My TakeLantau project not just a question of money
- The real issue is whether Hong Kong’s latest mega reclamation plan should go ahead in the first place, not whether we are willing to throw a trillion dollars at it
“Experts” for the government’s mega reclamation project for Lantau Island are out to paint its opponents as ill-informed and irrational, their objections technically unfounded and scientifically unsound.
Writing in this newspaper, Ken Chu, a national committee member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, doesn’t mince words.
“Unfortunately,” he wrote, “emotions and misinformed judgments have clouded the public debate over the proposed reclamation project to build 1,700 hectares of artificial islands”.
Is that so? I find the investigations carried out by the Citizens Task Force on Land Resources, a group of professionals, along with Designing Hong Kong, on the proposed reclamation first-rate. I urge people to check out their resources to decide if they are being irrational and ill-informed. Among their members are engineers, city planners and former government land surveyors.
Chu says we can afford it even if it costs a trillion dollars. But the real question is not whether we can afford it but why we should afford it.