Super-yacht lobby on the wrong tack
The arrival of the world’s largest sailing yacht in Hong Kong has sparked fresh calls for the city to increase its investment in marine infrastructure.
Sunday Morning Post, February 22
I have never been much of a boatie myself as I prefer the country park trails for recreation. But I did once briefly own a 25-foot plywood trimaran and I have reason to share the complaint about insufficient moorage.
All that I could do with my boat was anchor it in the Cheung Chau typhoon shelter, which was fine until Typhoon Ellen came along and turned my trimaran into a catamaran, whereupon the fallen mast turned the rest of it into matchwood in that storm and ended my days as a boat owner.
Our bureaucrats have so far seen the light on this question and fobbed off the super-yacht lobby
But this is a different matter from building docks for super yachts and I am not at all convinced that it is worth our while to dedicate valuable urban waterfront space to the whims of people who seek to impress others with their wealth through oversize pleasure craft. Let’s look at some of the reasons they offer:
It brings jobs to Hong Kong.
Our unemployment rate is 3.1 per cent, which is effectively full employment. The residual largely reflects people between jobs, people who don’t like the jobs they are offered and older workers made redundant by advancing technology.
We are in the unique position, so rare in the world today, that we don’t really need more jobs. We have enough of them. In particular, we don’t need menial jobs of the kind involved here. Our objective is to get away from these.
Super-yachts will bring tourist dollars here, thus boosting our economy.
Let’s put this into perspective. They will bring pennies, not dollars. We are talking about a very small number of people and, rich though they may be, I cannot picture them as mall rats loaded down with brand-name shopping bags.
Nor does it mean much that they will buy supplies for their yachts. All of these will be imported. When calculating gross domestic product you subtract the value of imports. What do we make that goes on any yacht’s shopping list?
It improves the image of Hong Kong.
This is one of the supposed pluses offered by a container port official whose job it is to find ways of keeping the port busy as it loses its container business to mainland ports.
The image I get, however, is of a super-rich American, who has made his money from various US government practices in restraint of free trade or from the sweat of millions of underpaid mainland industrial serfs, pushing a finger in our faces and saying, “I got mine.”
Some image.
It brings repair work to our marine industries.
Let’s refine this. What it mostly means is that a piece of fancy equipment is shipped in from abroad to replace a faulty one on board and, if any difficulty is involved, the technician who does the work is also brought in. Once again, deduct the value of imports when considering what this does for our economy.
But what it requires even then is a repair yard, not premium urban waterfront space, and if we were viable competitors in this repair business, we would still have plenty of such repair yards.
The fact, however, is that our dockyards, at one time a mainstay of the Hong Kong economy, have been turned into big residential developments as other places in Asia have proved cheaper and better for ship repair.
This is only natural. The business is not suited to a wealthy, crowded city thriving on office services. I am glad to see that our bureaucrats have so far seen the light on this question and fobbed off the super-yacht lobby.
However, I think they may also have confused this with the general requirements of the boating public. We are woefully short of moorage space for ordinary boat owners, by some estimates accommodating only a third of the demand.
In my view boat owners should pay high parking costs, just as car owners do, enough to make them think twice about owning a boat. But let’s at least start by having more space for them.
And let’s tell the foreign super-yachts to find their space on the River Styx.
