The budget was basically a bonanza giveaway coupled with a 'business-as-usual' vision of the future. Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah forecast a surplus of HK$63.7 billion in the operating account for 2007-08, and HK$115.6 billion in the consolidated account. Fiscal reserves will rise to HK$484.9 billion, more than two years' expenditure.
On the whole, his giveaways are one-offs. Mr Tsang made it clear that the government is averse to increasing recurrent expenditure, to avoid measures that impose burdens that may be hard to bear in the long term.
This is hard to understand in light of the continuing gross domestic product growth. Isn't government policy supposed to be to increase recurrent expenditure alongside GDP growth? Why is it being so stingy?
Let's look at the impact on the quality of public services when the government is not prepared to fund recurrent expenses. Patients using the public health system do not get the latest medicine because it is too expensive. Mr Tsang acknowledged this, and proposed that HK$1 billion would go to the Samaritan Fund to subsidise medicine for poor patients. Yes, new drugs and treatments are more expensive. But is it not better for society, as a whole, when people have a chance to recover faster? Is the act of 'skimming' both bad policy and bad financial management of the public purse?
The financial secretary is willing to plough HK$100 million more each year into providing 300 more preschool training places, 450 more day training places and 490 more subvented residential places for people with disabilities. This is helpful, of course. What we don't know is what the shortage will be.
These are the sort of questions we must rely on our legislators and the media asking on our behalf, so that we know Hong Kong is a decent society.
We are prepared to put our trust in the government to provide a decent society. Unless we know that people using the public health care system are being deprived of new treatments, or that there are insufficient services for the disabled, it is not easy to say if society is doing enough to help the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. We also need them to ask: how is it possible that, in 2001-02, the government spent HK$32 billion on health but, in 2006-07, spent only HK$29.7 billion? Indeed, the revised estimate for 2007-08 is still only HK$31.6 billion. It is only in this current year that the government estimates spending to be HK$32.6 billion.