1973, recalled in separate oral interviews that Goh was instrumental in getting the People’s Restaurants and other SWD feeding schemes up and running.¹⁷

By 1947, Goh was working in and soon after leading the Social Research Section. The section was added to the fast-expanding department at the beginning of 1947 with an objective of providing ‘a factual basis for the Department’s own work’.¹⁸ One of its first tasks was to conduct a social survey so as to give ‘a reliable basis of ascertained fact upon which future social policy in Singapore may be planned in a scientific way’.¹⁹ The preparation for the social survey occupied most of 1947 and was eventually carried out and completed in the last two weeks of the same year. The report was published almost a year later in November 1948.²⁰ The survey covered the following areas: type of households (numerically defined, as in 1-person, 2-persons and so on), type of housing (subdivided into three types: rooms, cubicles and spaces), the occupation and education of wage-earners, children’s education, and more intriguingly, an attempt to discern the relationship between children’s education and parents’ occupation, as well as the strength of homeland ties as felt by the major immigrant groups.²¹ The first of its kind in Singapore, the 1947 social survey provided useful data on several aspects of Singapore’s immediate post-war social landscape for social policy. Some of the data collected was also compared with earlier surveys of British cities (such as Plymouth and Bristol) and presented in statistical tables.²²

Compared to the subsequent survey of 1953–54, the 1947 survey (or at least the survey report) seemed rather aimless. It appeared uncertain of the specific issues it could and should have focused on, other than a general stab at providing a broad understanding of post-war social conditions. The survey nevertheless provided useful preliminary data shedding light on certain social issues, such as overcrowding, the possible impact of the wage-earners’ education levels on their children’s educational prospects, and an increasingly settled population but with little immediate social support. Data for the last part was somewhat inconclusive — due to low sample sizes and subjectivity, but the greater numbers of immigrants indicating they were not returning home nor remitting money back pointed to a settled (or disconnected) immigrant group which might not be earning enough to support themselves and others — and in turn, presenting a potential social problem that needed the attention of the government.²³ In the end, the survey was perhaps more useful as a trial run in testing the department’s capabilities to conduct a large-scale examination of the population so as to support social policy decisions.

In the survey committee that included McNeice, his...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Goh Keng Swee: Heroic Public Servant and History-Maker of Modern Singapore
• 1 Goh Keng Swee in a Social Welfare History of Singapore
• 2 Goh Keng Swee in Politics and Parliament
• 3 Goh Keng Swee, the Development Economist
• 4 Goh Keng Swee and Finance
• 5 Goh Keng Swee and the Emergence of a Modern SAF: The Rearing of a Poisonous Shrimp
• Photo Illustrations
• 6 Goh Keng Swee and Singapore’s Defence Industrial Policy
• 7 Goh Keng Swee and the Singapore Education System
• 8 Goh Keng Swee’s Contributions to Higher Education, Military Studies, and the Research Institutes
• 9 Goh Keng Swee and Chinese Studies in Singapore: From Confucianism to ‘China Watching’
• 10 Goh Keng Swee’s Cultural Contributions and the Making of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra
• Concluding Reflections: Goh Keng Swee as a ‘Great Man ’
• Appendix: A Holy Order to Scale New Heights
• Index