If there were a tax on the use of the word 'economy', our fiscal deficit would have turned into a surplus in the space of about an hour yesterday afternoon. And if an equal tax had been levied on Mr Tung every time during that hour that he blamed others for our economic problems and promised the solutions through his own administration, we would never need worry about our fiscal revenues again. Try, for instance, his argument that the major cause of our fiscal deficit lies in the period of what he calls 'the bubble economy', with public expenditure having risen by an annual average of 14 per cent in the six years up to 1997 while since that time 'we took steps to cut spending'. Yes sir, but fiscal operations should and do bear some relation to the size of the economy on which they are based and your own figures show that government operating expenditure in the 10 years before 1997 averaged 14 per cent of gross domestic product while the figure since that time has been more than 18 per cent. He also managed to trip over other economic references, attributing Hong Kong's economic success in the past two decades to 'our seizing the opportunities provided by the opening up of the mainland'. Two paragraphs later we find him attributing our success before that time to 'China's closed-door policy'. Well, how would you best like it, sir, closed or open? If either has the same effect why bother mentioning it all? In the end, the repeated references to economic causes and pledges of economic initiatives from someone with scant acquaintance of such things pre-1997 can only leave you wondering how seriously to take a further pledge that 'we will adhere to our 'big market, small government' policy'. With a pinch of salt probably, given that in his closing remarks he also intoned that 'we must be masters of our own destiny'. This has more the ring of a big government philosophy and certainly does not describe how so many small Hong Kong entrepreneurs made a big market. They did it by taking what destiny brought them. They did not tell destiny what to do. And where we would like Mr Tung to try to exert some control over his destiny - in that matter of a fiscal deficit - we are told that the solution lies in higher revenues, lower expenditures and better economic growth. In other words, the future lies ahead of us, a great truth revealed, and for details refer to the upcoming budget speech. If it is homilies I wanted I would have read the Sermon on the Mount, sir. Jake van der Kamp is a staff writer with the Post
