Hong Kong faces an ageing society and, by 2018, a shrinking workforce. It is our responsibility to work out a plan for managing both.
Few places in the world are so confident and so well positioned for the future as to be able to seriously consider deliberately damaging nearly 5 per cent of the economy.
John Mauldin, a US financial expert, wrote recently about the annual Darwin Awards, given out "to honour fools who kill themselves accidentally and remove themselves from the human gene pool".
Standard working hours will not, we believe, alleviate the problem of excessively long hours, and legislation risks lowering the flexibility of the labour market, as well as constraining Hong Kong's competitiveness and economic development.
It is argued by some that Hong Kong needs a class action system, which will give people better access to justice and consumers a fairer share of settlements. And the argument is made, of course, that other jurisdictions have, or are introducing, class action, so why not Hong Kong?
The fact that we are one of the world's top two or three business centres is due to our flexible, diligent and savvy entrepreneurial work ethic that is admired the world over. We don't just get the job done; we do it better than most.
An acute labour shortage in certain sectors is hurting our competiveness and undermining Hong Kong's economic growth. We have the necessary tools to fix this problem, but lack the will to act. That needs to change, or Hong Kong will underperform as the global economy improves.
