If proof were required of the dysfunction that lies at the heart of the Hong Kong government, we need look no further than the budget delivered this week. Only a non-elected bureaucrat could have produced a budget of this kind and been so gloriously lacking in self-awareness of its shortcomings.
Budget-making lies at the heart of government activity because it deals with the allocation of public resources, quantifies the burden which members of the public have to assume to pay for these resources, and contains a significant element of fiscal and economic planning.
In Hong Kong, the budget is preceded by an almost entirely spurious period of so-called public consultation. It is then announced in a flurry of declarations about 'giveaways' and 'concessions'. The mindset which frames a budget in these terms is troubling to say the least. For a start, the government cannot give away that which it does not own, that is, the public's money. It can only regulate how much it will take and how much will be returned.
Secondly, thinking of a budget in terms of a succession of 'concessions' inevitably implies very short-term thinking and expedient measures which duck tackling long-standing issues.
This is most clearly seen in the government's approach to the problem of poverty in Hong Kong. Real, grinding poverty affects literally hundreds of thousands of people in this supposedly prosperous society. Both the poverty gap and absolute levels of poverty are growing. This surely suggests the need for a coherent policy, yet all the government offers are piecemeal 'gifts' of cash for this and that, plus some hollow declarations of concern.
Hong Kong people, despairing of ever acquiring the security of owning their own homes, are told that they are being helped by small tweaks to the land sale programme and a tiny sum of cash for repairing old buildings. None of this propels a significant section of the population towards home ownership.
In place of plans to resolve fundamental problems, we have a proliferation of slogans about prudence, free trade and free markets that no doubt cause excitement in the depths of US-based think tanks but are meaningless because, for every free market in Hong Kong, there is a web of monopolies, and for all this talk of free enterprise, there is a plethora of bureaucratic controls.