REVISION OF SALARIES OF MINISTERS, CHIEF JUSTICE, ATTORNEY-GENERAL, CHAIRMAN PSC, JUDGES AND MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT

2.35 p.m.

The Prime Minister: Mr Speaker, Sir, before my colleague, the Minister for Finance, moves the Second and Third Readings of the Judges' Remuneration (Amendment) Bill, allow me to explain to the House why Judges' salaries are being revised, and also those of the Attorney-General, the Chairman, Public Service Commission, and the Ministers.

In February, the PSC promoted three members of the Administrative Service from Superscale 'A' to Staff Grade I. I have circulated, with your kind permission, Sir, to all Members the table marked Annex 1 (Cols. 781 - 790) for easy reference. It shows the consolidated salaries, the 1978, 1979, and 1980 National Wages Council awards, and the total wages for each Superscale and Staff Grade. Annex 1 - REVISION OF SALARIES OF MINISTERS, CHIEF JUSTICE, ATTORNEY-GENERAL, CHAIRMAN PSC, JUDGES AND MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT, AVERAGE EARNINGS OF TOP THREE IN VARIOUS COMPANIES AND PROFESSIONS IN 1979, LOCAL LAW GRADUATES, PSC LOCAL LAW SCHOLARS, PSC OVERSEAS LAW SCHOLARS (Cols. 781 - 790)

Since January last year, Legal Service officers have been paid a professional allowance. The maximum for the Solicitor-General is $2,000. This allowance became necessary to redress the wide disparity between salaries in the Legal Service and rewards in private practice. It has, to some extent, checked the brains drain to the private sector. The professional allowance is not paid to the Judges or the Attorney-General. Judges' salaries are fixed by statute. Not unnaturally, the Judges felt that it was incongruous that their pay should be less than the Solicitor-General's with this $2,000 professional allowance. To have allowed the professional allowance to be paid to the Judges would have breached the principle that those in the upper brackets of the protocol hierarchy should not have their salaries augmented by professional allowances, which, in any case, should become unnecessary when the supply of able lawyers increases.

To maintain "relativities", a word used by Establishment officers to mean differences or differentials between the pay of different categories of officers, in this case between Staff Grade I officers and the Solicitor-General with his professional allowance, I have also adjusted the salaries of the Attorney-General, Chairman, Public Service Commission, and Ministers.

The Chief Justice will now be placed on Staff Grade II, a consolidated salary of $13,000 a month.

Judges will go from Superscale 'B' to Superscale 'A'.

The Attorney-General will go from Super-scale 'A' to Staff Grade I. So will the Chairman PSC.

Ministers will have their consolidated pay increased from $10,095 to $11,500, i.e. $500 above Staff Grade I. In other words, the Minister for Law, for example, will be paid $500 more than the Attorney-General.

The Second Deputy Prime Minister will be paid $13,000 consolidated, Staff Grade II, on par with the Chief Justice.

The First Deputy Prime Minister will be paid $14,250 consolidated.

The Prime Minister will be paid $16,500 consolidated.

The relativities between the posts have been roughly maintained for a further period. I must emphasize once again that the Government considers the Administrative Service to be the premier service, more important than the Legal or Judicial Service. In future, Legal and Judicial officers must reconcile themselves to having outstanding Administrative officers going over them and widening the disparity to Staff Grade II and Staff Grade III. Of course, outstanding Legal Service officers are eligible for admission to the Staff Grades of the Administrative Service as Administrative officers.

Salaries of Senior Parliamentary Secretaries, Parliamentary Secretaries, and Political Secretaries are amended as in the table in Annex I: Senior Parliamentary Secretaries from Grade F to E, Parliamentary Secretaries from Grade G to F, and Political Secretaries to Grade G. The revision of Senior Ministers of State and Ministers of State salaries will be made later, probably mid-year.

The Cabinet has also recommended to the House an increase in the allowances given to Members of Parliament, at present $1,340, to $2,000 consolidated at 1977 wages.

This increase will enable Members to employ a part-time clerk/secretary to help them in their constituencies. [Applause] With a more educated and more articulate electorate, Members need help to attend to their constituency work more efficiently and diligently.

