Hong Kong's planned IT bureau heading for third delay - until October
A vote on funding for a proposed innovation and technology bureau is set to be shelved once again, until after the summer break, as the Legislative Council's Finance Committee is unlikely to finish discussions in its last four-hour meeting today.
The creation of the bureau, which is Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying's brainchild, will be delayed for the third time since he floated the idea in his election manifesto in 2012.
Last night, the committee approved the other items on its agenda: a pay rise for civil servants, a HK$1 billion recycling fund, a development fund for small and medium-sized enterprises, and a worker training plan under the Construction Industry Council.
The IT bureau, for which the committee is being asked to approve start-up funds of HK$25 million and staff costs of HK$35 million, is the last item on the agenda. Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development Greg So Kam-leung made the funding request.
At 10pm, an hour before the meeting was scheduled to end, committee chairman Tommy Cheung Yu-yan said: "We shall end earlier than scheduled and let So come tomorrow so he need not wait tonight."
Legco started its annual break last week and will reconvene in October. But Leung got Cheung to agree to meet for 28 more hours this week. The move has outraged pan-democrats who say it is disrespectful to lawmakers. Polytechnic University assistant professor Chung Kim-wah said the bureau had become a political fight between the chief executive and pan-democrats.
The committee voted by 41-0 to approve pay rises for civil servants ranging from 3.96 per cent to 4.62 per cent. The package included a controversial move by the government to "boost morale" by lifting rates 0.5 percentage points above the findings of a survey on private-sector pay.
