Opinion | Hong Kong’s small-house policy is evidence of a leadership stuck in the past

Name: Hong Kong’s small-house policy: indigenous rights or unfair advantage?
Uploaded: 2021-01-24T06:30:12.000Z
Duration: 1 min 35 s
Description: Hong Kong’s small-house policy: indigenous rights or unfair advantage?

A series of governments have chosen to put off dealing with a policy that is exacerbating Hong Kong’s housing crisis, preferring to kick the can down the road

Rather than maintain an archaic policy and waste the city’s fiscal reserves on land reclamation, officials should eliminate existing villages and use that money for compensation

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Village houses in Yuen Long on October 18, 2020. Hong Kong has transformed into a modern city and urbanisation has spread into the New Territories. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Mike Rowse

Published: 2:30pm, 24 Jan 2021Updated: 2:30pm, 24 Jan 2021

Whenever the subject of the small-house policy comes up, two English expressions – “passing the buck” and “kicking the can down the road” – spring to mind.

The first has an almost identical Cantonese equivalent. It means passing on responsibility for an action or decision to someone else. The Cantonese for the second translates loosely as “talking without reaching any decision or taking action”. To my mind, that is too passive. Kicking an object down the road implies applying a measure of force.

Interestingly, there can be a degree of overlap. If you kick the can far enough, you have in effect passed the buck to the next generation. This is pretty much where we are now with regards to the small-house policy.

What brought the subject back to life was a decision this month by the Court of Appeal to reverse a verdict by a lower court. Two citizens had sought a judicial review of the policy, which provides that upon turning 18, a male indigenous villager is entitled to build a small house on private land he owns within the village environs or, in certain circumstances, on government land nearby. Indigenous means descended through the male line to a resident of a pre-1898 recognised village.

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Hong Kong’s small-house policy: indigenous rights or unfair advantage?

The gist of their claim was that the policy must be unconstitutional because it discriminated between different categories of Hongkongers and by gender. Both are against the law. The lower court ruled in their favour in April 2019. The effect of the Court of Appeal’s decision is to restore the previously applied interpretation of the small-house policy in all its absurd glory.

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