Hong Kong budget: nothing bold about the dish served up by Paul Chan

Praise would be undeserved. If at all the financial secretary can be called audacious, it is for rolling out austerity measures amid the pandemic

Alice Wu

Published: 12:45pm, 28 Feb 2021

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If we were to judge the budget that Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po cooked up and served on Wednesday by the reactions of this city’s lawmakers, we would mistake it for something close to spectacular. The pro-establishment-dominated legislature largely fell in line in support of it.

Michael Tien Puk-sun is, so far and by far, the budget’s harshest critic and even he has been pretty tame in his critique, saying he doesn’t believe the HK$5,000 spending vouchers would kick-start the economy in any way, and that dividing it into five instalments is a “mistake” as the money should be pumped into the economy in one go. Businesses desperate for these spending vouchers may not survive the time needed for the government to figure out exactly how they will be rolled out.

And so it is evident that the voucher was adopted partly, if not entirely, for political appeasement, which is nothing to write home about. In this case, the Business and Professionals Alliance, which took credit for proposing the spending voucher idea, has bragging rights, although the plan is not groundbreaking either conceptually or in its impact.

Some have complimented Chan for being bold on increasing the stamp duty on stock transfers by 30 per cent from 0.1 per cent to 0.13 per cent. Three cents extra for every HK$100 of trading is not really going to be felt, so I’m surprised the government took this long to make this move. It’s the first increase since 1993. Look at the government rates you pay for your property; they surely haven’t stayed the same for the last decade, needless to say, three.

03:43

What Hong Kong’s 2021-22 budget means for residents of the city

If at all, Chan is “bold” to roll out any austerity measures when we are still in the middle of the pandemic. It is good news that our daily infection numbers have gone down, but we’re nowhere near being out of the woods yet.

The economic devastation the pandemic and the government’s counter-pandemic measures have wrought have not completely been seen and felt yet. The unemployment rate is still going to rise, as we have just come out of the Lunar New Year festivities. It will take a lot more than the first batch of vaccines for people to have enough confidence in the future to get the economy going again.

What is “bold”, then? Well, perhaps the patriots in government can take a leaf out of Beijing’s playbook on, say, handling Hong Kong affairs. Now, that’s bold.

Beijing is poised to push some very drastic electoral reforms for this city. For as long as Hong Kong has existed as a special administrative region, electoral reforms have been initiated by us, with Beijing consulted and involved in the process.

That process had been painfully slow at times, and all the hard work that had been put into the negotiating and compromising didn’t always deliver results, but what we have accomplished in our attempts at electoral reform did change the composition of our Legislative Council and the Election Committee that selects the chief executive, making them more representative and democratic. They were steps, however tiny, towards the ultimate goal of universal suffrage. But by the looks of what is on the table now, Beijing is going to do something huge, bold and shocking.

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Electoral system needs to change so patriots rule Hong Kong, Carrie Lam says

So it’s hard to say if our financial secretary is even in the ballpark of that measure of being “bold”. Chan did nothing in terms of swinging for the fences in his budget. Those left most vulnerable by the pandemic – the poor, the furloughed, women, working mothers – still have to pretty much fend for themselves.

In aiming to balance the budget, the government has lost sight of what is important and has turned a blind eye to those desperately in need of a lifeline. I would much rather we have a heated debate over improving the lives of people without compromising fiscal prudence than what we are now left with: compromising the lives of people for the sake of fiscal prudence.

Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA