Sometimes we could be forgiven for thinking that our government is staffed bu nutcases. Consider recent events on the matter of population and pregnancy.
Our Financial Secretary is concerned about the future size of the government’s income. In fact, though he is sitting on what is probably the largest pile of government reserves in the world, he want to consider “tax reform”, which is not intended to sound like good news for those of us who think we are paying quite enough already. The reason why a fizcal abyss looms in a decade or two (we shall pass over in a charitable silence the folly of a man who cannot predict his financial future a year ahead making predictions decades away) is that Hong Kong women are not having enough babies. This means that the proportion of non-working elderly drones like me in the population will grow and the number of people working to support them will fall. This is a scary prospect, if you can believe any prediction from Mr Tsang.
Meanwhile the Chief Executive says that the government will never allow private hospitals to entertain pregnant mainlanders again, because the resulting offspring might wish to live in Hong Kong, putting an intolerable strain on our education etc. systems. And the question which this raises is, of course, do these two gentlemen every talk to each other?
I mean if we are hurtling towards bankruptcy because we are not having enough kids, might it not actually be rather a good idea to persuade people to have babies here, and indeed to hope that the resulting kids will in fact stay in Hong Kong? What is going through CY Leung’s mind, one wonders. After all the line about strain on education and such systems is a con. A lady who can afford to give birth in a private hospital is probably going to send her sprog to a private school. So what is the problem? I suspect we are dealing here with the visceral unease that people in left-wing circles feel whenever anything comes along which reveals that actually the People’s Paradise is not a paradise, and many people are quite eager to get out of it. The easiest way of suppressing this embarassing revelation is to ban the move involved.
This must then be explained as a step taken in defence of Hong Kong people’s interests. Is anyone fooled by this, I wonder?
tim's experiment 
Absolutely agree. When the last CE decided that Hong Kong should become a “health care hub”, private hospitals built new wings (in the Sanitorium’s case a 30-storey monstrosity rather illegally, but that’s another matter) that would have a steady stream of income from mainlander births. It would be interesting to see how their finances are now (I’m not defending them particularly, but they’ll be removing even more arms and legs than before). Another odd policy connected with this is that, when the birth rate dropped, the government closed schools instead of reducing class numbers. Now children still learn in classes of 42 as they did when there was a vast overpopulation and often have to go to schools a long way off, while about 100 school buildings lie vacant. At the same time, the quota for Hong Kong students at universities has not gone up for more than 20 years (and universities resorted to the 4-year system to increase numbers). In all areas our government fails to make long-term policy despite being in a very good position to do so.