Paul Chan’s budget is old wine in a new bottle
- The financial secretary has offered Hong Kong neither long-term planning nor shorter-term solutions, and reserves expected to hit HK$1.16 trillion will be put away for another rainy day
There is the usual 60 per cent division into education (HK$124 billion [US$15.8 billion]), social welfare (HK$97.2 billion) and health care (HK$88.6 billion), the three big spending items.
I give you there is the much advertised 10.9 per cent increase in health spending – it’s recurrent, meaning year after year from now on, and not just one-off. But even with the increase, the big-three total spending still hovers around the 60 per cent level.
The rest, as usual, is taken up by security, food and the environment, infrastructure and government support (a major staff spending item), and economic and community services.
Of course, this year hasn’t been worse than last, when some public hospitals hit an occupancy rate of 130 per cent. What is different is that medical staff complaints have been politicised and tied to anti-immigrant sentiment and calls to scrap the 150 daily quota for mainland migrants – hence the quick and generous response from the government.