Public EyeDo these two know what it's like on the other side?

Whose side should Public Eye take? The side of property tycoon Ronnie Chan Chichung, who slammed the financial secretary as a great sinner for hoarding instead of spending the people's money on social problems? Or John Tsang Chun-wah, who defended himself with the tired line that he must spend public money prudently?

We'll side with neither. Both are la-la land dwellers who understand Hong Kong's social problems as much as Marie Antoinette understood the starving French peasants whom she advised to eat cake when told they had no bread.

We're not suggesting that Hong Kong's one million poor people lop off the heads of Chan and Tsang as the French did with their queen. But let's be brutally frank. How can either Chan or Tsang possibly grasp the anguish of families living in subdivided slum flats or elderly women who scavenge for cardboard boxes to survive?

Tsang lives in a taxpayer-financed mansion. He proved how clueless he was about the city's realities when he defined the middle class as people who drank coffee and watched French movies, and proudly proclaimed himself as middle class despite his HK$302,000-a-month pay. Chan's world is that of private yachts, first-class air travel and chauffeur-driven cars. He had the gall to slam Tsang as a sinner when his own property company, Hang Lung, hoarded completed flats instead of selling them to ease the housing shortage.

When was the last time Chan saw for himself how people in subdivided flats lived? When did Tsang last go out at dawn to ask elderly ladies hauling cardboard boxes how he could help them? As far as Public Eye is concerned, they're both sinners.