It's hard to believe Stieg Larsson hasn't somehow been writing the script for labour secretary Matthew Cheung Kin-chung in recent weeks.
First, a little background. In 2008, the government introduced on a pilot basis the Transport Support Scheme to help low-income individuals in four districts deemed remote (the islands, north, Yuen Long and Tuen Mun) travel to work. The idea was to encourage those residents to look for jobs and stay in employment by giving them HK$600 per month to help cover the extra costs of travel.
Within months, the Legislative Council passed a resolution urging the administration to improve the scheme by cancelling the one-year limit, extending it to all districts and including part-time workers.
The government's response was that this would completely change the intended nature of the scheme as it would become, in effect, a permanent income supplement for the low-paid.
After a review, it announced last December a proposal to replace the existing scheme with a Work Incentive Transport Subsidy scheme. This includes all employed (including self-employed) people from low-income families 'irrespective of the travelling distance, mode of transport and actual travelling expenses'. It covers all districts and there is no time limit. In effect, then, it is permanent income support for the low-paid.
Despite these improvements, some criticised the new scheme because part-time workers (those working less than 72 hours per month) were still excluded, and they thought imposing income limits on a household rather than individual basis would be unfair and the income limits were too low.
Purists attacked the scheme in principle as a subsidy; welfare groups attacked it in practice as insufficient.