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A national security sentence is longer than you think

April 25, 2024 by timhamlett

It is a commonplace political observation that carelessly passed legislation often has unintended – and maybe ridiculous – effects. Our newly minted local legislators seem to have neglected this important warning.

We are all, these days, eager to secure national security. Attempts to achieve this by jailing those convicted of national security offences for long periods have reached a curious position.

Readers will recall that under the national security law bestowed on us by Beijing, national security offences come, like Pacific Coffee, in three sizes: small, medium and large. Those convicted must be imprisoned (there is no room for the usual alternatives; they do not mess around in Beijing) for terms ranging up to five years, from five to ten years or from ten to 15 respectively.

It has already become clear that five is going to be a hot number. In the present climate nobody, or at least nobody in the Department of Justice, is going to risk classifying a nat sec offence as anything which could be mistaken for “trivial”. So the popular classification among prosecutors is the medium one.

When the case finds its way to the sentencing judge, however, some comparison is inevitable with sentences commonly imposed in less political cases, and a five-year stretch is usually reserved for cases involving the violent separation of a victim from his health or property, or large quantities of drugs.

So five years is likely to seem enough for nat sec cases, most of which involve the holding and expression of inconvenient opinions. Note, though, one curiosity which will become relevant later: the Court of Appeal has decided that the five years is not a guideline, like the conventional suggestions on sentencing which it dispenses. Five years is a solid minimum, so the usual discount for pleading guilty is not available.

Traditionally, if you pleaded guilty, you got a third knocked off what would otherwise have been the sentence. Recently local judges have followed an odious innovation from the UK and replaced the one third discount with a sliding scale. You get one third off if you plead guilty at the earliest opportunity. After that the scale of the discount declines, reaching 20 percent at the trial kick-off and ten percent later.

The objection to this is that it encourages prisoners to admit offences before taking legal advice, which in complicated cases may mean they admit a charge to which they have a good defence. Never mind.

Now we come to the local contribution to the punishment regime, which is that nat sec prisoners will not be eligible for any of the usual early release schemes, unless the Commissioner for Correctional Services is satisfied that they will not infringe again.

Given the difficulty of proving a negative and the degree of nat sec paranoia expected of senior officials these days this looks like a plausible way of ensuring that nat sec offenders are going to be enjoying the correctional M and Ms for a long time. No doubt that is its intention.

And this gives rise to a curious situation. Let us take two prisoners, who were arrested on the same day and kept in custody thereafter. One of them is an Ordinary Decent Criminal (a term coined in Belfast for miscreants motivated by greed rather than politics) and the other is a nat sec offender.

The ODC has committed armed robbery. The judge takes as his starting point in sentencing the guideline supplied by the Court of Appeal for this offence (provided no firearm is used) which is five years. The ODC has pleaded guilty at the first opportunity so he gets the full one third discount and is sentenced to three years and four months in jail. The nat sec offender, whether he has pleaded guilty or not, gets the grande five-year minimum.

Let us suppose they share a cell. You may think that the ODC, lucky chap, will be leaving a year and a half or so before his neighbour, but that is not so. He can apply for release under supervision after serving half of his sentence, which would be just 20 months, or a little over a year and a half. If he does not fancy being supervised by the Correctional Services he can wait a bit longer and, if he behaves himself, get the discount for good conduct which is one third of your sentence. This would get him out after just over two years, on the streets and unsupervised.

At this point his cellmate still has virtually three years to serve. This is likely to strike both of them as rather unfair.

You can look at it another way. What would the sentence have to be if a judge wished to ensure that an ODC would actually, like our nat sec offender, be off the streets for five years, even if he qualified for the guilty plea discount and early release. The answer is 15 years.

This weird situation is a predictable result of the system of sentencing and imprisonment which has been around a long time. You might hope that legislators who were proposing to tinker with it would have first studied it in sufficient detail to avoid constructing obvious new anomalies. You would hope in vain, apparently.

The purpose of the guilty plea discount is to encourage early pleas, which save the time and expense of a contested trial. It appears that if you are accused of a nat sec offence you might as well try your luck in court. You won’t get the discount anyway. At least it will give you a few chances to wave at your mother.

Similarly the purpose of releasing prisoners early if they behave themselves is to encourage conformity to prison rules and sincere participation in rehabilitative activities. If these are desirable objectives you might think they would be equally desirable for all prisoners.

National security is an important objective of the law and order industry. So is fairness.

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Civil service numbers suggest our happiness may have been exaggerated

April 16, 2024 by timhamlett

The finer points of civil servant staffing are not usually a hot news topic. But the latest grim update from the Civil Service Bureau was eagerly covered by both English-language newspapers. This may have been an effort to avoid the alternative story offered the same day about civil service dismissals.

But it was not surprising that different reporters made different choices. The “source” was the Civil Service Bureau’s written replies to questions from legislators in response to the budget speech. These were all published on the same day, involved a great deal of repetition and ran to no less than 362 pages.

Having browsed in this heap of information I think I would have gone for the dismissals as being more interesting. The leading reasons for dismissal from the civil service in the last five years were:

  • Failure to get a COVID vaccination (21 cases)
  • Absence/lateness (20)
  • Shoplifting/theft (18)
  • Sex-related offences (14)

Offences against public order and other protest-related peccadilloes only amounted to six. My personal favourite category was “Others (e.g. illegal gambling, perverting the course of justice, computer-related offences, murder etc)”. It is nice to know that murder is grounds for dismissal, though other punishments are probably more salient to the criminal concerned.

