It might be "necessary" or "useful" but not in its current form.
IPS as since I've known it from the beginning it was designed as, or intended to be a think tank
for the government on government policies. So I think that that's a good idea. I think it's useful;
I think most governments have or should have in-house think tanks that help them
to evaluate policy needs and policy outcomes and so on.
So the concept, yes, I think is useful and maybe even necessary.
In the beginning, the earliest, IPS was more like that, there would be conferences,
and seminars, and commission research and so on, on sort of hot topics of the day.
And I think it's good in particular to have people with academic background
involved in doing the research, they're aware of what issues are in other countries,
what the research is so they can locate, say the Singapore issues within a broader context.
I think my reservation is that over the years it seems to have, and this is an impression,
seems to have moved more from an independent research outfit which is
what I think a government think tank should be to more of a communications organ, that is,
since we focus more on justifying and legitimating policies
that the government has already decided on. As opposed to,
let's look at the whole domain of the policy subject we're interested in
and see what kinds of policies might resolve that.
What is the experience of other countries, what has been the findings of research.
So more open-ended, from the viewpoint of academics.
It has led some people to diminish, or to dismiss,
I'd say, to dismiss a lot of what IPS does,
by saying it's seen as more of, oh IPS is the official line,
with a little bit of edginess on the margins.
As opposed to, purely, let's find out what the issues are,
what the problems are, what is the wide range of opinion on it, and go from there.
I think what IPS does well is actually identify hot topics fairly early on.
They're not necessarily the first to identify them, but they catch on quite fast to things
that academics and the media might have identified
like inequality, demographics, race relations and so on.
So I think the identification of issues is very good. I think the present discussion of those issues is constrained.
I wouldn't say biased but constrained, by the more, I guess you would say establishment
types that tend to be invited to do research, or to speak at seminars, at conferences
and I think that's not very useful, because frankly we know what establishment types are going to say
The whole idea of a think tank is to challenge to innovate,
So I would bring in new people I would bring in people who are critical.
They don't have to be right, I don't have to agree with them.
And I think that would create a much livelier space for a lot of the discussion,
make it much harder for people to dismiss what comes out from IPS projects.
I think it will be much more useful if we could have all those open discussions
including from you know people that are troublemakers,
in fact the troublemakers are the ones that you want,
because if you don't pay attention to them you might get trouble. So, that's my sense.