The one big new idea in the policy address is a HK$10 billion insult to Hongkongers and, in particular, those now classified as poor. They do not need charity handouts as envisaged by the Community Care Fund. They want well-defined tax and spending systems, and policies that help reduce the income gap, get old people out of cage homes, and so on, not arbitrary one-off payments by some yet-to-be-named officials. Most of all, they don't want charity from the very property and monopoly tycoons who, thanks to official connivance, have been able to extract outrageous profits from a public whose hard-earned savings have also been eroded by interest rates below the level of inflation.
If the tycoon families - among whom we should probably now include New Territories feudal kingpin Lau Wong-fat - really want to contribute to charities, there are plenty to choose from run by selfless individuals. This proposed fund is typical of the paternalistic mindset of Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen and his inability to understand the proper role of government in a modern society. Contributions to it will probably buy tycoons even greater influence than they have already.
Nor is there any indication of how quickly this money might be distributed. The government has various funds which sit unused. It is, anyway, small change compared with the HK$50 billion a year that Tsang boasted is being spent on mega infrastructure, the biggest of which are driven by politics and special interests, not by their economic viability or social value.
That is not to say there are no measures in the speech to address poverty issues. Increased schoolbook allowances and transport subsidies for employees are small steps in the right direction. So, too, is increasing care provision for old people, particularly those with dementia. But apparent, too, is the hope that more old people will elect to move to the mainland - that is, getting rid of them in the guise of 'regional integration'.
There is talk of family values and problems of a rapidly ageing population, but nothing about actual measures which would enable families to have more children - like day-care centres, job protection for nursing mothers and other measures that have proved effective elsewhere.
Yet again on the housing front, the government is offering measures it could and should have taken at any time, such as rezoning more industrial land and auctioning land, in addition to what is released under the cumbersome application list scheme.