Government must address society's most urgent needs
Ho Hei-wah says that despite sizeable surpluses, the government continues to neglect the urgent needs of Hong Kong's grass roots in areas such as health, social services and care for the elderly
Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah was recently criticised for not using public money flexibly and justly for our needs. The criticism has sparked a widespread discussion in society and drawn a response from the financial secretary.
As far as the government's public financial philosophy is concerned, non-governmental organisations have been continuously criticising the government for not having a set of comprehensive strategies in response to the social changes. Insufficient public resources have been allocated to support services in various policy areas, and this has led to deep-seated contradictions in society.
In his first policy address, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying emphasised that tackling housing and livelihood problems was of the utmost importance in his five-year policy road map. Unfortunately, he also stressed that "with sustained economic growth, we will be able to properly address our housing, poverty, ageing-population and environmental problems".
Worse still, Tsang scapegoated the wealth redistributive mechanism as welfarism
It is disappointing that the new government only follows the old paradigm from the former government by putting economic development as the highest concern. The discourse of economic development neglected the importance of redirecting public resources for the redistribution of wealth. Economic development alone cannot address the issues of income disparity and insufficient social welfare resources in our society.
Having adequate financial support is essential for policy reform and implementation. The financial secretary has said that the government public expenditure has increased by around 85 per cent over the past six years. This is true. Since he came to office in 2007, the public expenditure has increased from HK$252.5 billion in 2007/08 to HK$467.1 billion in 2013/14, an increase of HK$214.6 billion. While this might seem a hefty rise on the surface, on closer examination there is little to cheer.
Public expenditure is divided into recurrent and non-recurrent components. Recurrent public expenditure increased from HK$212.1 billion in 2007/08 to HK$308.3 billion in 2013/14, an increase of 45 per cent.
But this includes inflation and the regular adjustment of civil servants' salaries. It means only a part of these resources are allocated for new policies and services. For example, the annual salaries of senior civil servants have risen 16.8 per cent over the past four financial years.
It is telling that the share of recurrent public expenditure to total spending decreased from 84 per cent to 66 per cent over the last six years.