However, to the grim news. This was that, as the Standard put it, “The bureau said on Friday that the number of departures in the civil service increased from over 8,500 people in the year 2018-2019 to over 10,100 people in the year 2022-2023. Among them, nearly 1,000 people were under 30, and almost 3,000 had less than ten years of service.”

This might lead the careless reader to think that civil servants were heading for the nearest exit in droves. Hong Kong has about 160,000 civil servants and the normal length of service for a graduate entrant would be something over 30 years. So you would in normal circumstances expect about 5,000 people a year to leave simply because they have reached the retirement age.

And unless I have completely misunderstood the Civil Service bureau’s tables, that is roughly what happens. More than half of the 10,000 “departures” were because of “retirement” (5,918 out of 10,126 in 2022-3). The category which we should be worrying about is “resignation”, which is much lower but rising (1,863 in 2020-21, 3,863 in 2022-23).

And the worrying thing about this is that if you look at the departures broken down by age groups the figures for 20-50 total 3,479, nearly half of whom are in the 30-40 bracket. There must be at least a suspicion that many of these comparatively young professionals are not just leaving the civil service, but Hong Kong as well.

This in turn suggests that official estimates of the level of happiness produced by recent changes have been somewhat exaggerated.

This is rather born out by the figures for individual departments. The two which are particularly beset by a large number of unfilled vacancies are RTHK and the Police Force.

RTHK had the highest vacancy rate of any government department, at 24 per cent. No wonder they have robots reading the weather bulletin. Indeed, looking at their news output there is clearly a wider role for Artificial Intelligence. Even a dumb computer can rewrite government press releases, which seem to be the favoured news source these days.

The highest absolute number of vacancies is in the police force. The force had 1,180 resignations last year which, looking on the bright side, was lower than the record high of 1,802 recorded in 2019-20.

It appears, unsurprisingly, that life in the force since 2019 has changed, and the arrival of national security and peaceful streets has produced further different changes, leaving quite a lot of police folk feeling that the new lifestyle is not what they signed up for.

In particular the force is, alas, no longer held in the high levels of public esteem to which it believed itself to be accustomed and entitled. It has a large and efficient public relations organisation. But expecting adroit reputation management to obliterate painful real-world memories involving tear gas and pepper spray is to ask more than public relations can deliver.

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On the ethics of the Octopus button

April 8, 2024 by timhamlett

An interesting ethical dilemma cropped up on my local green minibus the other day. Of course this is unusual; discussions of moral philosophy are not common on the 69K, but there it was.

To understand the issue at stake we must briefly explain that there are three ways in which your Octopus card in the special elderly version, now known as Joyyou, works on public transport. On the MTR your entry and exit are recorded. The machinery knocks $2 off your Octopus and bills the government for the rest of what the journey would have cost.

On big buses the situation is different. Your Octopus is read when you get on, but not when you get off. So the charge assumes that you travel to the end of the line. Of course the fare drops as the end of the line gets closer, but if you get off early that is the government’s tough luck. You still pay $2 but the government is charged for the whole trip, including the part you weren’t on the bus for.

This wrinkle in the system is the source of some anguish among transport officials, because they suspect that some people are avoiding queues or ensuring a seat by getting on unpopular long route buses for short trips.

Minibuses feature a system of their own. There is a button on the Octopus reader. If you press it the default setting – the fare to the end of the line – is replaced. The machine cycles through the possible fares, and if you plan to get off early you can choose the appropriate one.

We Joyyous elderly folk do not have to worry about this, which is perhaps just as well. Our other local green minibus route, the 811, is notorious for the grumpiness of its drivers. This is because it has a complex range of fares, so the drivers are constantly asked which one is applicable by baffled passengers.

Well, on my rare minibus excursions I simply dab the Octopus, which costs me $2. But this, according to our local street philosophers, may be wrong. If I am traveling to the end of the line the government is charged the rest of the fare, which means currently about five bucks. If I am getting off earlier I can push the fare change button and the government will accordingly cough up only the lower fare, minus my $2.

The person who raised this issue suggested that those of us who were not adjusting the government’s contribution according to the length of our trips (I must admit that in my case it had not crossed my mind that this was possible, but still …) were increasing the government’s already considerable financial problems and were accordingly guilty of antisocial behaviour.

This view did not go unchallenged. Some passengers thought that as the government’s money was our money there was no reason why we should not decide to use some of it to support our local minibus company, an important and unsubsidised public service.

Pessimists noted that the passenger getting a $2 trip had nothing to gain by pushing the button, and the driver had nothing to gain by encouraging it. So it was not very realistic to expect people to take the trouble. Underlying these arguments, perhaps, is the changing relationship between Hong Kong people and their government in recent years.

This point seems lost on local lawmakers, some of whom have been dangerously keen to abolish or curtail the whole $2 ride scheme. Be careful, gentlemen. It is the public’s general suspicion that some legislators are there to help the people, and some to help themselves. Cutting benefits to which you are not entitled could put you in the second category.

Admittedly the scheme is expensive. It is expected to cost a total of about $6 billion this year. The introduction of a senile card with a picture of the holder is expected to curtail fraud considerably.

But everyone knows why the costs have gone through the roof: it was Carrie Lam’s foolish decision to lower the age of eligibility to 60. Most people aged 60 are still working, officially or unofficially. Someone who is still commuting five days a week could easily make 20 subsidised trips a week, before he starts on leisure or shopping trips. After the change was made the number of subsidised trips a day almost doubled, from 480,000 a day in March 2022 to 890,000 in March last year.