The Commissioner of Inland Revenue, wearing another hat as Director, Research and Statistics Unit, is conducting a longitudinal study of what graduates of com- parable age, ability and qualifications earn in the public and private sectors. Longitudinal study is a statistical term, meaning a study that extends with the career of the graduate year by year - graduation day plus one year, plus two years, and so on. It will take six months for all returns to be received and analysed. The public sector has been slow to react to changes in market conditions. The Government has, therefore, decided that there will be an annual Survey of Employment of Graduates on the movement of wages and other perks for professionals and managers to keep wages of public sector graduates comparable with those in the private sector.

Fifteen years ago, the public sector was the largest employer of graduates, and therefore set the norms or standards of pay and remuneration. This is no longer so. It is now the private sector, particularly foreign banks and multinationals, who set the pace. If the Government does not respond sensitively and speedily, the public service will be stripped of talent.

At this stage, may I draw Members' attention to Annex II, which I have circulated, on the average income of various categories of professionals and managers in the private sector. This list has been compiled by the Commissioner of Inland Revenue. If Members will run their eye down the first column showing what the number one man is earning in the various categories of banks, oil companies, multinational manufacturing, local manufacturing, car dealers, transport, ship building, supermarkets, lawyers, accountants, doctors, surgeons, architects, engineers and stockbrokers, they will see how the public sector has been unrealistic in its rewards.

It is simply not possible for the Government to pay what top men are being paid in the banks, or what lawyers, or medical practitioners, let alone what top share-brokers are earning. Nevertheless, the Government has taken cognizance of the changed circumstances under which it is competing for top-ranking talent for the public sector, especially for the political leadership. This is by way of illustration. In fact, it is one of a chain of circumstances which led to this Table being compiled and to a revision being made. In 1978, I had to persuade Dr Tony Tan to give up his position as General Manager of the Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation which would, in the natural course of events, have taken him to the top of the banking ladder. Members will see in column 4 that the highest paid banker in Singapore earns $950,000 a year. He became a Senior Minister of State in February 1979, suffering a considerable loss in his salary and perks which included a car with driver. Even as a Cabinet Minister, his Ministerial remuneration does not equal the total remuneration and perks he would have enjoyed as a banker. Several other Cabinet Ministers, including Mr Ong Teng Cheong who gave up his practice as an architect, have made similar sacrifices.

May I pause here and say that the fact that a top architect is shown in Inland Revenue returns to have earned $200,000 a year does not necessarily mean that architects are generally worse off than, say, dental surgeons or accountants. There is a foot note there (Annex II) which the Commissioner of Inland Revenue has made, in which he has reminded us that:

'. . . these are minimal and the true benefits often total 15% or more of quantified earnings [which are not shown in the returns.] Adjustments, where known, have also been made to earnings diverted to personal or family holding companies. The table therefore shows proven, minimum earnings.'

In other words, lawyers are among the highest earners shown in the list of professions, not because they are virtuous but because their clients will register in their books payments made to them, unlike patients who do not necessarily register what they have paid their doctors. So speaking from personal experience, I do not necessarily believe that a lawyer is twice well-off as a doctor. I think he is twice well-off as far as Inland Revenue is concerned.

The problem with ministerial office is that the reward is the unquantifiable satisfaction of having transformed Singapore and having improved both the standards of living and the quality of life for all Singaporeans.

Those who take up public office must make some sacrifices. Loss of privacy is probably more keenly felt than the loss of many invisible perks like tax-free car and driver, expense account, entertainment and travel, housing loans, and end-of-year bonuses. As the private sector further develops, and we are confident it will, I fear it will become more difficult to recruit the really talented into the political leadership if we make the taking up of political office such a sharp sacrifice. Not to pay political leaders a wage comparable with the private sector is to restrict our recruitment to the less able and the not-so-successful. Compared to the 1950's and 1960's, we are already severely restricted in our catchment or our pool of talent. But then, our choice of Ministers ranged over the whole of Singapore and Malaya. Now, our selection is confined only to Singaporeans. This makes it all the more crucial that some 6-10 of the best in the professions, from banking, and from industry, be recruited into the political leadership. Otherwise the Cabinet will simply not be equal to the more complex tasks of government. However enterprising and talented our entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers in the private sector may be, if Ministers in charge of government policies are less able than the best, the country as a whole must suffer.

