PUBLIC INFORMATION PROCESSES

5.02 pm

Ms Braema Mathiaparanam: Mr Speaker, Sir, thank you for allowing me this opportunity to speak on the subject of public information processes.

I am raising this matter about information in the public domain as I do not want to go into this recent incident involving the Ministry of Manpower and the university dons. Mine is of wider scope and, as a citizen, I feel quite strongly that what falls into the public domain is something that perhaps we ought to relook. On that premise, these are the three primary issues I would like to raise.

I would like to ask for greater clarity on what constitutes public information, who decides that such information be labelled as "sensitive" or "in the national interests". I understand that nationally there are four categories for classifying information, ie, Confidential/Restricted, Secret, Top Secret and Top Secret and Cicero. Understandably, as one moves up the secrecy ladder, fewer and fewer people have access to the various grades of information. But what will be useful to the common person is to share with the public how such information is classified, how these classifications of information are implemented, and what really are the parameters around such information.

Such a lack of clarity has given rise to some of the following instances cited by various people I spoke to as well as from my own experiences as an ex-journalist: profiling of teachers by gender and age becomes sensitive information not open to the public domain; breakdown of foreign workers by nationalities is secret; emigration figures are sensitive; number of prisoners on death row is sensitive; the criteria used to categorise employment pass holders as Category 1 or 2 are classified information; the number of people who are in debt over mortgage payments is a difficult no-no; the number of ITE students entering polytechnic or the number of polytechnic students entering university - for these instances, the feedback one gets at the first entry point is that the information is sensitive.

What then are the classification codes for the above examples, and who decides? Has any such information been upgraded to a higher level among the four categories or downgraded and released into the public domain? If so, when does this happen? What is the criterion surrounding that? These answers can help the common person to at least understand how information is disseminated and communicated to the general public.

The second concern that I have is the process by which information is gathered and collated across the Ministries in terms of consistency. For example, if the Ministry of National Development collates its figures on its tenants in 1-room and 2-room flats and if that data is used to reflect or categorise residents as either the "Still Poor" lot or the "New Poor" - this same kind of database is stretched across to be used by other Ministries to identify who are the poor among us and what kind of schemes should be used to help them. My question is if such collation of information is consistent and in keeping with the changing times of our society.

In this regard, I would like to highlight that the criteria used to collate information needs reviewing. If we are really to know how a society is evolving, then equally important is the process of information gathering. Often, there is an over-generalisation or over-summarising of categories. We heard an instance just now when the hon. Member, Mr Iswaran, brought up the example of the service industry. If an over-summarised figure is in the public domain, it is sometimes hard to know what exactly constitutes the service industry and how it is impacted. I sit in AWARE's Sub-Committee on Women and Ageing. We have come across quite good data on women-headed households but are stuck when it comes to secondary data. It is quite elusive. Who constitutes a woman-headed household? Is it a divorcee, a single-again person or a single person? Why can this kind of information not also be made readily available in the public domain? That is as an example.

My third concern is that sometimes in policy-making issues, we tend to place a greater emphasis on quantitative information at the expense of qualitative data. To cite an example that appeared in the recent edition of Life!, Dr Nirmala Purushotam, an ex-academic don, struck a chord when she was commenting on the quantitative data on inter-racial marriages. The quantitative data will show that we are in a healthy situation, there is greater integration among the different races. But her quote begs another question whether a qualitative analysis might show that perhaps some individuals are not marrying their own kind in an inverted stereotyping of one's own race. That, I think, has its own implications. And we again heard just now from the Minister for Manpower, when we were talking about this issue, that there are jobs, it is not a question of race, but there are jobs for Singaporeans and there are employers. If the two are not matching, then we have to understand why it is not happening. That becomes a qualitative analysis that will steer policy-making and/or communication issues.

In conclusion, I would like to say that managing information is a communication process. It could be less top-down, more engaging of public stakeholders, less critical of the role played by academics, journalists, civil society groups and private citizens, who believe that they have a stake in this country. A maturing society cannot be told that information is sensitive and then expected to retreat without good valid explanations. The fewer closed-door feedback sessions we have with the public, the more all institutions, including private enterprises, open their doors to sharing information with the public, then we are really on the road to becoming a more mature society.

Sometimes, the cue is taken from the top. We have now seen some institutions with annual reports that display over-summarised financial statement pages, and heads of departments who do not share information with their own staff because it is considered privileged. If there is greater openness from the top down, people below too can be sharing information that, more often than not, is actually not sensitive.

Lastly, I would like to suggest to the Government that perhaps it is time to consider a Declassification Act so that in another 30 years or so a citizen can exercise the right to ask for files to read and look for himself or herself a part of Singapore's history and to fully understand and comprehend our evolution as a nation. If that can be done, it would be wonderful. For now, I personally think that getting to information is still not an easy road and there are many road blocks.

My last word on this matter is a challenge: how ready are we to share retrenchment figures by ethnic-based groups? The usual stuff that comes up with that is that it has to do with our national interests, our neighbours, etc. It is understandable. But this is our country and this is our home. If retrenchment figures are skewed in any particular way against any ethnic group, then it is good to see what is the qualitative data that supports that, and then put in the skills programmes to equip each and every person and, if it is a language-speaking capability, then to look at whether it is a backroom operation or a frontend operation that has brought about the retrenchment. And if it is really something that speaks of certain prejudices, then this society needs to look at itself and come up with a better model through better communication, and we will all have to play that role in eradicating any form of prejudice, if it does exist at all.