But withdrawing or curtailing benefits of this kind has problems of its own. It is a commonplace of behavioural economics that losses produce more pain than the pleasure produced by gains of similar size. This means that if you give the public something, and then take it away, we do not all return to where we started. We are all pissed off.

So we have here an interesting dilemma for the Financial Secretary. Still, looking on the bright side, Hong Kong is well placed to weather the coming increase in the proportion of elderly people in the population. This is because, compared with many other advanced societies, it is extremely sparing in providing pensions.

The only non-mean-tested benefit is the fruit money, which is paltry. The other benefits, which are less paltry, are only for those who can prove their poverty. So must of us dinosaurs do not get much for our years of dutiful taxpaying. Cheap rides are welcome. If the government wants to reduce the costs of the scheme without offending beneficiaries in the 60-65 age range, it might consider switching the concession off during rush hours.

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Surely the national security loopholes were not as big as this?

April 1, 2024 by timhamlett

It seems to be a rule nowadays that no criticism from overseas of our local national security arrangements can be allowed to pass unchallenged, or indeed uncondemned. This is fair enough, although no doubt it would be fairer if local criticism were still allowed.

No doubt there are many matters in this area on which intelligent people might politely disagree. We are all entitled to our opinions. But, as a great editor of the Guardian once put it, comments are free but facts are sacred. I do not wish to express any opinion on the merits of recent legislation. Its defenders, though, should be discouraged from rewriting history.

This brings us to Mr Ambrose Lam San-keung, who recently penned a piece for the China Daily defending the latest legal changes against criticism from the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute. The institute, said Mr Lam, has made “unsubstantiated claims” about the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance.

Mr Lam then canters through the usual whataboutisms – some Western countries provide no protection for whistleblowers, some limit the right to choose counsel, and so on. And then we come to this:

“No country would allow any seditious speech or publication that incites mutiny, disaffection, hatred, violent acts, or disobeying laws. No country would allow any association to provide training in using offensive weapons or military exercises without the government’s permission. No country would accept any assembly that aimed at sabotaging public infrastructure.

Surprisingly, before the enactment of the Ordinance, Hong Kong enjoyed “freedom” of incitement, sedition, unlawful military training, and sabotage of public infrastructure. As a result, riots broke out in 2014, 2016 and 2019.”

China Daily, April 1

I take this to mean that, in Mr Lam’s view, Hong Kong had no laws against incitement, sedition, unlawful military training or sabotage of public infrastructure, and this absence caused the riots in 2014 (sic), 2016 and 2019. This is an “unsubstantiated claim”.

Leaving aside the questionable matter of cause and effect – I do not recall any rioter explaining his malfeasance as a protest against the absence of relevant laws – the matter of large legal absences is easily dealt with:

  • Incitement and sedition were first criminalised by the Seditious Publications Ordinance of 1913. The ban was extended to acts by the Sedition Ordinance of 1938 and the whole matter was wrapped up in the Crimes Ordinance in 1971, at which point inspiring disaffection or mutiny in the disciplined forces was added. We may note in passing that the sedition offence was abolished in the UK in 2009 as archaic, infringing valuable freedoms and “used by other countries as justification for the retention of similar laws which have been actively used to suppress political dissent and restrict press freedom.” Present company excepted, of course.
  • Sabotage of public infrastructure was covered by the law on criminal damage, which resides in the Crimes Ordinance Section 60. It includes: “A person who without lawful excuse destroys or damages any property belonging to another intending to destroy or damage it or being reckless as to whether it would be destroyed or damaged is liable to imprisonment for 10 years. If a person destroys or damages any property … intending to endanger the life of another or being reckless as to whether the life of another would be thereby endangered is also guilty of this offence and is liable to imprisonment for life.”
  • The law on unlawful military training is also in the Crimes Ordinance, at Section 18, under which it is an offence if a person “trains or drills any other person in the use of arms or the practice of military exercises or evolutions” without the permission of the Governor or the Commissioner of Police.”

Mr Lam is an educated member of a learned profession so we must accept that when he writes rubbish he really believes what he says, and is not merely spouting propaganda “being reckless as to whether” it is true or not.

Disturbingly, he is also a member of the Legislative Council. His latest writings give rise to some doubt as to whether all members of that body had even a superficial knowledge of the existing law when they agreed to substantial amendments of it.

More disturbingly still, Mr Lam sits in the council on behalf of the legal functional constituency. He is in fact a lawyer. You might think that other members would expect learned and accurate advice from him about upcoming and existing legislation, and that opinions on these matters which fall from his lips would be particularly influential for non-legal members.

In his defence, I suppose, Mr Lam might blame the copy editor who worked on his offering, which will cut no ice with me because I used to be one. Or he could say that he did not mean what he appeared to mean and I have perversely insisted on using a literal meaning which was not what he intended.

Legislators – and lawyers – should be careful in their choice of words.

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New National Security law is open to abuse; lawmakers should fix it

March 11, 2024 by timhamlett

The thing that worries me about the proposed local national security legislation is that it seems to have been drafted with scant consideration of the likely consequences in practice. After all our judges and prosecutors have already had national security legislation to play with for three years, and some things have become obvious.

For example, the arrangement for bail in national security cases is in theory that the magistrate must be satisfied that the defendant is not going to commit another national security offence if released pending trial.

