FEBRUARY 26 — Singapore announced its annual Budget earlier this week. While the annual spectacle of the Finance Minister reading out the dollars and cents of the government’s economic plans is never electrifying stuff, politically speaking this is high drama.

Our rulers are speaking to us in the language they understand — taxes, revenue and growth. By listening closely at their utterings, we can understand rather a lot about the state of our nation and where we might be headed.

This year’s pronouncements actually surprised me. Not because they were in any way radical but rather quite the opposite — they were anything but radical.

There were the usual GST rebates, a modest increase in infrastructure spending, incentives for SMEs and small tweaks to the CPF to encourage couples to buy more child-friendly flats but really nothing particularly revolutionary to be seen.

The top 1 per cent aren’t about to start paying more, the bottom 10 per cent aren’t going to be showered with benefits and our vast reserves and state cash piles aren’t going to be used to ignite growth.

It strikes me as odd because on the other hand we are told the economy is growing at its slowest historical pace (around 2 per cent for the last three years) and that the fertility rate now stands at 1.2 children per women (effectively the lowest in the world).

This seems like real cause for concern as we are getting older and our economy is slowing. There were claims that this year’s Budget would be informed by the findings of the promisingly named Committee on the Future Economy (CFE). This committee chaired by the Finance Minister himself consulted with a vast range of experts and stakeholders to comprehensively review the country’s economic strategies.

However, after one year of research by the CFE we see largely the same. I assume the CFE found nothing particularly wrong with the existing development strategies.

Singapore’s Budget 2017 seems to suggest that no radical change is needed or wanted in the island nation. — File picture by Reuters

While this seems counter intuitive given our growth rates perhaps they have a point: Singapore is a very wealthy and highly developed country and maybe the priority now is to maintain what we have, not try to get even richer.

That seems to be the thinking — status quo. Remain fiscally prudent with ministries and government agencies asked to reduce spending by 2 per cent and a modest (by government standards) S$700 million (RM2.2 billion) boost to infrastructure projects.

There are real merits to this strategy — if it ain’t broken, well don’t fix it and for the most part Singapore isn’t broken, it is just growing rather slowly.

So the only places the government is flirting with real change is in spaces like carbon taxation with S$10 per ton of carbon emission tax now on the cards (albeit only for 2019). The second significant bump is that the price of water will go up from S$2.10 to S$2.70 or about S$18 a month for most modest domestic users.

While the government may have a solid argument — the cost of production has increased by over 100 per cent over the past 15 years despite prices remaining the same — the reality is very few nations would tolerate a 30 per cent increase in the cost of a basic necessity.

Why didn’t the government simply increase the price gradually by a 1-2 per cent rate a year over the past few years rather than foist a sudden increase on us, which will be felt most by the poor? In many parts of the world, this would trigger riots but here of course it will pass with just a few online murmurs.

I think this, more than anything, explains the rather conservative nature of the Budget. The Singapore government isn’t about to do anything radical because the Singapore public doesn’t demand anything radical.

Universal welfare, increased taxation for the wealthy... we don’t really want these things. Despite our endless complaining, the reality is we like things the way they are — and the government via the Budget is telling us that’s what we are going to get: more of the same.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.