My Take | Carrie Lam like a rabbit caught in the headlights
- Policy address that focuses on housing and increased subsidies, but offers no solutions to political crisis shows just how out of touch the government is
If you knew nothing about Hong Kong and just read Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s latest annual policy address, you might not have guessed the city has been hit by the worst political crisis in decades.
There is nothing wrong with trying to resolve the housing crisis, and providing more subsidies, from education and transport to sports, to underprivileged individuals and groups.
Raising the mortgage cap for first-time buyers, resuming private land and developing brownfield sites for more public housing are all viable initiatives to increase land supply. Of course, all these plans could have been launched in her first policy address, rather than her third.
Lam and her top officials are so far behind the curve it’s really getting to be hopeless.
It should have been a no-brainer for Lam to use the occasion of the annual address to offer ways for the city to move past its current crisis and to go forward with viable proposals – reaching out to the opposition and calming the anger of young rebels while searching for common ground.