As the organised opposition, or even the organised criticism, has been trampled into the dust and the revised constitution no longer offers a role for dissident politicians you would think this was a fairly easy condition to satisfy. In practice the prosecution invariably opposes bail and in the vast majority of cases bail is refused.

Similarly under the existing national security law the Secretary for Justice may – but does not have to – ask for a juryless trial before three national security judges. On every occasion so far when a jury trial might have been appropriate the prosecution has in fact opted for a juryless trial. It is difficult to believe that this is entirely unconnected with the pleasures of having three judges of your own choice deciding on the success of your prosecution. Accordingly it seems likely that this is now a routine practice and there will never be a national security trial before a jury.

Turning to the new proposed “Article 23” version we can see number of areas where something similar may be expected to happen.

Consider for example the proposed exemption from the rule that a suspect in custody must be charged or released within two days. This will be replaced by an arrangement under which a senior police person can ask for 14 days of uncharged custody to allow inquiries to proceed, with the possibility of further renewals for seven days at a time.

In other jurisdictions this is a rarely used option which comes up in cases where the prosecution would have to rely on, and disclose in open court, evidence obtained clandestinely or from an overseas source. It was introduced in a panic after a raft of terrorism cases, and it was and is clearly understood that it would be used seldom, in cases where there was a real concern about what the arrested person might get up to if released.

No such condition is incorporated in the proposed law here. In the light of practice so far you have to be very optimistic to dismiss the possibility that arrested suspects will be subjected to an ordeal practically undistinguishable from indefinite detention without trial or charge. The police will always find it convenient to have the suspect to themselves for two weeks. They will also find it easy.

The limit on detention is of course a limit on police powers, and it is intentionally so. It is an important protection for suspects who, in the end, may not be charged at all, and if charged may in the end be acquitted. We can all think of cases in which it would be necessary and desirable that a suspect should be detained for more than the stipulated couple of days without charge. In practice, though, that is likely to become a rule, rather than an exception.

I have similar misgivings about the proposed restrictions on suspects’ right to choose their own lawyers. Once again we can all think of scenarios in which this might be a useful power, and might be used to prevent a serious breach of public order. Once again we have to wonder whether it will be used as rarely as these unusual scenarios imply.

Or there is the curious proposed arrangement under which national security prisoners would not be eligible for early release on the same terms as other prisoners. This is curious because we must supposed that the existing arrangements for early release include an assessment of the inmate’s chances of reoffending if returned to the outside world.

Asking the Commissioner for Correctional Services to certify in addition that the prisoner will not reoffend against the national security legislation places a civil servant with no relevant expertise in a hot seat, from which the most comfortable exit will be to refuse to release the person concerned. Which is perhaps the intention.

Then there is the question of “absconders”. An absconder, properly understood, is someone who has been charged with an offence and flees the city to avoid trial. On the other hand Hong Kong people have the right to emigrate if they wish to do so and there is nothing in law or morality to suggest that they have a duty to return to Hong Kong if the authorities later decide to charge them with an offence.

As before we can all think of rare occasions when a more flexible interpretation of this would be useful, and there would be some legitimate purpose in the proposed laws against people having anything to do with an “absconder”. We can also see scenarios in which a sensitive government, stung by criticism in an overseas country from a Hong Kong exile, would charge him with an offence, issue an arrest warrant and classify him as an “absconder” on the basis of actions or words which were perfectly legal in the place where the actor or speaker did or spoke them.

Of course defenders of the proposed legislation will say that we should trust officials to do the right thing and not abuse powers which are clearly open to abuse. But our government has form in this area.

The rule of law requires that the powers conferred on officials should be used in good faith for the purposes for which they were intended, as Lord Bingham put it in an important book on the subject. But this is not what we see in Hong Kong. Here we see opposition coffee shops submerged in an avalanche of sanitary inspections, inconvenient bookshops driven out of business by a similar sort of bureaucratic persecution, and huge tax bills landing mysteriously in the letterboxes of organisations that have had the temerity to ignore calls for their dissolution in the government’s poodle press.

Legislators should approach proposed legislation on the basis that if a power can be abused it will be abused, and adjust it accordingly. Critics condemn the new patriotic legislature as a puppet parliament, a congress of complacency full of people who have never seen a government proposal they didn’t like. The new national security bill is a chance for legislators to prove the critics wrong. Or not.

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Diet or die! Do we really need a World Obesity Day?

March 7, 2024 by timhamlett

It was, as I am sure you noticed, World Obesity Day last Monday. World Days are surprisingly common. The United Nations has about 200 of them, starting with World Braille Day on January 4 and finishing the year with the International Day of Epidemic Preparedness on December 27.

But World Obesity Day is not one of the UN ones, it is an unofficial, or less official, offering from the World Obesity Federation. No, I had never heard of it either.

In fact it is a bit of a mystery why World Obesity Day qualified for a decent third of a page feature in the Standard from the agile pen of Adelyn Lau. There was no recognition in the paper of World Wildlife Day, which was the day before. Well all right they don’t print on a Sunday, but March 1 passed with no mention of the fact that it was in fact two Days: World Seagrass Day and Zero Discrimination Day.

Similarly, Tuesday’s International Day for Disarmament and Non-proliferation Awareness passed unremarked, as far as I could see. Perhaps tomorrow will attract some coverage; it’s International Women’s Day.

Personally I found the idea of a World Obesity Day somewhat confusing. Presumably on World Seagrass Day one consumes, or cultivates seagrass. According to the government website there are some seagrass beds in Hong Kong “but they are generally small and sporadic”.

