Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his Malaysian counterpart Najib Razak, who was here on an introductory visit, met the media on Friday after their talks at the Istana. Here are excerpts of their remarks at the press conference.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong discussed, among other things, the Iskandar Malaysia project, including ways to enhance connectivity on both sides. -- ST PHOTO: AZIZ HUSSIN
PM LEE: We have very warm relations with Malaysia. We have many interactions with their leaders but this is special because it's the first time Datuk Seri Najib is visiting Singapore as the Prime Minister. We had a good discussion.
First of all, the Iskandar Malaysia project where I expressed once again our support and cooperation for participating in the project because we see this as positive to Singapore.
And we see this as something we can do if the Malaysian side finds that it's useful and believes that we can make a contribution.
We talked about the iconic project which we have previously discussed. PM Najib suggested the possibility of a Wellness Centre or Wellness Town where we can provide spas and other services to tourists and visitors.
I suggested the possibility of a mixed-use township development which would broaden the idea and extend to a range of activities including industrial activities with some residential, commercial space.
These are preliminary suggestions which we floated but they need to be studied further and we agreed to ask the Joint Ministerial Committee to follow up and study them in depth and come back with a more specific report.
We talked about the link between Singapore and Iskandar Malaysia, the Causeway and the necessity to facilitate people and traffic flow on both sides because the volume is growing, will grow further, and we should enable this to happen as conveniently and smoothly as possible.
I explained the history of this problem to Prime Minister (Najib), the bridge and how it came about, what the difficulties were.
But I expressed my full support for the objective of enhancing the connectivity and the ease of movement on both sides.
And I suggested that there might be other alternatives such as broadening the Causeway or improving the rail link between the two sides, maybe linking up the two rail transport systems so that we could make it easy for people to travel back and forth in large numbers.
