Just as businesses need to change, the civil service also needs to change. So, I fully agree with Mr Leong Horn Kee, Mr Yeo Guat Kwang and Mrs Fang Ai Lian that civil servants need to be more responsive, innovative and prepared to accept change. Do not be "bureaupreneurs"; too complicated. Just be entrepreneurs! Part of this involves trimming our rules and regulations to create space and opportunities for enterprise to flourish. But, of course, when we relax rules and regulations or apply them more flexibly, then we have to be prepared to live with untidiness and stop taking care of every aspect of people's lives.

Equally, people must be prepared to accept some risks and inconveniences. I will just give you two recent examples. They are not big ones, but they show the mindset change which is necessary.

One, reverse bungee jumping. We took the plunge recently and decided to allow reverse bungee jumping even though some of us were worried about public safety. But it was not the end of the story, because our instincts are very deep. So, when we allowed reverse bungee jumping, we said stop jumping at 10.30 pm because, after 10.30pm, you jump, there may be screams, squeals, etc, and you may wake up the neighbours. But, in Singapore, it is very warm. Nobody wants to go bungee jumping in the day time, and their peak hours are late at night when you have had a drink, you want to enjoy yourself, you want to show off to your girlfriend. Hence, 10.30 pm was a problem. So, they appealed several times. Eventually, they appealed to the Head of the Civil Service and, after a thorough investigation, of course, we established that there were hardly any residents within a 50-metre radius of the bungee jumping site. So, if only three people are screaming at the time, it should be all right! And we have decided to allow reverse bungee jumping until 2 o'clock in the morning. So, we have made a small victory.

Let me give you another example - home brewing of beer. Under the Customs Act, anyone who wants to brew beer must have a licence. The licence costs $43,200, because it is meant for Asia Pacific Breweries and people like that. But, recently, an entrepreneur came along and wanted to sell kits to brew at home. So, he asked for exemption of the liquor duty and licence fee for people who brew beer at home for their own consumption. I suppose they are not allowed to invite their friends to a party! So, MOF had to review its rules and come up with a position.

The first question was not the licence fee. It was whether to allow home brewing at all. And there were many possible objections. We consulted all the agencies and wrote a staff paper. There were concerns about smell, binge drinking, social disturbances to their neighbourhood, etc. And from MOF's parochial point of view, loss of tax revenue. If you keep your home brewery going all the year round and produce the maximum amount of beer, you can lose $1,000 of tax revenue per year per kit, at full capacity. But when we looked at the experience of other countries, we found that home brewing only appeals to a small group of hobbyists. It needs a lot of time, patience, effort and quite a lot of money. It is really for fun and, after a while, it is easier to just go and buy the can! So, we decided that we will not stand in the way of enterprise. Now, home brewers will enjoy a duty exemption on the beer they produce for personal consumption, and we will levy just a small licence fee of $100 for two years, just to know who is buying the kits and whether it is successful or not.

So, the point is not home-brewing. The point is that Government agencies have to make sensible judgements and relax their rules to facilitate enterprise. We have erred on the side of caution and conservatism, and we have often taken a "one-size-fits-all" regulatory approach. If we thought a particular activity poses risks, even if only to a small section of the population, then our instinct was to just disallow that activity.

But increasingly, our approach should be to balance the risks and potential problems the activity might pose to society at large against the overriding need to encourage private enterprise and initiative. As long as it does not cause unmanageable problems or harm to others, I think our default position should be to allow this entrepreneurial activity with as few bureaucratic impediments as possible.