And I suppose on World Press Freedom day one pursues or cultivates press freedom, which is also, in Hong Kong, a bit small and sporadic these days.

In the light of these thoughts it is tempting to suppose that the appropriate way for a conscientious citizen to mark World Obesity Day would be to go out for a double cheeseburger with extra fries. But of course this is wrong. Some World Days are about things you should avoid, like Violent Extremism as and when Conducive to Terrorism (February 12) or Illegal, Unregulated or Unreported Fishing (June 5).

Anyway, to return to obesity, I did notice a certain lack of balance in Ms Lau’s otherwise fluent feature. Those interviewed all turned out to be officials, or the founder, of the Hong Kong branch of the World Obesity Federation. A picture showed all these sources together, looking admirably trim. Unsurprisingly they all had different way of saying the same thing: that obesity should be avoided at all costs.

It is no doubt true that obesity has been “associated” with up to 224 diseases, and the overweight are likely to be over also in measurements of blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar. Clearly people who are very overweight have a problem.

And yet… Is it really true, as the Department of Health data says, that 55 per cent of the population of Hong Kong are either overweight or obese? That is more than half. I am sure I am not the only person who does not, in ordinary everyday encounters with Hongkongers, find that more than half of the people I meet are overweight or, as we used to say before euphemisms became compulsory, fat.

One also wonders, with all due respect to the pure motives of the local obesity fan club, whether stirring up anxiety about people’s weight is really such a good idea. It risks tossing many people with a minor, or no, problem into the slavering maw of a large and greedy industry, which makes its money out of people’s desire to lose weight.

As Stuart Richie points out (in “Science Fictions”) it is really hard to draw firm conclusions from research into the effects of diets, and vested interests are happy to push dodgy conclusions out to unsuspecting consumers.

It seems also that medical opinion is increasingly sceptical about the value of badgering people to lose weight. Dr Joshua Wolrich (in “Food isn’t Medicine”) argues that people’s ‘natural weight’ varies enormously and simple formulae used to measure whether you are overweight are not actually very helpful.

People who really eat more than they need, he suggests, are responding to personal or medical problems; the over-eating is a symptom and the cure is to solve the underlying problem.

Meanwhile it is important to foster in everyone a ‘healthy attitude to food’. Otherwise, for every middle-aged man saved from heart disease by dedicated dieting there will be an adolescent, probably but not invariably female, tipped into eating disorders by over-anxiety about the effect of food on her health and appearance.

Well no doubt there are no easy answers to these questions. In my experience losing weight is hard, but not impossible. One does not get much help from the environment, which constantly offers delicious but fattening temptations. It is perhaps time for the United Nations to consider critically the existence of its International Day of Potato (May 30).

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On the Wais and wherefores of tourism

February 28, 2024 by timhamlett

The MTR has opened a new shopping mall in Tai Wai, naturally next to the station, called the Wai. This has now displaced Festival Walk as my destination for the weekly Big Shopping Spasm. Oddly, the attraction is not what is there, but what is not there.

In many ways the Wai is much like other malls. It was designed in the modern shopping mall style, which seems intended to maximise the chances of visitors getting lost. All the floors are different shapes; there are few straight lines; escalators are distributed randomly.

The entrance to the car park is also discouraging. You drive four stories down a long and winding spiral road featuring narrow spaces and tight turns. Within days of the mall opening the walls of this road were generously decorated with scrape marks and paint deposits by errant drivers.

The supermarket is, even by Hong Kong standards, a weird shape. Few of our supermarkets follow the boring Western style of floor plan, a large rectangle. The Wai’s supermarket (a Marketplace, Wellcome’s version of Taste; usual local stuff but cosmopolitan decadence also catered for with sushi, choice of cheeses, large wine department etc) is shaped like a deformed dumbell.

What is not there? The tourist traps. There are no international vendors of make-up, perfume, or brand-name handbags, no offerings of watches with real clockwork for the price of a small car, no gold shops. In at least six visits I have only seen one wheeled suitcase.

I have no prejudice, racial or otherwise, against mainlanders. But tourism is an industry which brings benefits to some people and costs to others, a point which seems lost on our government. There is such a thing as enough. Places with Pinterest-worthy attractions have discovered this and acted accordingly. Venice, for example, restricts cruise liners. Barcelona is discouraging Airbnb. Yosemite rations access.

I do not suggest anything like that for Hong Kong. But official dreamers need to recognise that outside the developer hegemony, which has a vested interest in astronomical shop rents, most local people regard visitors to the city like visitors to their home: welcome in limited quantities and at limited times… as long as they behave themselves.

Tourists who congregate at particular spots, as they tend to do, can quickly become an unwelcome part of the scenery. Hong Kong U students have been complaining of tourists gate-crashing their lecturers and photographing the proceedings. I know where this is going. Oxford and Cambridge colleges routinely refuse to admit visitors at all.

Photogenic spots generally may lose their allure if they become a perpetual crowd scene.

This may be a problem which is on the way to solving itself. My early journalism career was spent mostly in fading resorts on the coast of North Lancashire. Morecambe was at the time the butt of cruel jokes. Sample: if you die in Morecambe they prop you up in a bus shelter to make the place look more busy. Blackpool was part-way down the slope which has left it, according to current reports, in many ways the most deprived town in England.

One of the symptoms of decay was a chorus of complaints from local hosts of various kinds that people were no longer coming from a long way away, and as a result visitors did not stay overnight. Most visitors were from nearby towns; they ate their fish and chips, had a few beers and went home the same day.

