It is time the population projections of the Census and Statistics Department came in for some thorough scrutiny. These things matter deeply to the community at large, with regard to budgeting for infrastructure, housing, health, and the like. While demographic projections are always at the mercy of the unknowable, Hong Kong's have such a consistent bias to exaggeration that there must be some question as to whether they are influenced by the dreams of planners and a development industry which provides high-paying jobs to ex-civil servants and chiefs of police.
Although there can be few doubts about the quality and accuracy of the data the department collects and publishes, its projections are another matter altogether.
It should never be allowed to forget its action in 1999 of tearing up its former estimates and devising a ludicrous number - 1.7 million - of supposed mainland offspring of Hong Kong residents who were going to flood the city and its schools, as a result of the Court of Final Appeal ruling on the right of abode. This dishonest concoction was then used to try to scare the public into accepting the government's undermining of Hong Kong's autonomy by going to the National People's Congress to overturn the ruling.
The latest population projections certainly do not fall into that league of politically motivated fiction. But the department still seems to be straining to get the kind of population growth numbers that would move us towards the magical 10 million figure that Donald Tsang Yam-kuen feels is necessary for Hong Kong to be the equal of New York or London.
But, first, a little population-projection history. This is the fourth such projection in the past 10 years. According to one in 1997, by mid-2006 (the base year for the latest estimates), Hong Kong was supposed to have a population of 7.38 million. The next estimate, in 2000, reduced that to 7.24 million and the 2004 projection to 6.94 million. In reality it was just 6.85 million.
Likewise, longer-term estimates have been consistently reduced - that for 2011 from 7.79 million in 1997 to 7.15 million now; that for 2016 from 8.2 million to the latest figure of 7.45 million; and that for 2021 from a 2000 estimate of 8.49 million, to the latest one of 7.78 million.