OpinionTime for HK Golf Club to tee off against the government over land grab

The silence was deafening, troubling in fact. For weeks the populist crusade raged over reclaiming the land where the Hong Kong Golf Club at Fanling sits to build public housing.

An ambitious green group had an idea that instead of building new housing tracts in the New Territories, the government should take the 54 holes at Fanling, which has hosted the Hong Kong Open since 1959, and tear them up to erect row upon row of much-needed housing instead of evicting small groups of villagers and farmers from their land. After all, it's merely a playpen for a couple of thousand of the city's richest people.

The government, besieged by perpetual ineptitude and terminally poor popularity ratings, is desperate to try anything so they nodded in approval and said, hmm, it might be worth exploring.

A slew of pious poseurs in print and on the airwaves gleefully joined the fray, denouncing the sense of entitlement among the one per cent of the one per cent. And in response to a growing avalanche of criticism, the people who run Fanling said … nothing. Beaten on like a helpless piñata, they officially had absolutely nothing to say.

Even if I wanted to sit this brouhaha out, I can't because I actually play the game, although not particularly well, and apparently have to apologise for indulging in this blissful misery known as golf.

I've also attended a number of Hong Kong Opens, which according to one so-called commentator is "a snob sporting event for the wealthy few". That's certainly news to my forlorn bank account. Compounding all of this tripe, we also have a green group that wants to get rid of the green.