Another symptom was the increasingly frantic efforts of the local authorities concerned to find some interesting new attraction which would renew the flow of overnight visitors. These rarely seemed to make much difference. Is any of this beginning to sound familiar?

Of course tourist towns can go up as well as down. Historians of the European spa enthusiasm noted the way in which particular spots would suddenly become top destinations after a visit from the Tsar, or the invention of a new bogus water cure. Tourism is like the restaurant business: you are at the mercy of fickle consumers, wafted by the winds of fashion. However good the food, next year’s hot item may steal your customers.

So the search for the secret sauce goes on. Unfortunately it is difficult to be confident that a magical new ingredient will come from an establishment run by mainland officials and recycled policemen. Holiday destinations, like Homeric heroes, are judged by what they are, not by what they do. Hong Kong used to be regarded as a fun place. Now it is not. A shortage of firework displays is not the problem.

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Time for the Director of Audit to stick to his knitting?

February 19, 2024 by timhamlett

Regular readers will recall that a couple of months ago I complained that the Director of Audit had devoted the resources of his department to some nit-picking criticisms of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

I thought there was a danger that this might look like a contribution to the general barrage of abuse from government-friendly quarters which had led to the departure of the university’s vice chancellor.

However it appears from the director’s annual report that this is not what is going on at all. What is going on is a violation not of the separation of powers but of an even older principle: the division of labour.

The Director of Audit, Nelson Lam Chi-yuen, is not a career civil servant. Before he was appointed to his present post by Carrie Lam in 2022 he was an accountant, his political experience limited to membership of the usual sort of consultative bodies and six months on the Legislative Council.

This may explain why he apparently supposes that senior civil servants are free to devote themselves to whatever work they think might be important and interesting, regardless of whether this is their appointed function, or whether it may in fact be someone else’s.

Mr Lam devoted a quarter of his annual report to his efforts to improve the protection of national security, including his farcical foray into the Chinese University. He is reported as complaining, in a newspaper interview, that “government departments and other public organisations either failed to prioritise the national security law or did not fully comply with the government’s requirements.”

“These departments and organisations are at risk of violating the law,” he said.

It seems I am not the only scribe who thought that Mr Lam’s self-appointment as a sort of national security Witchfinder General was straying a bit off-piste, as it were. Why, he was asked at the inevitable press conference, was his department no longer keeping its traditional focus on an audited body’s proper and effective use of money?

His reply deserved quoting in full: “Efficiency and effectiveness refers to whether the audited body abided by the law or not. If they have failed to do so that means they are doing a poor job. If they have broken the law, that would also involve money,” Lam said.

Which of course is rubbish. It is perfectly possible to impair national security without involving money. Effective spending of money is not the same thing as abiding by the law. And ineffective spending may be perfectly legal. Contrariwise there are many things which will eventually involve money if left unchecked, which we do not expect auditors to explore. If the drains in the Central Government Offices are blocked it will eventually cost money; we do not on that account expect the Director of Audit to explore the official sewers.

There are already elaborate mechanisms in place to ensure that government departments and public bodies accord appropriate attention to national security and obey the relevant laws. We have national security police, our shy guardians from over the boundary, the Secretaries for Security and Justice, and so on.

Mr Lam’s formulation that departments and organisations are “at risk” of breaking the law tells us, and should tell him, that he should be leaving law enforcement to police people and lawyers who will have a better idea of whether the risk is real or imagined.

The flip side of the Director of Audit developing a new national security hobby is that it will reduce the resources devoted to his proper function, which is ensuring that government spending is honest and effective.

Nobody else has the knowledge, experience and powers to do this job properly. Amateur observers have no right to extract answers from recalcitrant departments, and potential whistleblowers in the civil service may well be restrained by the thought that whistleblowing is rarely a good career move.

Mr Lam’s innovation in this area is the idea that “not everything has to be audited at once”, so any new policy will be given a few years before it is audited. By which time, surely, it will be too late to do anything about it?

An unintended light on the new approach was shone by Mr Lam’s concluding remark that “the Audit Commission is not trying to pick on the government’s mistake, but trying to step up the government’s accountability and service quality.”

Well perhaps it would be a good idea if someone in the government was trying to “pick on the government’s mistake”, because critics from outside it are “at risk” of breaking the law, as Mr Lam might put it.

And some errors become evident long before a few years have passed. The West Kowloon Cultural District, for example, is tottering towards bankruptcy because its two big museums operate at a loss, as museums generally do, and no arrangement has been made yet to fill in the resulting financial gap.

There is talk of an MTR-like solution, in which the cultural district will go into the business of developing expensive flats. This raises an interesting question. Allowing rail companies to develop the land over and around their stations is justified as allowing the rail operator to share in the extra wealth that it generates when it opens a station. Whether this is an acceptable way of financing a cultural district is perhaps a different matter.

Then if Mr Lam is not too busy he might look at the Express Rail link. It seems most of the travellers on this wonderful innovation are only going to and from stations in nearby Shenzhen, for which purpose a high-speed rail link is inappropriate and ludicrously expensive.

No doubt readers will be able to think of other items which are more worthy of Mr Lam’s sleuthing skills than the Chinese University bookshop. Directors of Audit have traditionally had a high degree of freedom to pursue whatever issue attracts their attention. But freedom, as we are so often reminded these days, has limits.

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The Messi mess: fun, but a distraction from more important things

February 7, 2024 by timhamlett

A rare moment of public preoccupation has hit Hong Kong as a result of the incident which would in due course probably be called Messigate by the popular tabloids, if we had any left.

