National Youth Council Pre-Budget Dialogue 2023

In January 2023, the National Youth Council Pre-Budget Dialogue brought together youth representatives and senior policymakers at the Asian Civilisation Museum. Among them were Senior Minister of State for Finance and Transport, Mr Chee Hong Tat, and Minister for Culture, Community and Youth, Mr Alvin Tan.

The evening began with a networking reception, where I had the chance to speak with youth participants from very different fields and backgrounds. The breakout session that followed was the most useful part. Hearing what other young Singaporeans were prioritising, mental health support, housing affordability, climate policy, and education costs, was a reminder that 'youth concerns' is not a single category. The range of issues on the table reflected very different life circumstances and time horizons. The challenge of a budget that tries to address all of them at once became much more concrete than it had ever felt as an abstract policy question.

What I found most interesting in the panel session was the framing around fiscal sustainability. The constraints on what Singapore can spend today are not simply bureaucratic. They are a function of genuine trade-offs between present obligations and future ones. A government that spends everything now leaves less room for the generations that follow. That is not an abstract principle. It is a decision that gets made in rooms like this one, by people weighing concerns as different as the ones I had just heard in the breakout.

I left thinking about what it would actually take for youth voices to meaningfully shape policy. Attending a dialogue is one thing. Having the tools to engage seriously with trade-offs and constraints is another. That is the part worth building.