Among our new Members of Parliament are several Members who, when they take up office as Ministers of State, will suffer significant cuts in their total incomes. I cannot assure them that if they make the grade as Cabinet Ministers they will earn as much as what they would have in the private sector. I can, however, assure them, and their families, that they will not be unduly penalized. Regular surveys of rewards in the private sector will make sure that adjustments are made in good time.

Now a word, Sir, about the difficulty of appointing High Court Judges. Since 1973, I have, in accordance with the Constitution, regularly discussed the appointment of Judges from the Bar with the Chief Justice. The number of lawyers qualified, both intellectually and in other respects, for appointment to the Bench can be counted on the fingers of less than two hands. It is because in the last 20 years very few students with top points, in other words, those with three or four distinctions in their 'A' levels, have read Law. Of the 1,725 students admitted to the Law Faculty in the last 21 years, only 36 had 60-64 points, or could be considered potential firsts. (There is a table in Annex III.) The University's Law Faculty has actually produced only six first-class Honours graduates since it was founded in 1959. Two of them were Malaysians. Only 114 had Upper Seconds. PSC records show no scholars who took first-class Honours either in the University of Singapore or abroad. (They are in Annexes IV and V.) Almost all our first-class students have chosen to be engineers and doctors. The number of lawyers in Singapore with first-class Honours from British universities or the Bar are among the older generation of scholars and they can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Top lawyers earn between $650,000 and $900,000 a year. Not surprisingly, those the Chief Justice and I agree are worthy of appointment to the Bench have asked to be excused until some future date. Fortunately, a few top scholars have taken up Law in recent years and will eventually be able to man the higher reaches of the Legal and Judicial Service.

I do not, however, see an immediate solution to the problem of getting good lawyers with wide experience in courtcraft to be judges, other than to appoint them from abroad. The Chief Justice has his reservations. So has my colleague, the Minister for Law, and so has the Attorney-General. The Chief Justice considers it inappropriate to appoint expatriate lawyers to our High Court Bench at this stage. Although I agree that they would not have experience of and understanding for the manners and mores of Singaporeans, it is not an insurmountable handicap, especially for able men. If, in the next few years, I am not able to get men of quality to be judges, I shall, after consulting the Chief Justice, exercise my right to advise the President to appoint non-Singaporeans to the High Court Bench. The disadvantage of no previous experience of life in Singapore can be overcome in one to two years.

Sir, I am ready to answer questions Members may wish to put.

Mr Ng Kah Ting: Mr Speaker, Sir, I just wish to seek clarification from the Hon. Prime Minister. As regards Annex I, having seen the proposed salary scales and bearing in mind what the Prime Minister has just said, that is, the gross disparity in wage earnings between the top earners in the private sector and the political leadership, including the Judiciary, my question is: how does the Prime Minister come to the conclusion for this amount, considering the fact that Annex 11 shows a gross disparity in spite of the fact that there has been a decrease.

The Prime Minister: Mr Speaker, Sir, I cannot relate Annex I to Annex II. If I were to meet market conditions, then I would have to tear up the protocol list. So I have taken the line of least resistance, namely, to make the minimal changes to official salaries in order to make the pain and misery bearable all round, at least for the next couple of years until the full survey has been completed when more fundamental adjustments can be made. I have done no more than tinker with the salary scales.

We were faced with the problem of lawyers leaving the Government service for the private sector, because they were going to earn anywhere between eight and 12 times more than what they were paid. To solve that problem, a stop-gap measure of a professional allowance was given only to lawyers. As I have shown from the tables, lawyers are the least able of our students. The able students have done their calculations and have chosen to do medicine and engineering because, as the Member for Punggol knows, after the collapse in Vietnam parents and students in Singapore did a quick re-think of what were universally saleable skills. If you are a sick man, you do not ask the doctor whether he qualified at the Sorbonne, in London or in Singapore. The question is: can he cure you? If you are building a bridge, you do not worry whether he took his engineering degree from Todai in Tokyo, or from Waseda, or from Melbourne, London, MIT, or what have you. "Will the bridge stand the stresses and strains?" If you are a lawyer, you are linked to the political system. It depends on the constitutional setup. It depends on the language of the administration. Therefore, this minimal adjustment to tie this all up. By this minimal adjustment, I have thrown out of gear the protocol lists. All I have done now is to make minimal changes so that everybody on the protocol list is more or less re-adjusted. It is like a platoon asked to dress themselves again, and they all put their left arms out and reshuffle from the point-man at the end.

