This was the report card on Singapore's socio-economic development issued by the founding Prime Minister (PM) of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew twentyeight years after his People's Action Party (PAP) first won the right to govern Singapore in 1959, when it was still a British colony. Its transformation from post-Second World War squalor where most of the populace continued to struggle with basic survival, to one where the vast majority had homes of their own, where many were armed with better educational qualifications than the generation before them, and a significant proportion of workers in well-paying white-collar administrative and professional jobs, was remarkable.

In the speech above, PM Lee argued that having benefited from a governance system that upheld the rule of law, integrity and active industrial policy that brought such progress, Singaporeans should have no interest in reversing course to embrace an alternative social order—communism— something that had traction on the ground before Independence. Instead, Singapore's full engagement with the global capitalist system after it had lost the Malayan hinterland with the end of merger with Malaysia and the PAP's social and political policies had proven the worth of the PAP's governance system in tangible terms.