The do-gooders are at work in the Legislative Council again. Lots of poorer countries provide unemployment benefits, says legislator Lee Cheuk-yan. Why don't we? Good question and there is a good answer too, but let's first establish that we are not talking here of whether our social welfare system takes adequate care of the truly indigent. Unemployment benefits are a different matter.
The background here is that our unemployment rate at present stands at 5.5 per cent, down from a peak of 6.3 per cent a year ago but still high by historical standards.
However, if you subscribe to this newspaper rather than buying it on the street and if the man downstairs allows the distributor to drop it at your door rather than leaving it by the mail-boxes, you will know that every Saturday morning you get a wake-up reminder as 120 odd pages of job ads land with a thump on your doormat.
This may have led you to ask the obvious question. Why do we have any unemployment at all when every week we have 120 broadsheet pages of tightly spaced appeals by employers wanting to hire people? You see part of the answer when you page through these ads. They all require some level of skill, although not much. Three quarters consists of fancy job titles for salesman.
But it should nonetheless be obvious, and the official statistics indicate it, that the unemployment problem lies largely in the unskilled and semi-skilled trades.
It turns out this is also a good match with the tenant base of our public rental housing in which 40 per cent of the population lives. Now think about the deal these people already get.
Their rent on average comes to less than 10 per cent of their income, they pay only a pittance to educate their children and they get good public health care. It may be slow, but it is public rather than private hospitals that have the equipment when serious problems come up.