I have no other explanation.

Mr Ng Kah Ting: Mr Speaker, Sir, with your kind indulgence, my other question is this. The Hon. Prime Minister just now mentioned that as regards the whole Civil Service, i.e. the public sector, the increases given to this protocol list will affect those who are not on the protocol list. How much time will be needed to look into the ramifications, and probably the dissatisfaction. The Administrative Officers at the lower salary scales might say, "The officers at the top have got such big increases. What about us?" I hope the Prime Minister can comment on that.

The Prime Minister: I said that a longitudinal study is being made. The preliminary results should be available by mid-year. This will enable us to compare what, say, a first-class graduate in Engineering would be getting five years after graduation, six years after graduation and so on, say, in the Public Utilities Board, as against, say, Hewlett Packard, Mitsubishi or Jurong Shipyard. It is a rough test but, by and large, it will give us a shrewd idea of relative rewards.

This adjustment does not affect people in the lower reaches. So far as we can make out, the Government pays the best salaries for "green" graduates. So, for the first two to three years, the Government provides practical training for all "green" graduates. They leave from about the third year when the private sector finds them with usable skills, apart from theoretical training.

The career curve based on figures obtained four years ago shows a very gradual disparity between the public sector and the private sector in the first seven to eight years of a graduate's career, and then a steep take-off by the high flyers in the private sector after the seventh or eighth year. It is like a Concorde taking off. In the private sector, you start low. Usually, the bright graduates join the Government service for two to three years and then join the private sector after that. And those who do well, and they are based purely on performance, not on paper qualifications, they rise rapidly.

The Government's problem is to match or to react quickly to market conditions because with each passing year, after the seventh year, the disparity widens. The answer has been to advise the Public Service Commission to abandon practices which have been ingrained over the last 30 years, when inflation was low and the public sector, including the Government, was the largest single employer of highly-trained manpower. Two factors have entered into it: inflation plus an ever-expanding private sector. Banks, multinationals, offshore financial houses pay the rate for the job. This has presented us with a new problem. The only answer is rapid annual promotions for the talented.

It may be that perhaps in certain areas, such as the Engineering Service, we should abandon the idea of life-time service and pensions and go on to CPF, so that the Government hires and fires just like the private sector. As it is, we are saddled with all the mediocrities who remain whilst all the high flyers leave. The inevitable consequence is that whenever there is a major project to be executed, we have to hire expertise from the private sector. If that has to be, then perhaps we should ask ourselves whether we should not abandon British practices which we have continued, but instead hire and fire and pay the rate for the job; and perhaps we should do that with Ministers too! [Laughter]

Mr Ho See Beng (Khe Bong): Mr Speaker, Sir, I merely want to seek a point of clarification from the Hon. Prime Minister. Are these Annexes and Tables put before this House to justify the upward revision of the Ministers' and the MPs' allowances? If that is so, I would say that there is no need because not only Singapore but the whole world knows that the PAP Ministers and MPs are underpaid.

The Prime Minister: I have not put those figures as justification for the minimal adjustments that I have made. I have put the figures in order that the House can take a deep breath and Members should ask themselves, "How long will we stay relevant?" A generation that was recruited under revolutionary conditions in the 1950s and 1960s had carried on with the system that is completely out of touch with present-day realities. We will carry on out of habit. Old soldiers just soldier on.

But recruiting new talent, something which I have assiduously pursued in the last few years, presents grave difficulties. I am not saying that it is not possible to get more bankers like the Member for Sembawang. I am wondering if it is a sensible way of ordering our political life. My mind went back when I looked through these tables to an occasion in 1956 when I hired the Organising Secretary for the PAP by getting the Minister for the Environment, then having been transferred from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, to give up his job and come down to Singapore for half his salary which was what my Assemblyman's allowance then was. But the circumstances which brought out that response have gone. Those were tumultuous times. Asia was in ferment: the shape of our lives was being altered irrevocably. In that revolutionary ferment, any man with any courage, with any fire in him, would respond to the challenge. The future was anybody's guess. The Chinese Communists looked invincible. The Vietnamese said they were invincible. Many people believed that. In that situation, no one bothers about salary scales and pension schemes. It is a question of life and death, a question of your convictions.

