Some years ago when the climate of public opinion was very different, I wrote to the government suggesting that, instead of putting the Tamar site up for sale and allowing commercial development of uncertain distinction across its empty spaces, it should be used for new buildings to house the legislative and executive Councils, and the chief executive and the ancillary offices.
I saw this as making a statement about the special administrative region and its government, on a waterfront site visible from the harbour and Kowloon. These would be prestigious buildings of government and give the SAR a clear and visible identity. I was thinking of those other cities - Budapest, London and so on - and the fine locations of their principal offices.
I wrote this too at a time when the pressure was on to extend the Legco either over or under Chater Garden. These proposals excited criticism and opposition. Quite rightly so. I joined the protest because I had been the one who had dealt with the removal of the cricket ground and the establishment of a public garden. I felt it would be a public betrayal if all that effort to open the cricket ground to the public were forgotten in the name of expediency and pressure from Legco.
Since then, other towers now dominate the waterfront and I can see the need to revise my early suggestion. But there may be something to a scaled-down version - the councils, the chief executive and the chief and financial secretaries together in buildings of distinction in a park on Tamar.
They would be set back from the waterfront and beyond their gardens, hopefully, the waterfront park will have taken shape. Indeed, why not take a look at the parliament buildings in Canberra, which are hidden in grassy slopes?
There is no need to take up the whole area with a relocation of all the Lower Albert Road offices; given advancements in communications they can be moved elsewhere on either side of the harbour.
Certainly it would be most undesirable to build another monster office tower shutting out the harbour from the buildings behind and even more of the view of the Peak from the harbour.