There's a game I play whenever I watch a budget speech on TV. I compare the number of times I yawn to the times the financial secretary looks up from his script. He always loses. I always yawn more times than he looks up at the people he is supposedly talking to. I won again last Wednesday.
For two hours, John Tsang Chun-wah droned on with head bowed, reading to us rather than inspiring us. This time I wondered: is this the best we deserve in a financial secretary? He, after all, decides how we should spend our money to shape our future. And we're not talking peanuts. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars.
There is, of course, little we can do if Tsang wants to inflict on us his decisions on how we should shape our future by reading from a recycled script without making eye contact. He is the financial secretary, after all, not one that we chose but one that we have no choice but to live with. Still, the people are starving for a government vision, even if read in monotone. The script's got to have substance.
Here's another game you can play. All the government's men, from the chief executive down, lined up to say his script had substance. All the democratically elected members of the Legislative Council - they're the ones with the mandate to reflect the people's views - lined up to say it didn't. Who's right?
Don't play that game with the financial secretary. He'll tell you he's right, that he knows best how to spend your money. There's nothing you can do about that. He doesn't owe his job to you.
This year, he spent HK$24 billion on giving every MPF account holder HK$6,000. It doesn't matter whether you're Hong Kong's top salary earner worth millions and don't really need the money or a lowly office clerk who really needs it.
You'll all get the same amount. When asked at a press conference the rationale for this, Tsang agitatedly ducked the question.