It is said that one of the most dangerous things in politics is a long memory. This maxim seems to be unknown to the Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen who, having delivered his policy address, rashly told the assembled media, 'if I fail to deliver my policy pledges, you will certainly pursue me and hold me responsible'.
The temptation to take the chief executive at his word is overwhelming, so let's look at the record and see whether Tsang should be held responsible for failure to fulfil past pledges.
A good place to start is environmental policies which figured big in last week's policy address and have done so in the past, accompanied by a conspicuous lack of action. Who now remembers 'Operation Blue Skies', launched in 2006? The most striking outcome of this initiative was the government's discovery of how to manipulate air pollution data, showing impressive gains on paper while at ground level air pollution continued to increase.
The following year a HK$3.2 billion fund was launched to help commercial vehicle operators switch to less polluting fuels. The outcome was the conversion of just one bus and a take-up rate of only 20 per cent or so for the fund. It has since been quietly abandoned. Now, without even acknowledging the failure of the past scheme, a new scheme, with a more modest budget of HK$550 million, has been launched with similar objectives.
Last year's pledge to institute air quality benchmarks appears to have already been forgotten. Meanwhile Tsang's funny little plan to provide funding for low-energy light bulb replacement has also disappeared into the haze of pollution.
This year's policy address carries the dubious title: 'Sharing Prosperity for a Caring Society': its centrepiece is a joint-government and tycoon fund to transform government poverty alleviation policy into something akin to a charity project. What happened to the more meaningful 'voluntary wage protection initiative'? This was another scheme reliant on the goodwill of business that produced precisely zero by way of outcome. As a result, the government was shamed into introducing a minimum wage law, which can still be undermined by the people who shunned the voluntary initiative.
And just in case there is any lingering illusion that the Tsang administration was even vaguely serious about better governance, let's consider the dull impact of the so-called 'Principal Officials Accountability System' introduced in 2002. The word accountability has been taken to mean more or less nothing because every time there is a major failure inside government, the buck stops nowhere. The minister for planning is not responsible for major scandals in land grants, blunders in the medical service are seen as acts of God and when a member of Tsang's own cabinet openly flouts the rules of disclosure, he is not punished but lauded by the chief executive.