SINGAPORE - The solutions to complex problems of the day may lie in the middle, but the middle is often boring and rarely appeals naturally to populism, said Education Minister Ong Ye Kung on Friday (Nov 22).
"It requires tedious explanation, balancing of trade-offs and backbreaking implementation work. It is hard to boil down to a crisp rallying call, compared to the stirring rhetoric at the extremes," he said.
Mr Ong said this might be the reason for the shrinking political middle observed in the West, where countries like the United States, Britain and Germany are seeing increasing polarisation and divisiveness.
One exception is France, where President Emmanuel Macron's centrist party still commands a majority in the French Parliament. Mr Ong said this could be because France still has a large percentage of young people who have a lot of hope for the future.
He was speaking on the third day of the inaugural Festival of Ideas, organised by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP).
The four-day symposium on the topic of governance for the future ends on Saturday (Nov 23).
Governance is becoming more challenging globally, and it may even be in crisis, said Mr Ong.
The fact that the political centre has ceded ground to the extremes has impacted discourse on key issues of the day, he noted.
"Technology is disrupting industries, creating new jobs while displacing workers at the same time. The impact is drastically uneven throughout society, creating both booms and busts for individual lives," Mr Ong said.
While big tech companies paint a rosy outcome for the future, there have also been calls to break up these companies, put a tax on robots and introduce policy measures like universal basic income to cushion the impact on affected workers, he added.
He noted that globalisation has also been controversial, particularly in the aspect of immigration.
"When the doors of countries become more open, they attract immigrants, which will unsettle local populations if the numbers are excessive. There is a genuine fear about a loss of a nation's identity."
And climate change has seen prominent people denying global warming despite the scientific evidence before them, Mr Ong said. "We also have activists admonishing world leaders to stop talking about 'money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth' and advocating for global measures that can potentially deprive developing countries of a fair chance for economic growth," he added.
Mr Ong said these issues often resonate emotionally, but the simplistic solutions spouted are essentially that - simplistic. There are no quick fixes, he added, only long-term and consistent strategies that will take time to show results.
"If we still believe in the politics of the middle, then we need to give thought and voice to its rationality, its analysis of trade-offs and longer-term perspectives," he said.