The hero of this debacle is Mr Lionel Messi, a footballer of sublime gifts who is now getting a bit long in the tooth. As footballers sometimes do at this stage of their careers he has moved from the highly competitive European scene to the US of A, where the football is worse but the money is better. Not so much a swan song as a goose with golden eggs song.

So Mr Messi now twinkles his agile toes for a new club called Inter Miami. The name is a straight lift from a legendary Italian club, Inter Milan. Inter Miami is not yet legendary.

But Mr Messi is, so when a local lifestyle magazine, backed by a government grant and official approval for the staging of “mega events”, arranged for Inter Miami to come and perform in Hong Kong there was great excitement among soccer fans.

Many of them had the opportunity to watch a training session or to see Mr Messi from a distance. Less publicly, for a six figure sum people could get close enough for a selfie and a few words, although as Mr Messi is from Spanish-speaking Argentina the communication may have been a bit disappointing for everyone concerned.

The high point of the whole exercise was a friendly match against a Hong Kong team assembled from the local performers. More than 30,000 spectators turned up for this, paying between $800 and $4,000 for the privilege.

I was not one of them. Inoculated by five years as a professional watcher of football matches I am rarely tempted and “friendly” games in my experience usually disappoint. One of the reasons for this is that professional athletes are surprisingly fragile and reluctant to risk their livelihood in encounters which are merely entertainment. So there is a tendency for people to drop out at the last minute if they get a twinge somewhere.

And so, alas, it turned out on this occasion. Inter Miami did their stuff, and saw off the Hong Kong team handily, but they did so without the assistance of Mr Messi, who was down as a substitute but was not used.

Many of the spectators were extremely offended, and a speech at the end of the match from Mr David Beckham (who used to be a footballer but nowadays is famous for being famous) was booed.

Cue outrage on all channels that fans bad been scammed. The internet frothed with bitter complaints. Some irate fans resorted to the Consumer Council. Column inches were devoted to Mr Messi’s medical symptoms and history. Academics were interviewed.

After the organising magazine announced that under the circumstances it would not collect the government subsidy our leaders could wade in. Secure, for a change, from charges that they had misplanned an event or wasted the taxpayers’ money, they were free to express warm solidarity with disgruntled fans and call for money to be returned to them.

Which is all very well, and has provided a great deal of harmless media fodder. It has also, rather regrettably, consumed a large chunk of the rather small period allowed for people to comment on the up-coming national security legislation.

This is a pity. I was surprised by a recent offering in China Daily’s English version from Prof Lau Siu-kai. Prof Lau is an emeritus professor of sociology (a polite academic way of saying retired) and a consultant to the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies, a think tank where democratic ideas are drowned.

Those of us who were here at the time will remember as the high point of Prof Lau’s career his prediction in 2003 that the July 1 march would only attract 30,000 or so people, which turned out to be about 500,000 people light.

However if you want to know what the government is plotting then Prof Lau is your man, so I waded through his thoughts on “colour revolutions”. This involved a very elaborate string of definitions, understandable in a way because Prof Lau could hardly be expected to use the common-sense definition, which would be something like “a popular movement aiming at the overthrow of a despotic regime”. For Prof Lau a colour revolution is a Bad Thing.

He then proceeded to explain how the national security law would prevent colour revolutions in Hong Kong. Which included some interesting observations. For example:

…It will no longer be possible for political groups to freely participate in the leadership, planning, organization and mobilization of a “color revolution”. The Ordinance will stipulate: “If the Secretary for Security reasonably believes that prohibiting the operation or continued operation of any local organization in the HKSAR is necessary for safeguarding national security, the Secretary for Security may by order published in the Gazette prohibit the operation or continued operation of the organization in the HKSAR,” and “If a local organization is a political body and has a connection with an external political organization, the Security for Security may by order published in the Gazette prohibit the operation or continued operation of the local organization in the HKSAR.

This seems a little stark. No obligation to tell the society first, or give it a chance to explain itself; no avenue for appeal? It also seems a bit unnecessary. In 2018 the police withdrew registration as a society from the Hong Kong National Party on national security grounds. We are plugging a non-existent loophole.

Then there is this:

…It will be difficult for hostile forces to spread false information to slander the central government and the HKSAR government, to instigate hatred, division and opposition in society, and to instigate, lead and organize unrest.  That is because they would be committing the offense of espionage under the Ordinance, which includes “colluding with an external force to publish a statement of fact that is false or misleading to the public, and the person, with intent to endanger national security or being reckless as to whether national security would be endangered, so publishes the statement; and knows that the statement is false or misleading.

I quite see why one might wish to have a law against false statements, although this already seems to be covered by the sedition offence which we already have. But, at least in English, I do not see how this can be classed as espionage. This is a concern because espionage is generally treated as a very serious matter, whereas publishing a statement might in some circumstances be a fairly minor offence, if for example the publication was seen by very few people.

It used to be said that the British Army was always preparing to fight the last war, not the next one. Something rather similar seems to be afflicting our government. The HKJA is “not recognised” because of two disagreements in 2019, a play is cancelled because the founder of the drama group tweeted something in 2019, a legislator making reasonable points about tourism and police work is accused of speaking “dangerously” and sounding like some of the things that were said in … 2019.

Now we have national security legislation which appears to be an attempt to criminalise anything and everything people did in 2019 which didn’t please the government. The fear of an encore is unwarranted. The people who wanted the five demands have got the message. They are going or gone. Relax.

