Ahigh-ranking government official has likened selling a GST to Hong Kong to the challenge of winning the World Cup. Except that while victory in the soccer championship involves four years of preparation, the official says Financial Secretary Henry Tang Ying-yen and his four predecessors have invested two decades contemplating a goods and services tax.
The anonymous official's sense of cynicism, bordering on fatalism and self-defeatism towards the tax reform debate, seems to reflect the mood in the top echelons of Donald Tsang Yam-kuen's administration.
With all major political parties either opposing or holding grave reservations about the GST ball that was set rolling this week, only a tiny portion of people appear sympathetic to the proposed levy.
Twenty years since then-financial secretary Sir Piers Jacobs floated the idea of a GST, the first serious government drive led by Mr Tang to seek public support for the proposal is seemingly doomed, just as the nine-month-long consultation begins.
Political scientist Anthony Cheung Bing-leung, who sits on the policy-making Executive Council, said he was not surprised by the negative response in recent days. He said other countries that implemented a GST went through a painful debate, and Hong Kong was no exception.
'The question we really need to ask is why so many countries have still gone down the road of a GST even though it's an unpopular idea? There is no harm in raising the issue for public debate in view of our structural problems in the tax system,' Professor Cheung said.
