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Two types of jam

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When I worked in the government secretariat, more than 20 years ago, I recall a file which circulated once a quarter, requiring us to provide an update on actions taken in response to formal decisions made by the governor in the executive council.

Dealing with this file was one of the trickier challenges which we civil servants faced. We might find ourselves having to paper over delays, or to explain tactfully how some Exco decision - despite having been based on our recommendations in the first place - was now proving flawed or impracticable.

No doubt, some similar file still circulates today. The motivation is a worthy and necessary one - to keep civil servants on their toes, to avoid embarrassing delays and, in today's jargon, to achieve 'closure'. The public does not like uncertainty or dithering.

Those who have experience of public departments in other places would probably judge Hong Kong's administration to be remarkably efficient at getting things done, whether major actions decreed by Exco or minor matters despatched by officials further down the line. When there are signs of masterful inaction, or of subjects being buried in the 'too difficult' box, it is probably more often the result of deliberate political foot-dragging than of administrative incompetence.

Two examples spring to mind. First, whatever became of the boundary facilities improvement tax - the euphemism for making people pay to cross the border? This was, in many ways, a very sensible revenue-raising idea. It was proposed in the March 2002 budget by the previous financial secretary, and was last heard of in October 2003 when the current incumbent confirmed that, although the rationale was still valid, the public was not ready for it. Since then, not a word. Is it buried? Do we have closure?

Next, tunnel tolls. To anyone even only half awake, it should have been obvious, within a couple of years of the opening of the Western Harbour Tunnel in 1997, that there was something amiss about the spread of traffic across the three tunnels, and that, by inference, the toll relativities were far from optimal. Several years on and - no surprise - there has been no miracle cure. And we are now told that transport officials need yet another year to consult on 12 options which they have belatedly identified.

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