It is a right hemisphere versus left hemisphere thing. The Hong Kong Government is no different to the rest of humanity in this. Practical matters, like accountancy, diesel tax and pumping sewage straight into the harbour are dealt with in one hemisphere of the brain. Creative and intuitive matters like language, the arts and quality of life in the other.
But in individuals there are occasional sparks of communication between one side and the other. That is why we know, for instance, that it may be cheaper to let our waste water wash straight down the hill through ancient, cracked and inadequate sewage pipes, overflow into storm drains and occasionally re-emerge in the streets of Central, but it is infinitely preferable to treat it and find sustainable ways to dispose of it.
Intuitively, we understand the harbour will be more pleasant and less likely to congeal into a stinking mire, if we do not burden it daily with two million tonnes of waste.
Governments do not have the inter-hemispheric synapses required for intuition. It takes some sentient human being like a Governor or Chief Executive (OK, OK, it is quite an assumption, but previous leaders have occasionally come up with good ideas like sewage treatment schemes), to collect lifestyle impulses from one side of the brain and use them to guide the policies implemented by the other. The technical phrase for this process is 'banging hemispheres together', although in layman's language we talk, loosely, of banging heads.
Without this brutal process, nary a communication passes between departments.
Thousands of workers have slaved away for years in the Environmental Protection Department, for instance, installing air-pollution monitors four storeys above street level, and guesstimating the pollution lower down. Finally, under some head-thumping by the media, they get around to installing a few down on the ground where the exhaust fumes are - and discover, to no one else's surprise, that the guesstimates are 170 per cent too low.
But in all this time, no one has been able to flash a single neurotransmitter across to the Financial Secretary's hemisphere (or indeed to the strange hemispherical world inhabited by Legislative Councillors, provisional and elected).