A Hong Kong budget for officials and cartels, not ordinary people
Financial Secretary Paul Chan paid lip service to ‘people-based governance’, but he has delivered a grotesquely skewed budget that allocates more to infrastructure than education, health or social welfare
It is probably unrealistic to expect anyone in an official position in Hong Kong to listen to reasoned, constructive criticism. After all, this is the city where dozens of former officials line up to plead for leniency when a former government chief executive is convicted of misconduct in office. It is also the city where thousands of police officers assemble to condemn the conviction and sentencing of seven of their colleagues for assault.
Think for a moment about the implications of those actions. Apparently a roll-call of senior officials firmly believe that Donald Tsang’s years of highly paid government employment fully entitle him to accept a bit extra under the table. And the police rank and file are absolutely outraged that fellow coppers should be sent to jail for beating up a suspect.
Even though the government managed to run a surplus for the current fiscal year expected to hit a scarcely believable HK$93 billion (compared to an initial estimate for a surplus of HK$11 billion), there was no recognition that Hong Kong’s fiscal system is inflicting grievous damage on the city’s economy.
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Most bizarre of all, despite accumulated excess reserves of some HK$1.5 trillion, the government insists it is facing a cash crunch. On Wednesday, Chan complained about Hong Kong’s “narrow tax base”, the wording officials use when they want to increase taxes. Yet like his predecessor, Chan continues to insist that because land revenues are a “capital” windfall, they cannot be used to fund ongoing spending such as education, health care or welfare for the elderly. Instead they can be used only for “capital” projects.
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This is self-serving nonsense of a high order. The government only collects land revenues as up-front lump-sum capital payments because it chooses to. It could equally well collect its land revenues in the form of ground rents, which would spread payments out over the full duration of leaseholds.
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It would scarcely be beyond the capabilities of Hong Kong’s public sector to change the city’s fiscal system so that it worked in favour of, rather than against, the ordinary people of the territory. But as officials from the most senior civil servants to the lowliest police constables made clear last week, they are not concerned with serving ordinary people, only themselves, their masters and their cronies. ■
Tom Holland is a former SCMP staffer who has been writing about Asian affairs for more than 20 years