Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen has a strategic choice to make: will his penultimate policy address, on October 13, be his 'sunset' address? He will, of course, still be in office in October next year, but that address will be delivered in the midst of campaigns by candidates seeking to become Hong Kong's next leader.
These candidates may well be critical of Tsang's policies, either directly stating where he went wrong, or indirectly doing so by proposing fundamentally different policies. At his last policy address in October next year, Tsang won't be able to say much about future policies; it will be time for him to give a work summary and an assessment of his success, and perhaps share regrets about what could not be achieved.
Given the many constraints next year, Tsang must use the opportunity this year well. There is still time to propose a few new initiatives. He also has the perfect occasion to say what major policy challenges his successor will have to deal with before the campaigning begins. Indeed, Tsang can be even more aggressive. He can use the months between his annual address and the next budget early next year to issue policy explanations of why things are the way they are and point to solutions, even if his administration will run out of time to solve them all. He will be putting down a marker for the future. It will also push those running for election to pay attention.
Take land and housing policies as an example. There is no shortage of people giving all kinds of suggestions to the chief executive and his senior officials on how to deal with high property prices. Suggestions on how to help lower-income families buy a home include building smaller and therefore cheaper flats, reviving the government's abandoned Home Ownership Scheme, building flats for sale that do not require a down payment, and making it more costly for hot money coming from the mainland to buy up mid-price homes.
There are in fact fundamental issues that are seldom discussed. The government has the superior title to land in Hong Kong. In other words, leasehold is the only type of land tenure here. Control over existing and future possible use of land is enforced through restrictive development covenants within each lease as to type of use and plot ratios. Control is additionally supplemented by planning legislation based on zoning and plot ratio requirements. Under this system, changes of the leasehold conditions enable the government to receive payment from developers; and land-related incomes have always formed a major part of government revenue.
The public is in fact demanding solutions to all sorts of land-related problems way beyond just the price of flats. For example, concern over the widespread degradation of rural land of high ecological and landscape value has emerged in response to the degradation of Sai Wan. Destruction has been driven by the demand for developable land for 'small houses', and by poor enforcement of land leases and other statutory and administrative measures. At the same time, securing conservation land via resumption has been made prohibitively expensive by the Lands Resumption Ordinance setting inexplicably high compensation rates on land with no development value.