'Candies' not all we want

Ching Ming

The first Policy Address (PA) by the new Chief Executive will be delivered next week. Hong Kong residents cannot wait to hear what it has to offer.

A public opinion poll asked respondents what areas they wanted the PA to highlight. Results published last week show people are most deeply concerned about quality of life issues and the nub of those concerns goes to housing and welfare. More recently the media has been urging the government to introduce better policies designed to improve housing conditions and to alleviate the burdens on the underprivileged.

Having a home of one's own is no doubt one of the top priorities for everyone and so is social welfare for those on the bottom rang of the income ladder. Hong Kong must have a long-term plan to ensure the industrial upgrade and transition will make the "cake" bigger for all citizens to enjoy. The city has heard people of influence and ordinary people talking about these issues before. We all know that an industrial upgrade and transition are way overdue, but efforts aimed at planning for a better future have borne little fruit due to ill timing, poor circumstances or outright human meddling.

Many a neighboring economy, the mainland in particular, have been surging ahead in recent years, while in Hong Kong, one major project after another has teetered and then fallen victim to unwarranted disputation or ill-motivated judicial reviews.

More than a decade of precious time has been wasted and the social environment is poisoned, while tens of billions of dollars have gone down the drain. Of course alarm bells have been ringing almost non-stop warning that Hong Kong is losing its competitive edge over its neighbors.

Faced with such a challenging situation, a motivated and capable government should not lose heart but forge ahead to advance its industrial development strategy toward a long-term plan. Offering "candies for all" has been the highlight of previous PAs in the past 15 years, but the new SAR government already made it clear that its first one will not go big on handouts and we could not agree more, because "candies" cannot overwhelm our worries about the future.

Today we are genuinely looking forward to more exploration by the government of Hong Kong's future in order to show local residents a realistic and practicable long-term plan.

The author is a current affairs commentator. This is an excerpted translation of his article published in Hong Kong Commercial Daily on Jan 10.

(HK Edition 01/11/2013 page3)