The Minister, Prime Minister's Office (Mr Lim Hng Kiang): Mr Speaker, Sir, Ms Braema has raised several interesting issues. I would just like to say, as a general rule, our approach is to publish whatever information that is useful to the public, information that is timely, regular and accurate. So, there is no holding back in the publication of information. Only a very small category which is considered security in nature would be controlled.

As a general rule, we do not believe in hiding bad news, we do not believe in hiding data, we do not believe in projecting a misleading impression by suppressing awkward facts. Our approach is to bring out the facts openly and discuss them. But we do recognise that there could be some sensitivities involved and, therefore, sometimes, before we present the facts, we really have to prepare the ground, because we do not want the facts to come out too cold and the ground is not readily prepared.

For example, for some of the issues that the hon. Member has raised, by all means file a Question here and the data will be made available. Such information can be available through different channels. As I have mentioned, one of the common channels is for Members to file Questions to obtain specific answers to the areas of interest that they have. Members of the public can also write in, email in or phone in for information. As an ex-journalist, the Member should know that journalists do pose questions regularly to the Ministries and the Ministries will respond. Journalists also have interviews with politicians to gather insights into issues of public interest. So, there is a multitude of avenues for which information can be sought. If I may just go through the specific examples raised by the Member.

First, profiling of teachers by gender and age. RAdm Teo just brought the document, and this is an open document and the tables are in there. So, the information is in the public domain.

Classification of information into Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, Top Secret and Cicero, these are fixed regulations, and everybody in the Ministry knows how to classify them, depending on the impact on security. In most Ministries, such classifications are not germane. The Ministry of Health, for example, does not go into classification of Cicero or Top Secret. Most data are open. So, you will find that, for most of the Ministries, whether it is on real estate, health or community development, we follow the classification and the standards and parameters set down by the international agencies, whether it is ILO or WHO or WTO. Therefore, the classifications that the Member raised just now - the criteria, the classification, the parameters - we follow international norms.

The other example which she has raised about classification of poor people in 1- and 2-room flats, I think the most sensible way to classify whether a person is poor or not is by the income, either by household or by per capita and that is a standard classification. We do sometimes use a proxy, say, for example, utility rebates because to gather household income and to get the household per capita income is a very laborious process. So, sometimes, we do use household types as proxies. But if you have been moving around the HDB estates, you will find that many of the people who live in 1- and 2-room flats are by no means poor.

My point is that our classification goes by international definitions. The question that the Member raised about secondary classification, again, I would encourage her, where she has special interests, like AWARE and she wants to go into households headed by women and want a breakdown on whether it is single, divorced or widowed, do raise these questions with the relevant Ministries. I am sure that they would try and gather the data.

Many times when we were given these Questions in Parliament, in the limited time that we have, our staff would scramble around and try to get the information. But unless we have a recurring interest in this area, it is not cost-effective to set up a whole data set just to collect a set of data because a Member finds it interesting. I would like to urge Members, when they file a Question, to remember that there is a cost to all the information collection. During this period of fiscal restraint, I would like all Members to consider that factor carefully.

On qualitative and quantitative data, that is an interesting point that she has raised. We always want to raise the quality of our data. The Chief Statistician and the people in this business would always be very happy to get feedback from all of you on how to raise the quality of the data which they publish.

The final point that she made was about managing information and that we should be more engaging, ie, less top-down, fewer closed-door feedback sessions, greater openness. We all subscribe to these sentiments. Sometimes, we do have closed-door feedback sessions primarily to encourage more frankness in the dialogues rather than people playing to the gallery or people giving feedback but not in a very frank manner. So it is up to the organising agency whether they have it closed-door or open-door. There is no rule from the Government that feedback sessions should be closed-door. It depends on the judgement whether we get better and more frank feedback in closed-door sessions rather than open to the press.

The Member's point about Declassification Act or Freedom of Information Act is an interesting suggestion. It is also something that the Remaking Singapore Committee has put up and I am sure that the relevant Ministry would be studying it.

I hope this answers the Member's questions. Basically, I just want to summarise and say that our approach is to be as open as possible and to provide information which is useful. The only time we restrict information is when the information impacts our national interests. By national interests, let me define this by giving some examples.

We know that certain information, if released, can undermine our security or economic interests or may jeopardise the political and social stability that we have enjoyed. So there are clear limits as to how much we will speak about our defence and intelligence capability. I think those classifications that she has talked about - Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, Top Secret and Cicero - are extremely relevant in the arena of defence and intelligence capability.

The second example is financial reserves. We will not publish our total financial reserves or how we invest them because this would give opportunity to those who mean us ill to use this information to speculate and threaten our financial stability. If you look at the data we produce - the fiscal data, the economic statistics, the financial statistics - these are all very comprehensive and they meet international standards and IMF requirements. But we stop short of giving details of total reserves and the mix of total reserves because that is in our national interests. Beyond that, if you go through the statistics, whether it is national accounts statistics or economic statistics, these are all very comprehensive and they meet everybody's needs.

Third, we must always be mindful of our small size - our vulnerability to external forces and our context in this region. We should not see ourselves as a big continent like the United States. So be mindful of this peculiarity of Singapore. Other than these criteria, I think the Government stands by its position that information would be open and information that is useful, we will release it. We encourage Members to file Questions to get information in specific areas of their interest.