Historians, journalists and the public interested in digging out details of controversial issues such as the scrapping of former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa's target of supplying 85,000 flats a year or his feud with former chief secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang will not get any clues in the near future.
They should not even take it for granted that they will be able to get any more information from government records even three decades after the events, when records created by government departments are made available.
This is because since 1997 the Chief Executive's Office, the Chief Secretary's Office and the Financial Secretary's Office - the nerve centre of the administration - have not transferred their records to the Government Records Service.
They have not made the transfer because of 'operational needs', a government spokesman said.
Former record service director Simon Chu Fook-keung said that with the proliferation of electronic records and the government's lack of will and capacity to deal with their management and preservation, Hong Kong faced the prospects of a 'huge historical black hole'.
The absence of an archive law leaves it up to bureaus and departments whether or not they transfer documents to the service, which oversees the overall management of government records.