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Financial Secretary John Tsang will give a sweetener to your greedy landlord in the form of a rates waiver but not you. Photo: Dickson Lee
Opinion
Public Eye
by Michael Chugani
Public Eye
by Michael Chugani

It's enough to drive us all mad

It's that crazy time of year again. Lunacy will take centre stage today when Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah delivers his budget speech in the Legislative Council.

It's that crazy time of year again. Lunacy will take centre stage today when Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah delivers his budget speech in the Legislative Council. There will be the usual missile throwing and stage-managed outbursts from pro-democracy loonies, who will be duly ejected by Legco president Jasper Tsang Yok-sing. (Do we really pay these idiots HK$80,000 a month plus millions more a year in perks?) Then the lunacy of Tsang himself, delivered in monotone to a sleepy audience, will start. He'll hand out billions in sweeteners, thanks to a HK$60 billion budget surplus he didn't see coming last year. Though to be fair, he's never got his budget forecasts right since he's been in charge of our money. Should the frail old ladies who haul loads of discarded cardboard boxes to sell for a living watch the speech, in case a few sweeteners fall their way? No, they're better off taking a nap like the rest of Tsang's Legco audience. Too bad collecting cardboard boxes is not one of the five sectors Tsang sees as having been hit by the Occupy protests. If you're a tycoon who owns hotels and shops far away from the protest sites you'll still be compensated with public money because our overpaid bureaucrats consider it too arduous a task to separate those who were actually affected from those who were not. Take a nap too if you're paying an exorbitant rent for a tiny or subdivided flat. Tsang will give a sweetener to your greedy landlord in the form of a rates waiver but not you. Is there a case for the Equal Opportunities Commission that those who own homes, including mansions on The Peak, get yearly handouts but those who rent, including those in slum subdivided flats, don't? Well, we did say it was lunacy.

 

Ask not what your university can do for you but what you can do for your university, to paraphrase former US president John F. Kennedy. University of Hong Kong law professor Johannes Chan Man-mun should seriously think about this idea. His possible appointment as pro-vice-chancellor has divided HKU and further polarised our society. Public Eye is not saying he's to blame but politics here has become a dirty business. We don't know if Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying meddled to block the appointment. The democracy camp has alleged this without proof. We don't buy Chan's claim that Beijing mouthpiece politically persecuted him when it blamed him for the law faculty's drop in research performance while he was dean. The media muckrakes. Democracy camp mouthpiece does it all the time. If that's political persecution, then revelations of Henry Tang Ying-yen's illegal basement, Secretary for Development Paul Chan Mo-po's New Territories farmland and numerous other disclosures, would be political persecution too. Good men know when to do the right thing. Chan should withdraw his name to end the bitter division and political mudslinging.

 

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