Now, barring accidents like a catastrophic collapse of will in the United States, or a desire for peace at any price in Western Europe, for detente in Western Europe, whatever may happen in parts of the Third World, the Communist wave of the future has been revealed to be what it was - a lot of froth, a load of propaganda. It was a psychological blitz, and we nearly became victims of that blitz. The world knows that the Communist system does not work, that the Poles cannot feed themselves, and the industrial system just cannot produce. We know that China has decided to get down to earth and stop pretending that it is a great success. It is not. It has got to learn simple things about how to motivate workers from firms in Hong Kong, setting up an industrial estate in Sum Chun across the border.

In these calmer times, minds wander on to career paths and pension schemes, on what happens when a person is retired at the age of 65, what post-retirement benefits there are when they are 75 or 85. I am suggesting to the House and to members of the media that Singapore has to step back and take a look at how we are to order our rewards. I am not suggesting that political leaders should have the rewards of top stockbrokers who earn $21/2 million a year, or top bankers who earn nearly $1 million a year, or lawyers who earn $900,000, or doctors and surgeons who earn $650,000. Even top car dealers earn $1/2 million I It does not make sense to makebelieve that we can continue with no fundamental changes in rewards in the relatively tranquil situation that we now enjoy, contingent of course on the Vietnamese being held down to good behaviour, both by the international community and by the Khmer patriotic resistance. In these changed circumstances, we have to make a fundamental reappraisal of how we pay Members of Parliament, pay our top administrators, pay our top men. Perhaps wherever and whenever convenient, we should move away from pensionable terms to the CPF and pay the rate for the job. In other words, engineers can leave the public service if they wish, rejoin it when they feel that the private sector has gone stale and public building is on the up.

I suggest the figures provoke us to rethink our position.

Mr Eugene Yap Giau Cheng (Mountbatten): Mr Speaker, Sir, I am a little confused. The Hon. Prime Minister has raised the question of hiring and firing. If I was a Prime Minister - but I do not think I will be - I would not take the risk of being hired and fired at a cost of $1/4 million, that is (if you do a quick calculation), on $21,000 a month. But if I was in a bank, or maybe a share broker, I would take the risk of $21/2 million and get hired and fired.

Another matter is that the Hon. Prime Minister is now speaking of hiring and firing at a time when we are talking of the Japanese management-labour relationship. I am a bit confused, and so can I ask the Prime Minister to clarify?

The Prime Minister: The salary scales worked out for the public sector all rested upon the premise of a life-long service and a pension thereafter. They were worked out by British Establishment experts some 30 years ago and modified by our own Establishment officers over the years. But they accepted the premise that when you join the Government service and serve it faithfully, you cannot be sacked unless you have done something seriously wrong; and a pension is there waiting for you when you retire at the age of 55 and ever after. We have abandoned that system for Divisions III and IV. Am I right?

The Minister for Finance (Mr Hon Sui Sen): Yes.

The Prime Minister: In 1975 the Minister for Finance tried to persuade me to abandon it even for Divisions I and II, I resisted for very practical reasons as I thought that we would just lose too many good men, I still believe that for certain key jobs, like the Administrative Officers, people who formulate policies or help Ministers formulate alternatives, it is not practical to hire and fire. One needs years of experience, data and expertise of the various Ministries, to know that if you make alterations to policies, years later there are consequences to be felt in other sectors. Therefore, for such persons a pensionable service is the only kind of service. We have to hold their loyalty by regular adjustments and a decent pension, and also the possibility of a derivative pension. In other words, a pension to the wife and children in the event of their death either during service or after retirement if their children are still under-age. But for other categories of purely professional expertise, like the Engineering Service where one does not have to acquire in-depth knowledge of the inter-relationships between Ministries and the consequences of changes in policies and their impact on other Ministries, I would accede to the proposal of the Minister for Finance that we move away from pensionable service and go on to CPF. Then we are able to recruit new talent when we lose them.

I do not wish to confuse the Member for Mountbatten. We are not Japanese. That is part of our problem. But we admire and indeed we aspire to do what they have achieved. I believe there are large segments of their cooperative relationship between management and workers and between workers and workers, which can be transferred or incorporated into the Singapore social context.

