SINGAPORE — In what she said was probably her last major speech in the House, Nominated Member of Parliament Kuik Shiao-Yin called on the Government to seek out more “non-establishment types” to participate in national-level focus groups, committees, boards, ministries and Parliament to build a more resilient system.

“The purposeful inclusion of more thoughtful voices who are unafraid of challenging establishment views makes our system stronger," said Ms Kuik on Thursday (May 17) in the debate on the President’s address.

“We need to boldly open up our echo chambers and learn to ask both friends and detractors, ‘Tell me what you know. Tell me what you don’t know. Then tell me what you think. And help me distinguish which is which’,” she said, referring to four rules that former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell set for his staffers to get a clear picture of the ground situation.

Ms Kuik, whose speech was the final one of the day, tackled the Government’s trust in the people and income inequality as she spoke about questions that youths at a recent panel discussion at the National University of Singapore’s Tembusu College had raised for Singapore’s future prime minister.

Her own sense of the ground is that there are more people with dissenting views about the goings-on in Singapore than Government-commissioned opinion polls reveal, Ms Kuik said.

This is partly because some are unlikely to participate in such polls – they may think their opinions are unqualified or fear their honesty would invite a rebuke, among other reasons, she said.

“I do worry when I read surveys that seem to present too positive an assessment of public opinion on controversial issues such as transport or water prices. I believe such polls may cause an unintended widening of the communication gap between leadership and the ground,” said Ms Kuik, a social entrepreneur who said she gets to talk to a considerable number of youths and white-collar professionals in her work.

The establishment’s handling of historian Thum Ping Tjin’s submission to the parliamentary select committee on deliberate online falsehoods, and his testimony at the public hearing, made some lay observers increasingly uncomfortable as they perceived an “overkill when it came to dealing with naysayers from the opposition, from civil society and even from within the establishment’s own ranks”, said Ms Kuik.

Dr Thum had claimed in his written submission to the committee that historically, there has only been one body that has peddled falsehoods — the People's Action Party Government, which has been spreading "fake news" about Operation Coldstore, for example, "for narrow party-political gain".

He was questioned for six hours by the committee, which said he had "fallen completely" short of the standards of an objective historian. It later questioned his position at Oxford University and claimed that support from various academics appeared to have been "primarily engineered" by Dr Thum himself.

This invited a response from Dr Thum’s colleagues at the university’s Project South-east Asia and Dr Thum later issued a defence of his work.

Although she did not name anyone, Ms Kuik also responded to a quote by Senior Minister of State for Communications and Information Janil Puthucheary, featured in a Straits Times article, that “nobody” in the grassroots was concerned about the March 29 questioning of Dr Thum.

Her experience has been different, said Ms Kuik on Thursday.

“Now, these (lay) observers weren’t saying let’s go soft on dissenters who are clearly professional agitators. But they asked: How far do we really have to go to bring down people with political opinions that are different from our own? What do we gain and what do we lose when we win the argument but display clear contempt of the other person?”

Those in power can avoid unnecessarily adversarial relationships with dissenters if they “choose to be slow to speak and quick to listen for the truths (their) naysayers are offering”, she added.

Even General Powell’s rules could not prevent withheld dissent, which caused him and the United States to make the “astronomical mistake” of invading Iraq in 2003, only to find no weapons of mass destruction there, she noted.

Calling for the next generation of leaders to forge their own paths, Ms Kuik said: “We are not Lee Kuan Yews, Goh Keng Swees or Rajaratnams. And we need not pretend to be… We need only be the best of ourselves. Seizing the most of our times. Steering our country, our way.”

On income inequality, Ms Kuik urged the authorities to treat lower-income parents and their children as “a package deal”.

“We must not operate from a subconscious mindset of ‘save the children because the adults are a gone case’,” said Ms Kuik, who was selected in March 2016 to be NMP for a second time. NMPs’ terms last for two-and-a-half years.

“So as we provide education subsidies to support a child at school, let’s simultaneously provide secure affordable housing to his unwed mother…the same dignities we accord to middle- or upper-income families should be accorded to the lower-income,” she said.