Retire once and for all
IN response to my last column, Mr M. J. C. Waters, writing for the Secretary for the Civil Service on this page on November 1, addressed only the issue of civil servants' post-retirement business activities. The issue of civil servants' post-retirement political activities is equally troubling, yet Government appears unable or unwilling to lay down clear-cut guidelines.
For example, how can it be fair or proper for any former Hong Kong civil servant to accept, prior to 1997, a post as adviser to the Chinese Government? The ''advice'' which China seeks from such people must surely be based upon their experience of governing Hong Kong; and China's intent must surely be to exploit such knowledge in order to help China's policies and views prevail over the Hong Kong Government's own. To pretend otherwise may be polite, but it is also naive.
As to post-retirement business activities, the guidelines given by Mr Waters seem to be rather elastic. To start with, why do the existing guidelines cover retirement but not resignations? Officers who accept unsuitable post-retirement jobs ''may'', he says, find their pension suspended. Very well. But in how many cases has such a suspension occurred? We have seen Hong Kong's highest-ranking officers go to work for large companies. Past examples include Sir Piers Jacob, the former Financial Secretary now working for China Light and Power, and Nicky Chan, the former Secretary for Lands and Works who had a stint with Hutchison. And currently, we have John Chan, who joined KMB, and Yeung Kai-yin, who is to join Sino Land.
The Post's editorial on November 2 stated that ''As Mr Chan noted . . . his new position as managing director of Kowloon Motor Bus will require a great deal of integrity to avoid such abuses.'' I am neither suggesting that conflicts of interest or abuseshave occurred. I am merely saying that care should be taken to avoid situations in which they might occur.
Since the Government chooses to devolve scrutiny of appointments to an appointed committee, the Advisory Committee on Post-retirement Employment, which reports privately to the Governor, then the public is entitled to ask for some evidence that the process is working effectively, which is why it would be useful to know when the committee has drawn the line.
Perhaps the Government may say that a pension has never been suspended (if that is indeed the case) because the committee's rulings have always been respected, and therefore the system is working well. But the public might also wish to question whether the relationship between Government, the committee and senior civil servants might be too cosy for the committee to take hard decisions about senior civil servants.
SINCE the public has little information about the workings of the committee, it is incumbent upon the Government to clarify the situation and convince us that, indeed, the system is working perfectly.
My prime concern is that by limiting its concern to what might be a not-very-vigorous scrutiny of individual cases, the Government risks missing a more general and important point. There will always be conflict of interest considerations when an officer trained to serve the public at large then sells those skills to a private entity acting for profit.
The more readily that senior civil servants move into the private sector, the more the civil service could lose, in the eyes of the public, the special quality of being dedicated to a vocation of government which is and should remain different and separate from that of the private sector.
Retirement, whether early or otherwise, should mean what it says. The passage of a senior civil servant into the private sector should be an exceptional event, tolerable only in those rare cases when there is public interest justification, such as, taking over the running of a failing bank, managing some large construction project with public and private participation, or heading a quasi-government organisation.
