ColumnWhy Hong Kong’s grandstanding lawmakers should shut up and approve HK$32bn Kai Tak Sports Park

Given previous and current white elephants like the bridge to nowhere and the ghost-town cruise terminal, politicians’ fear and doubt are understandable – but the latest mega-project should actually benefit Hong Kong’s citizens

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Fernando Cheung, Kwok Ka-ki, 'Long Hair' and Eddie Chu have been among Kai Tak's most vocal critics. Photos: SCMP

Published: 4:08pm, 19 May 2017Updated: 8:02pm, 20 May 2017

Recent meetings of the government’s Public Works Subcommittee (PWSC) have been fascinating viewing. There’s a sentence no-one has ever written.

In case you’ve had better things to do, the Home Affairs Bureau (HAB) wants the PWSC to recommend to the Finance Committee that it approve HK$31.898 billion to start construction on the Kai Tak Sports Park. We are eight hours in to the festival of bloviating, with more scheduled for Saturday.

The Sports Park, first proposed in the Tang Dynasty (okay, it was ‘only’ 20 years ago), will be a much-needed boon to sports and music fans in the city, as well as providing much-needed community facilities and public space, and finally making some attractive use of our amazing harbour.

It is also, obviously, expensive and requires a new-in-Hong-Kong approach to tendering and implementation – lawmakers, mainly pan-democrats, have seemed determined to stymie it.

“You’re throwing Hong Kong people’s money into the sea,” blasted ‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung, before ranting away like me after a pint or two. He called the HAB’s consultants “insultants” and somehow even managed to blame them for the global financial crisis.

The main sticking points are the procurement model, a so-called ‘Design-Build-Operate’ (DBO) scheme and its ‘bid incentive’ proposal.