I raise the point today after receiving several e-mails over the past few weeks asking me why I do not comment in the Monitor column on whether our new chief executive should serve a two-year, five-year, seven-year, 10-year or 12-year term. Everyone else seems obsessed with it. Why not stick my oar in too?

The easy answer, of course, is that this is meant to be a column on financial and economic affairs and, therefore, purely political matters have no place in it. I could plead this excuse if I had never strayed from finance and economics, but I stray more often than I stay on the path.

Public policy has an enormous impact on economic development. It is impossible to ignore the first while talking of the second. The economy operates on a framework established by government whether or not we like that framework or think there may be too much or little of it at times.

The real reason that I have not felt drawn to comment on this constitutional issue of the chief executive's term of office is that, quite frankly, it bores me.

Once again, public attention has been diverted from what government does to how government is structured to do it, leaving the truly pressing questions of what it does on the backburner. The message of the day is the medium of how the message is formulated and that is where the message ends, no message at all.

Meanwhile, we are still embarked on massive infrastructure projects that take no account of a much lower population tally than forecast by the studies on which they were based or, as in the case of our ports, increasingly stand revealed as denying economic reality. Is government reconsidering these massive expenditures? No, government is too busy looking at itself to look anywhere else.

Time presses us to resolve how we should regulate natural network monopolies in sectors such as power, telecommunications and transport where public services are delivered by private entities. We have only a hodge-podge of conflicting rules at the moment and it could make a big difference to what we pay for these services. What is government doing? Inspecting itself in a mirror, that is what government is doing.

We now have one of the world's wealthiest economies but the average Hong Kong family still lives in a shoebox of less than 400 square feet of usable space. How did this come to pass and is there anything we can do to improve these living circumstances? Do not bother to ask government. Its attention is concentrated on the shape of the whirl in its collective bellybutton.

I blame journalists for a good measure of this. Few journalists have formal expertise in the fields about which they write (most would otherwise make career moves to those fields) and their most frequent refuge from this ignorance is palace politics (anyone can gossip endlessly) and excessive moral high-mindedness (you cannot be wrong if you stand with God).

There goes my prospect of anyone buying me drinks at the Foreign Correspondents Club tonight, but I do not blame journalists alone. Our Legislative Council, for instance, is too heavily made up of barristers, the classic specialists in form to the exclusion of function, and our administration too heavily made up of career civil servants who live and die by their pecking order.

But I hear you. How can I call constitutional issues trivial, you say, when they are the foundation of proper government?

How can we talk about what government does before we have put it together the right way to do what it does? Ignore constitutional matters and we invite bad government for sure. It is what the big tycoon wants. Everyone shuts up and the rich will get richer while the poor will get poorer.

I know, I know. But I sometimes think it makes no difference anyway. Do the people who tell us that they see this evil bogeyman around every constitutional corner not tell us just as often that he already pretty much has his way? If he truly exists, he is probably more than happy to see the rest of us look aside to obsess ourselves with the constitution while he walks off with the money.

Donald for two years or Donald for five? Bother yourself with it. I am more concerned about whether he lets his underlings fill in what is left of our harbour and destroy the Hong Kong Island foreshore with another six lanes of traffic.