I hope the Member for Mountbatten has read the article, which was published recently, explaining how the Member for Cairnhill had his own management doctrines changed as a result of seven years working with Japanese management. He started off in Atlas Electronics with a Hong Kong management doctrine. I inspired that article, I have spent long years pondering over this. It is best, of course, if there can be this life-long fealty of Samurai for his Daiymo or his Lord, of the fealty of the farmers and the peasants to the Daiymo. They transferred that fealty to the Zaibatsu's Chief Executives. The samurais have, I suppose, become the directors of various sections, and the loyal peasants have become the workers.

If we do not learn from the Japanese, I see a great danger of Singapore stagnating. The 1980s is a period of slow sluggish growth. There is no magic wand which can suddenly bring back the 1960s - with oil at US$1.20 a barrel instead of US$38 a barrel: world trade galloping away at 10 to 12% increase per annum; new products, new technology. It was the beginning of the transistor era, the transistor radio, the television set, and so on. There is no going back to those favourable conditions. Growth is going to be sluggish and slow, and we have got impatient Singaporeans. We can teach them patience, to learn this secret of team spirit in getting a job done well, to work with and not be against management. If you can achieve this, then despite slow growth worldwide, we will make that next quantum leap into middle technology. We will get out of those products which face protectionist barriers.

I suggest to the Member for Mountbatten that if we can get the right men, by the end of the 1980s, with sound recruitment of MPs, of Ministers of State, of Ministers, in other words we have got not only people with a sense of commitment but also ability, drive, a sense of imagination, qualities of leadership, we shall make the grade. If we can recruit political leaders able to help create this climate of cooperative endeavour, then despite our different conditions from those of the Japanese, despite our absence of life-long employment, we can successfully adopt large segments of what has made Japanese industries so formidable and so successful.

I commend the Member for Mountbatten to spend some time on this. He is a serious-minded person. So is the Member for Cairnhill.

My own interest in this subject was first aroused when I visited IHI (Ishikawajima Harima Industries) shipyard in Yokohama in April, 1967, 14 years ago. I was taken through the shipyard by Dr Shinto, now retired, one of Japan's leading shipbuilders. That September, five months later I was at Newcastle-on-Tyne where I was taken through a British shipyard, Swan Hunter, by Sir John Hunter. I had induced him to come out to take over the British Naval Base and convert it into a civilian dockyard. The contrast between the two shipyards was so vivid that it was etched in my memory. One was a leisurely graceful way of working, a way of living. There was no hustle, no flurry, no bustle. Sir John sent his beautifully carpeted Rolls to fetch me from the Gosforth Hotel which was conveniently sited by the golf course, took me to the shipyard with a leisurely workforce. He told me that I should not misjudge their productivity; he had computerised machine tools that could automatically bend large beams of steel to the right shape for the purposes required. I did not tell him that the Japanese also had these automated and computerised equipment plus what Dr Shinto explained in subsequent conversations: the differences between the way Japanese shipyards were run and British shipyards were run. This was before the collapse of the British shipbuilding industry later in the 1960s, and was being wiped out in the 1970s. He said, "Well, we Japanese make no difference between management and workers. I, Dr Shinto, put on my gum boots and my helmet and I go to my shipyard regularly. It takes me about half an hour at least, but I must see for myself how conditions are, and the workers must see me that I am interested in them, and how they are working." So do other senior executives right down the line.

Spend some time with the Member for Cairnhill. He had this lesson administered by Aiwa Electronics. As a result of our wage policy, Atlas was pushed against the wall. To rescue Atlas, Aiwa, a subsidiary of Sony, was brought in, seven years ago, I have spent hours discussing this with him. It is fascinating because it is an object lesson of what we can do. While he was running Aiwa on Hong Kong doctrine, he distrusted even his directors because the Hong Kong directors were not only designing for Atlas, they were also designing for themselves and offering their products at a cheaper price to the same customers. That is Hong Kong doctrine: I mean diamond cuts diamond. So his time is spent not only on supervising them on the job, he has also to check what they were doing in their spare time.

