Today is a day in which the Hong Kong Government is meant to fill a vacuum. Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa is to make a big policy speech, which implies that at least it's now been decided who sets policy.
It has been far from certain so far. There is the Anson Chan school of thought that setting policy is the job of the civil service with the Executive and Legislative Councils left to say 'Yeah' or 'Nay'.
Exco also wants the honour while Legco assumes that its democratic credentials give it the policy-making rights with Exco and the civil service bowing in assent.
Legco's claim might carry the greatest weight with most voters were it not so absorbed in its own rights and privileges that people know much more of what its elected members are against than what they are for, Christine Loh excepted.
Thus the vacuum. What has represented itself as government policy since the handover to the mainland last year has amounted to little more than saying 'we are good people, we have good intentions, we don't like speculators, we're going to build lots of housing and, oh yes, we have big reserves'.
Where these thoughts are graced with a name it has not yet progressed from the decades-old one of 'positive non-interventionism', a term which connotes a prudent government that likes free markets.
But how much does it like them when it has not privatised a single government corporation during an era when even socialist governments around the world are returning to the private sector those activities which are better suited to it? The Kowloon Canton Railway, the Mass Transit Railway, the Water Authority, the Provisional Airport Authority and, most of all, the Housing Authority, still remain firmly in government hands.