The government's budget may have finally been passed by the Legislative Council after more than seven weeks of political turmoil, but it is clear the challenge facing the financial secretary and his successors has changed.
The increasingly politicised budgetary scene is reminiscent of the United States where the federal government is occasionally at the risk of shutdown because the Congress does not see eye to eye with the president on the budget. Hong Kong is moving away from an executive-led regime inherited from the British colonial era towards the US-style rivalry between the executive and legislature.
Such change is not sudden but part of an evolutionary shift starting from the early 1990s when the departing British administration introduced a limited form of electoral politics.
The then financial secretary Hamish Macleod openly acknowledged the advent of 'consensus capitalism' and incorporated pre-budget political consultations with parties and legislators in the budgetary process.
Hong Kong's fiscal system had long thrived on the prudent principles and policies laid down in the 1970s by financial secretary Philip Haddon-Cave - positive non-interventionism; a low and administratively simple tax regime; and government expenditure normally not exceeding 20 per cent of gross domestic product and not growing faster than the GDP trend growth rate over the medium term.
Such fiscal conservatism co-existed with governor Murray MacLehose's social reformism to make the 1970s a decade of enlightened colonial rule.
Hong Kong-style capitalism, as characterised by low tax and relatively good welfare, impressed the Chinese government so much during the Sino-British negotiations of the 1980s that the Basic Law subsequently made some of those fiscal principles and a balanced budget constitutionally binding (articles 107, 108). However, reunification in 1997 unleashed a more active society with higher expectations, and a more fragmented and assertive legislature over which a traditional form of executive-led government would simply fail to command.