PM Lee's National Day Rally in Mandarin: Increasing Marriage and Birth Rates

As part of our National Day Rally speech in Mandarin, PM Lee Hsien Loong verbalized the government’s concern of Singapore’s declining birth rate as an issue that needed to be addressed immediately in order to ensure SG’s economic survival in the long run, say, 10, 20 years down the road. With a birth rate of 1.29 children per couple, Singapore is falling far short of the national target of 2.1 births for a healthy population replacement rate and dependency ratio. An increasing pool of graduate women that are delaying marriages and men that choose to focus on career first, has led us to conclude that such a trend is unlikely to take on a reversal without external interventions.

 

I was rather amused by some of the comments he made on this topic, more specifically how he so shrewdly chose to address the parents of the singles, planting ideas of starting a parent swap meet. What do they swap? Info on their current unwed sons and daughters.. including graduation certs/ results, photos and CV (??!!) and eventually phone numbers. PM Lee jokingly suggested that perhaps this kind of Parent-Swap-Meet might be something the govt may have to help create, to boost our marriage and baby boom. Though he made a joke out of it, it will certainly not be surprising if such an idea actually takes root in the near future. 

 

However, I must applaud PM Lee’s shrewdness in this matter. Apparently, the impact of the social marketing messages and financial incentives targeted at the singles to get married and have babies have had insignificant impact and now, the government has ingeniously turned to addressing the parents of this generation of singles, who could possibly be their last resort in applying social pressure and facilitate the matchmaking process amongst the singles.  Not only so, a large majority of the parents that would possibly adopt his suggestions are the mandarin speaking conservative crowd, who would very likely be the ones listening on the Mandarin National Day Rally. Is that smart communications targeting or what? I am impressed.