Abacus | A Hong Kong budget for officials and cartels, not ordinary people
Financial Secretary Paul Chan paid lip service to ‘people-based governance’, but he has delivered a grotesquely skewed budget that allocates more to infrastructure than education, health or social welfare
It is probably unrealistic to expect anyone in an official position in Hong Kong to listen to reasoned, constructive criticism. After all, this is the city where dozens of former officials line up to plead for leniency when a former government chief executive is convicted of misconduct in office. It is also the city where thousands of police officers assemble to condemn the conviction and sentencing of seven of their colleagues for assault.
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Think for a moment about the implications of those actions. Apparently a roll-call of senior officials firmly believe that Donald Tsang’s years of highly paid government employment fully entitle him to accept a bit extra under the table. And the police rank and file are absolutely outraged that fellow coppers should be sent to jail for beating up a suspect.
Hong Kong’s former chief executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen has been sentenced to 20 months in jail for misconduct. Photo: SCMP Pictures
In neither case did officials show any understanding that public servants, like Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion. Indeed, in neither case did they display any belief at all that they are in office to serve the public. Instead the message they sent was one of hubris and entitlement; an attitude that they are in office not to serve the populace, but themselves, their political masters and the state. And in reality the state is nothing more than a convenient code for a narrow group of special interests.
Seven Hong Kong policemen have been jailed for assaulting activist Ken Tsang Kin-chiu during the Occupy Central demonstration. Photo: Felix Wong
This attitude was on display again last Wednesday when Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po delivered his first budget speech. Chan paid lip-service to what he called “the principle of people-based governance” and blathered about improving people’s livelihood. But on even the most cursory examination, it quickly became clear that despite some tinkering around the edges, this was not a budget intended to help ordinary people. Rather it was aimed at benefiting an increasingly bloated government and its favoured business cronies.
Even though the government managed to run a surplus for the current fiscal year expected to hit a scarcely believable HK$93 billion (compared to an initial estimate for a surplus of HK$11 billion), there was no recognition that Hong Kong’s fiscal system is inflicting grievous damage on the city’s economy.
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From left: Hong Kong finance officials Elizabeth Tse Man-yee, Paul Chan Mo-po, Ceajer Chan Ka-keung and Helen Chan present the budget. Photo: Xiaomei Chen
The government ran such a huge surplus largely because it collected over HK$60 billion more than it expected in land revenues – the eighth year running these have exceeded official forecasts.
And it collected such vast land revenues because despite endless official protestations to the contrary, the government operates a high-land-price policy, drip-feeding building land onto the market and conspiring with a small cartel of developers to keep property prices sky-high. The result is the most expensive housing and office space in the world, a combination that marginalises the poor and even the moderately well-off, and crowds out enterprise to the detriment of the local economy and local people’s livelihoods.
