On Second Thought: Hong Kong government departments must move with the times

In a report released earlier by the Legislative Council Secretariat, Hongkong Post was chastised for failing to diversify its services to meet market demands and relying too much on traditional mail business to generate revenue.

But our post office is certainly not the only government department which can't keep pace with change. The descent of the Information Services Department into irrelevance after 1997 is a case in point.

The government has been getting so much bad press since the handover that it seems only fair to ask: as its public relations consultant and news agency, is the department doing its job? What the department lacks, I believe, is a strategic understanding of the increasingly hostile media environment in which the government must operate.

In the eyes of a large part of the local press, the chief executive and the people who work for him are guilty until proven innocent. And a highly suggestible, credulous public is prone to believe the worst accusations made against the government by the media.

Yet the government desperately needs a public mandate for the effective implementation of its policies.

The paradigm irrevocably shifted when Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony and became a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. But somehow it has escaped the department's notice.

With great insouciance, it goes about its daily business of issuing press releases, making announcements and running a news and media information system. No one on its staff of over 300 seems to have any idea that the department is now in the business of public persuasion, not public information.