When he had Japanese from Aiwa, they re-educated him gradually, as he puts it, "by stealth". I asked him what he meant "by stealth". He said, "Well, we used to ship out orders. Although we knew that there were a few defective boxes, we did a rough estimation of the reaction of the customer. If he is a fussy customer, and will cause us great mischief, and great outrage will follow, then we will remove the defective boxes. But if he looks a reasonable man, one or two per cent defects would be acceptable. But when the Japanese were in charge, they literally disobeyed him and refused to ship; they changed the defective boxes. Long sessions followed. They told him that Aiwa was a name that they would never allow to be sullied by exporting any article which was defective; and their customers came back despite price hikes as a result of increases in oil price or costs of Components. He was not convinced. But they insisted and changed the defective boxes. Price hikes followed oil prices. Aiwa-Atlas customers came back, Gradually he was swung round. And he was no longer worried about what they were doing in their spare time. They were thinking up new ways to improve productivity. When he went off on travels to sell Aiwa, they would be at the airport to send him off. And when he returned, they would be at the airport to receive the glad tidings of his success, or to commiserate with him when he had failed.

I see no contradiction in what we are trying to do, selectively culling those parts of Japanese management-labour relations which are applicable to a more or less similar culture - a Confucianist society. I think much will take root here. But where it is not necessary to have life-long or pensionable service, like technical services, engineers, architects, and the other technical professions, we can let them come and go, in and out of Government service, without loss to themselves. They can take their CPF. There is no pension. And they can rejoin the Government service after having acquired experience outside.

I hope I have not left the Member for Mountbatten more confused than when I started. I can assure him that in my mind there is no contradiction.

Prof. S. Jayakumar (Bedok): Mr Speaker, Sir, we have heard the Hon. Prime Minister indicating that if in a few years' time he is unable to persuade potential candidates from Singapore to take up the office of judgeship he will exercise his right of advising the President to appoint judges from abroad. I hope that statement will persuade those who were approached but declined, to reconsider and to accept judgeship as a contribution to the administration of justice in Singapore for if, as pointed out, several of the Cabinet Ministers have taken rather steep cuts in their salaries to contribute to the nation in the Legislature, it may not be unreasonable to ask persons in the legal profession to do likewise in contributing to the Judiciary. But I think it must be a measure of last resort because, Mr Speaker, while I can see that an expatriate judge can perform ably in deciding cases in most categories, I wonder whether an expatriate judge would have that sense of appreciation of the policy underpinnings of certain laws which he might have to administer in cases appearing before him. I am thinking particularly of cases like Constitutional Law cases where this may impinge on important national interests and the judge ought to have an awareness of the social and political underpinnings of the laws.

Having said that, may I ask a question of the Hon. Prime Minister and, that is, whether some of the problems we are encountering could be solved in the long run by focusing on the younger practising lawyers. Traditionally, it seems that we have focused on lawyers from Government legal service who are in their fifties. I can see the reluctance in approaching younger lawyers because under the scheme in our Constitution there is security of tenure and, once appointed, judges cannot be removed except by very complicated procedures. But the Consti- tution was amended recently to provide for the office of Judicial Commissioner. I wonder whether it would be possible for the Government and the Hon. Prime Minister to think in terms of using the device of Judicial Commissioner to enable short-term appointments of the younger able practitioners so that they would not have to completely abandon their careers but, at the same time, they could have a taste of the judicial function and would also enable the Senior Judges and the Chief Justice to appraise the judicial performance of the Judicial Commissioner.

The Prime Minister: The suggestion has been made to me. It is most attractive to the young advocate. It increases his stature at the Bar. Having done a stint of 18 months to two years, I do not see him taking on a judge-ship. His earning capacity at the Bar would have correspondingly increased. It is similar to the problem of holding doctors in professorships in our hospitals. They work hard in order to become the professor, and having become the professor they serve out a reasonable length of tenure - sufficient so that nobody can doubt their qualities as a professor - they then leave. As Members can see from the Table in Annex II, fifth item from the bottom, doctors and surgeons earn a maximum of $650,000 declared income for tax.

We are a fast growing society. I hope we will continue to do so because it makes life so much easier for everybody. As long as more ordinary workers are buying colour television sets and video tape recorders and so on, Members in this Chamber will lead lives which are more regular, even tranquil. Given that scenario, I do not see young lawyers taking on judgeships after a stint as judicial commissioners. An advocate's earning capacity is at his peak between the ages of 40 and 58. At 60 when he begins to lose steam, he may decide it is too hard and too demanding a life. Two years as a Judicial Commissioner increases his earning capacity. He is unlikely to take up a judgeship. When he has lost steam, after the age of 58, he may want to be considered.