MR A.E. Gazeley (South China Morning Post, July 25) must be commended for showing the courage to speak in favour of the proposed Occupational Pension Scheme, when it would be so easy to try and bury the issue.
Almost three decades were lost, while we wasted our time debating the Central Provident Fund (CPF), until the Government decided not to go ahead with it.
In the meantime, tens of thousands of people in Hong Kong retired without proper retirement arrangements and had to subsist on meagre public assistance. Some of these people might well have welcomed a CPF, and might have been willing to contribute to it before retiring, but it just doesn't exist.
Business groups such as the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce are opposed to the pension proposals and have asked, instead, for the Government to top up its public assistance pay-outs.
Do these groups realise that this topping-up proposal smacks of a welfare state - the very thing they want to guard against? Labour groups have also opposed the new scheme, because there will be no direct government contribution, other than the start-up sum of HK$10 billion and the annual employer's contribution which the Government will pay in its role as ''employer'' in the Civil Service.
The labour lobby wants to see the Government either making a higher start-up contribution, or becoming a contributing party. Do labour leaders not realise that should we once again fail to reach an agreement, they will be denying members of their organisations, the right of some financial protection in their old age? The Chinese Government is likely to water down the scheme, claiming it will impose a substantial burden on the future Special Administrative Region (SAR) government.