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Accident, emergency or error: money is not the issue

January 24, 2024 by timhamlett

Our government is now grappling with a policy dilemma of the kind which is, sadly, particularly difficult for regimes which have dispensed with such luxuries as electoral politics and independent media: what sort of health service do we want?

This is the matter of principle behind the public musings of officials and politicians – including Chief Executive John Lee – about whether there should be an increase in the small fee charged to users of the Accident and Emergency departments of public hospitals.

At the moment this is fixed at $180. This has crept up over the years. The reason given for further tinkering is the number of people turning up in accident and emergency departments with conditions which are neither the result of an accident nor an emergency.

Officials describe this as “abuse” of the service. Let us note first of all that unjustified visits to local hospitals in some number are to be expected. After all potential patients are not doctors. It may be obvious to the medically qualified that the situation is not urgent; the patient may sincerely believe that it is.

Looking back on my personal record I can count six A and E visits: two in which I arrived in an ambulance, two which led to either stitches or immediate admission to a ward, and two cases of “abuse”. One of these was a request for help with a disintegrated and very painful tooth. The doctor could not provide anything stronger than aspirin for out-patients, and suggested washing my mouth with Scotch whisky, which worked. The other was a panic attack over a possible medicine mix-up, which had not in fact taken place: the young man fished out of the psychology department to help me was kind enough to say that I was right to seek help, just in case.

I infer from this unscientific sample that even a responsible citizen well enough off to use private facilities and happy to do so will in the long run develop some A and E visits, about one third of which will turn out to be unnecessary.

As a parent one also tends to be alarmist. Small children are generally not very good at describing their symptoms, if they can talk at all. I imagine few parents have not on occasion rushed to the nearest hospital, with an ensuing anticlimax. Many of us, including me, have also incurred barely hidden disapproval from a doctor who thought we should have come sooner.

The conclusion from all this is that even in a perfect world there will be quite a lot of arrivals in A and E which turn out to be erroneous. Whether the incidence is unusually high in Hong Kong we have not been told. I note, though, that in England, where emergency service is free, this was not a frequent complaint at all.

What seems to be bothering the Secretary for Health is the thought that people are deliberately choosing their local A and E because it is cheaper than a private GP. One idea he is toying with is to put the A and E fee up to the minimum sum a private doctor might charge for a visit. Another is to have a sort of sliding scale: if you arrive in a pool of blood it’s cheap, if you arrive with sniffles you pay extra.

This suggests some confusion about how our medical system is supposed to work. In the colonial days health was a matter of markets for the rich and charity for the poor. The poor did not do very well out of this.

Then Sir Murray Maclehose was sent to Hong Kong with instructions to turn the city into a colony of which a UK Labour government need not be ashamed. This produced, as well as a lot of public housing, an expectation that there would be enough clinics and hospitals to provide, at least for the grassroots, a service as good as that provided to the prosperous by the private sector.

This did not produce an imitation of the British National Health Service, in which most doctors are paid and hospitals built by the state, and treatment is generally free or nearly free. Nor did it follow the model popular in Europe, with health insurance provided at the public expense for everyone who could not afford their own.

It did embody the progressive consensus that, as the philosopher Michael Sandel puts it, “there are some things that money should not buy”. Patients could choose to “go private”, but inhabitants of both sectors assured them that the medical procedures offered were the same. Private hospitals offered nicer surroundings and, as one doctor told me when considering a range of private venues for an event which I would anyway sleep through, “a Coke costs more in the Mandarin than in 7-11 but it’s the same Coke.”

The consensus that our health system should offer nearly free care to anyone who needed it was somewhat corroded in the 2000s, when some senior officials seem to have come under the influence of Milton Freidman, or indeed of Ayn Rand. Charges were introduced for some expensive medicines. One can only feel grateful that the health machinery was not subjected to the same surreptitious sabotage as the public housing programme.

But where we are is still, in principle, a health service which provides a full range of services to anyone who needs it, at affordable or no cost. I infer that it is quite inappropriate to compare the cost of an A and E visit with the cost of a visit to a private doctor. It is not the job of the government to drum up business for private practitioners.

If excessive reliance on A and E is a problem, the solution should be to divert people with minor complaints to the district clinics set up to deal precisely with out-patient problems. They are generally even cheaper. The money is not the issue here.

There was an interesting piece in one of the public prints last month by two researchers of the Our Hong Kong Foundation, in which they pointed out that old people were particularly likely to turn up in emergency rooms (as indeed they are to turn up in hospitals generally) but experiments by the Housing Association and others had shown that with guidance and help at home seniors could be persuaded to greatly reduce their A and E appearances.

The authors also made some other good suggestions. In the evening the options for people feeling ill are quite limited. Clinics close, private doctors knock off work. The hospital may be the only place open. This is a good point. The only medics working evenings in our neck of the woods are vets.

Another interesting idea is to provide an out-patient clinic next to the emergency facilities to which patients in need of less dramatic help can be politely shunted.

No doubt these and other helpful suggestions would all cost money. They still seem more attractive than extracting what will in effect be fines from elderly hypochondriacs. And the more expensive you make a hospital, the more likely it is that patients who really need treatment will delay it for financial reasons.

If money is a problem, though, the government could reconsider the arrangement under which Accident and Emergency service is provided absolutely free to civil servants, former civil servants and former civil servants’ spouses.

This would have the added advantage that decisions about raising fees would be made by people who would themselves have to pay them, which always helps.

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