Moment to Moment

I attended a Youth Forum this morning and the topic for discussion was Key Challenges of Singapore’s Foreign Policies, particularly in ASEAN context. The first time I saw the title….I was like…OH WOW!! The topic is too intellectual for me and reading a write up about Foreign Policy of Singapore and not able to comprehend a single paragraph, I asked myself how I am going to survive the next few hours. Surprisingly, I enjoyed the whole session.

The Mayor of South-west CDC, Dr Amy Khor, the MPs...Mr Zaqy Mohamad, Mr Alvin Yeo and Mr Ang Mong Seng were part of the panel addressing the questions we raised up.

The issues we had to discuss about were something like what we could do to improve relationships with countries around us and a few other issues that I can’t seem to recall as of now.

I was with a group and we discussed a lot about the issues that were brought up. One of the MPs sat with us and asked about one of our questions. We told him that we were thinking whether it is possible for Singapore to let those countries know that whenever in crisis and we sent help, whatever we did is not out of obligation but as part of humanity. We brought up to him that probably those countries thought that as a rich country, it is our obligation to help those countries not as privileged as ours. He said to answer our question, he asked us to think of one of our National Policies that has a link to a foreign policy on what we brought up. This was when the four of us in the group looked at each other and started to sweat lol. He gave us 2 minutes to think about it and we had no idea what is the national policy. A nice man he is, he told us what it is and explained to us the rationale behind it…well…it is the GST increased of course. After hearing his explanation, I have better understanding why the government did that and the four of us thought that it would be better in the first place if the government would have told us the real reason behind the increase.

Well…overall it was a fruitful session especially the Q & A sessions among the participants and the Ministers. I’ll definitely go for more of this forum in future and I do hope next time they addressed issues concerning the youth rather than topic that is so difficult for us to comprehend.