Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong delivered his annual National Day Rally at ITE College Central, Ang Mo Kio, on Sunday (August 23).

We spoke to three young people - two first time voters - to find out what they think of this year’s National Day Rally speech by PM Lee and how they feel about the government.

Below are their views:

1. We still need political courage - Leianne Tan Jia Yi

Singapore (read: PAP) is like your parents. You grow up thinking they were your heroes, but then you slowly learn that they have flaws that diminish your respect for them. You still love (feel indebted to) your parents, who've nurtured you and given you a beautiful home to live in, but then you really cannot stand the old rules they make you abide by and can't wait to move out.

But then parents are parents, they are too old to change who they are fundamentally. You can only notice the mistakes they make and avoid them so that when you take over as head of the household, you find a new and better way of doing things… instead of the same old.

I recently facilitated some conversations between the Pioneer Generation and art students. The stories the old folks had were fascinating, admirable and tragic in equal measure - I met a few who were the epitome of self-reliance and resilience. Aunty Mary, for one, has a spick and span one room flat - we ooh and ahh as she carries a tray of kueh, pours us fruit punch and virtuously sips on water.

But she has Stage 3 colorectal cancer. Her sons don't visit her. She applied for two grants and relies on a trusted neighbour and another niece when she needs to visit the hospital.

I cannot blame our system for her sons’ attitude but I think there's a correlation between our "every man for himself" ethos and these elderly. Everyone has to eke out a living - seduced perhaps by lifestyle and trappings of our modern society, busy earning money at the expense of family. We need political courage in creating social safety nets - we can’t just be a society that looks at the data and assume that everything is hunky-dory.

And then there’s immigration. Yes, we need more skilled workers that the rest of the world are poaching as well. We also need blue collar workers who do the jobs we don't like. But my heart says that we're building our wealth from mistreating and squeezing these foreign workers.

Will the government try to decrease the overall social costs of hiring immigrants rather than transfer them to the exploited and make them mere externalities? Will our property magnates be willing to award projects to fairer agencies?

I think we need to look for a solution from employers - while groundwork and advocacy shape fairer policies for foreign workers, how much would a decent dorm, food without cockroaches, decent pay and rest days cost for construction workers cost?

Being kind and fair needs to make business sense. And I think Singapore Inc. - especially the parents who have been too old to change who they fundamentally are - really needs to start believing that.

Leianne Tan Jia Yi is a 25-year-old facilitator at Thinkscape.

2. Still in the ivory tower - Sean Francis

There is not much I can say about the PM’s National Day Rally – it has become a standardized rallying of the people, with a good helping of self-praise and touch of unbridled hope for the future.

PM Lee announced several new social and national improvements such as changes to the housing scheme, the new SIT campus in Punggol, and, most beautifully, highlighted the eventual success of student Chen Zhangkai. Progress and policy change is brilliant, but I was truly touched that the common man was put on an equal, if not even greater, pedestal.

Yet, two comments were made which I found rather disturbing - the first being that there were no “rugged” places or poverty in Singapore, and the second being that a person with an income of below a thousand dollars could buy a flat. Does saying these things imply that poverty does not manifest itself in different ways?

It is not only abject poverty that needs to be confronted head on in society. This also denies the work that civil society plays in combating issues of poverty.

The Population White Paper was also discussed. The concerns raised by working class people fearing for their job security were met with the cold response that whichever path were to be taken (on immigration issues) there would be pain involved.

How Singaporeans will react to this on polling day though, I have nothing short of a blind guess.

Sean Francis is a 20-year-old Marketing Officer at Project X, and a talk show host on TOC TV.

3. A little surprise at the bully pulpit - Samuel Caleb Wee

I was rather naïve prior to the rally.

On a certain level, I must have expected the Prime Minister to refrain from transparently using the event as a bully pulpit, because when 2 hours of candid electioneering transpired and PM Lee laid out an impassioned defence of his government, I found myself mildly surprised.

Upon further thought, however, it makes sense—I’ve often felt that the PAP sees the state, the party, and the nation as interchangeable anyway. Viewed in the context of the upcoming election, the Prime Minister’s rally rhetoric becomes much more admirable: a brilliant piece of political theatre; a virtuoso performance.

Granted, that Kit Chan performance was a tad clunky and kitsch—did we really need another rendition of Home? It’s hard to remember in 2015 that Dick Lee was the same guy who once brilliantly skewered PM Lee in this parody. It just goes to show how shrewd the state can be at politicking sometimes, when it really puts in effort—why sue, when you can make the dissentor the creative director of the SG50 NDP, and create stirring scenes of DPM Tharman, Minister Lim Swee Say and Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong singing along to Chan?

Just like Punggol, I too give you an A+, sir.

The rest of the rally, however, was rather masterful. Accusations of repetitiveness really miss the point: what the NDR needs is not originality, but ritualistic-re-enactment which turns the original mythic moment of independence into an eternal present.

Publicly thanking the pioneer soldiers was a nice touch, setting up the classic vulnerable-Singapore narrative —we were the scrawny picked-upon kid who couldn’t, but did.

It’s a tougher balancing act than you might think: PM Lee has to balance trumpeting the achievements of his party with reinforcing a certain sense of fragility about the nation they’ve built. In that light, his praise for our progress—particularly when he touched upon race relations before pivoting to Malaysia’s current fractured state—was a particularly sly way of revitalizing that story. The implicit message was always:

We came from chaos, and to chaos we could return if we—if you, dear voter—aren’t careful.”

Samuel Caleb Wee is a 24-year-old student.