Budgets do little for business or the poor
Budgets are a bit like department store winter sales; they generate a modicum of excitement and proffer some bargains that you don’t quite believe in but seem to be attractive; then you take the goods home and wonder why you bought them in the first place.
A whole week has elapsed since John Tsang Chun-wah delivered his budget and the good folks who give him the money he was so generous as to dish out are left wondering whether this was another case of the winter sales all over again.
Tsang reminds me of those divorced dads who periodically remember that they have children
As ever, his budget was jammed full of what are misleadingly called “giveaways” or maybe this is not so misleading because they are little more than giveaways in the sense that they reveal nothing approaching a strategy, have only very short-term affect and mainly contain rewards for those fortunate not to be among the one in six Hong Kong people living below the poverty line.
Tsang reminds me of those divorced dads who periodically remember that they have children and visit them bearing gifts providing instant gratification while generally forgetting to support the hardworking mothers who do the real work of bringing them up. Of course the kids love seeing daddy bearing down on them with ice creams but something more substantial would be better.
Unlike daddy’s gifts, Tsang’s giveaways are paid for by the people receiving the “gifts”, so it’s not quite the same. Yet this business of withholding a bit of tax, deferring a clutch of charges and so on requires serious sums of money that would otherwise be hoarded away or spent – but on what exactly?
Generally speaking this government is deeply in love with big projects, such as the bridge to nowhere that will stretch across Macau to Zuhai, which is indeed somewhere but as matters stand only 45,000 vehicles are licensed to drive across the border, divide that number by the HK$130 billion that’s being spent on the highway and the per capita cost gets to be pretty daunting. Next up will be a massive splurge on building a new airport runway, plus the West Kowloon Cultural District and so on.
There is nothing wrong with building lots of infrastructure but its strange how money always seems to be available for everything but caring for those at the bottom of the pile. I am delighted that Hong Kong is going to have more cultural facilities but would be even more delighted if my local public health clinic was not so down at heel and constantly crammed with people awaiting attention.
Meanwhile us suckers in the business sector are regaled with government plans to come to our aid with a new hi-tech project here, cash for the fashion industry there, and even another dollop of cash for the film industry. The problem is that the government thinks that business works like the civil service where graphs are produced to show that because more money is spent on X and more civil servants are employed doing Y then marvellous things are happening. And don’t even get me started about how government departments throw money around towards the end of the financial year, fearing that any unspent cash will be responsible for reducing future budgets.
The truth about what the budget calls “developing our economy” and “augmenting competitiveness” is that most of this cash is money down the drain. The simple criteria by which businesses are judged: do they make money and have they produced a financially viable product or service, simply does not apply in budget-land where new schemes with fancy names are said to be a “success” simply because they exist. Two words suffice to sum up how this works: cruise terminal.
Meanwhile over in Gulag Food Sector, where I live, we are told that “relevant departments” are to facilitate more alfresco dining and food trucks might be added to the great mix which is Hong Kong’s “food scene”. As a veteran of alfresco dining battles I can say with confidence that our sector’s regulators will strain ever muscle to ensure that this remains a dream. As for food trucks, gimme a break – why not do something for honest street food vendors who spend their lives being hounded by the authorities?
Adding insult to injury are all the predictions made in the budget, usually containing a dire warning from Tsang of what will happen if we don’t listen to him. As the government cannot even get annual estimates right who can believe any of this longer-term-forecasting stuff?
Yet Tsang was right to say that “the Hong Kong we see today is the result of the exertion of past generations who brought forth good fruit for us to try and thrive on”. This prosperity sure as hell had little to do with budgets.
Stephen Vines runs companies in the food sector and moonlights as a journalist and broadcaster
