In case you haven't heard, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Workers’ Party chief Low Thia Khiang engaged in an epic war of words in Parliament yesterday.

With extensive media and online coverage over their verbal jousting, what many people missed was PM Lee's speech earlier. It is an IMPORTANT speech because it concerns the government's agenda for the rest of their term.

In his speech, he spoke about the government's progress since the 2011 elections. He also explained the government's plans to tackle the challenges of housing, transport, manpower, education as well as strengthening social safety nets.

Anyway, he explained in detail what constructive politics means. So here is what constructive politics is all about:

1. Developing effective policies for Singaporeans: It means having good policies but making difficult trade-offs. It involves solving problems, creating opportunities, improving the lives of people.

2. Putting forward good people to lead. This refers to finding people of integrity and character who can represent Singapore with distinction, who can serve Singapore in an outstanding way.

3. Having a robust and open debate: It means having a debate to ensure proposals are scrutinised and argued, so that we can come up with the best ideas and solutions for Singaporeans. It is not just engaging in “soundbite politics”.

4. Maintaining high standards of integrity: Honesty is an absolute necessity and is the key difference between politics in Singapore and in many other countries.

5. Rallying people together for a common cause: This is to enable us to achieve broad objectives and accommodate our differences. We have to form a broad coalition, compromise among ourselves, be able to see that the general direction achieves 70-80 per cent of what each one of us wants.

If you are still interested in the verbal sparing in Parliament yesterday, check out these articles:

10 Quotable Quotes that really show PM Lee & WP’s Low engaged in an epic butting of heads in parliament

Judging by supporters’ comments online, both LHL and LTK won the face-off

5 non-verbal cues that speak volumes in Parliament