SINGAPORE – Several weeks after GE2025, the four first-term MPs in Nee Soon GRC received an e-mail from their anchor minister K. Shanmugam telling them to slow down.
Mr Shanmugam – who is Coordinating Minister for National Security and a nine-term MP – had noticed two of his rookies replying to e-mails deep into the night and warned them that this was not sustainable.
“Being an MP is a marathon,” he told Mr Jackson Lam, Ms Lee Hui Ying, Dr Syed Harun Alhabsyi and Ms Goh Hanyan, who were all elected under the PAP banner at the May 2025 polls.
It was not the first time Mr Shanmugam had seen his new MPs replying to e-mails late at night.
He told The Straits Times in a group interview with the entire Nee Soon team on May 7 that an MP must get to know people and work on issues in the constituency, but if they are dealing with things and responding every day at 1am or 2am, they will burn out – “Rome wasn’t built in a day”.
When burnout happens, they are not of any use to themselves, their families or their constituents, he said.
“My own assessment is therefore (it is) better to have a good pace, but a steady pace, and always keep in mind the different things that you’re doing, and there is a difference between what’s urgent and what’s important.”
And sometimes the urgent has to be done, sometimes the most important thing, he said.
Nee Soon was the only GRC to field an entirely new slate alongside an anchor minister at the last election. The four were among 32 new faces that PAP fielded at that election – the largest batch since the 1990s.
