tim's experiment

There is a story about an old lady in New York who used to emerge from her house every morning and let off a firecracker. Eventually a curious neighbour plucked up the courage to ask her why she did this. “It keeps the tigers away,” she replied. “But there are no tigers around here,” said the neighbour. “You see,” she said, “it works.” This is a fairly simple logical offer to spot. An equally classic example was offered on the letters page this morning by a Mr Wergin, who said that “the crime rate figures clearly show that the Hong Kong Police’s stop and search tactics are working”. Well Mr Wergin had somehow got his statistics in a twist, because he claimed that the crime rate in New York is twice that in Hong Kong, and the crime rate in London ten times as high, which is nonsense. But even if it were true, the causes of crime are a complex matter. Hong Kong had a low crime rate long before it had an honest police force or the compulsory ID cards which provide a pretext for stopping people. If promiscuous use of stop and search was the cure to all criminal ills then police forces all over the world would be doing it. They aren’t and it isn’t.

Mr Wergin though, was a model of dispassionate logic compared with our glorious leader Mr CY Leung, who is either a real dimwit or posing as one because he thinks that will make him more lovable. A couple of days ago the under-secretary for financial services and the treasury, whatever that is, resigned. The lady gave no reasons but said she had been intending to leave for a while. Naturally this produced a rash of headlines suggesting something was rotten in the state. This lady was the fifth political appointee to resign since the team took office. Now I have no idea why this lady resigned. I also have no idea whether the rate of resignations from what Mr Leung is pleased to call his team is remarkably high, or just normal. People do move on from time to time for a variety of reasons. If you have a larger team you will in the normal course of events have more departures. Still, this lady is being replaced by a 63-year-old retired civil servant, which does not suggest an abundance of willing recruits. This is not the way it seems to Mr Leung, though. He honoured the occasion with this priceless quote “Our politically appointed team of secretaries, under secretaries and political assistants is the biggest ever in all government terms.  What does it show? It shows that many are willing to join our new government and serve society.” Oh no it doesn’t. Nobody has ever suggested that the comparatively small politically appointed teams of the Tung and Tsang administrations were constrained by a shortage of willing recruits. The only reason Mr Leung’s team is bigger is because he was willing to waste more money on it. Actually these positions are very well paid and there would be no difficulty in filling a much larger roster with people who were “willing to serve society” for a directorate-level salary and all the perks that money can buy. What the size of the Leung team shows is that he has shamelessly mass-produced expensive non-jobs for political cronies. It is hardly surprising that people can be found to sign up. Beats working for a living.

Read Full Post »

It’s the week for mind-blowing police statistics. Last year our beloved constabulary conducted 1,637,334 “stop and searches”. This is the procedure which starts with “Excuse me sir, may I see your ID card?”, or for less prestigeous clients “Oi! You. What you got in that bag?” The victim is asked to produce the card, empty pockets, open bag, etc. We have all seen this going on. MTR exits are a favourite spot. It seems rather unlikely that anyone on his way to commit a serious crime will be travelling by MTR, but there it is.

The interesting thing about Hong Kong’s figure is that it is about twice the figure for New York, which has both a larger population and more crime than we do. Even so the practice is so controversial that the latest Mayor ran on a promise to reform and reduce the practice. The figure for London – roughly the same population as New York – is about one third of the Hong Kong one. Here the matter is also controversial, not so much because the thing is in principle objectionable but because in practice those stopped and searched are disproportionately from minority groups – or, in words of one syllable, black.

Looking further at the figures it appears that this is a very ineffective method of catching criminals, and that the more you do it the less effective it is. In London, stop and searches produce an arrest rate of 10-12 per cent. In New York about 6 per cent lead to the searchee being arrested for something, though critics note that only about half of these cases lead to a successful prosecution. In Hong Kong only one in 113 led to “crime detection”. We may suppose this sorry figure to include those whose only offence was not to have their ID card on them when required to produce it, which is not a crime in London or New York.

This is not a laughing matter because conducting stop and searches on this scale uses up a lot of police resources. If we suppose the average duration of one of these little chats to be ten minutes then our annual total of incidents represents 6,600 40-hour working weeks. In other words this activity consumed the equivalent of 128 policemen’s work for an entire year. And that is assuming that the policemen concerned are operating solo. All those people who complain that our Force neglects the crime of their choice – parking in Central, cruelty to animals, upskirt photography, speeding on Lamma, rape, murder, etc – can now see why. Hordes of constables are standing around on street corners waiting to conduct vain searches of passing pedestrians.

Another way of looking at the figures is to say that if you are a New Yorker you can expect to be stopped on average once every 11 years or so. If you are a Londoner you can expect to wait a bit longer: on average your number will come up only once in 16 years. In Hong Kong, with our smaller population and higher rate of stoppages, you should on average be stopped about once every three years. This is an interesting figure because I have been here for 30 years and have never been stopped and frisked yet. I was once subjected to a random breath test while driving (I think they were testing the equipment because 11 am on a Sunday seemed an unlikely time to catch drunk drivers) but that doesn’t count. And indeed from my observations of embarrassing scenes at MTR stations the searchee is almost invariably a young man carrying a bag. The other group often stopped, according to my students, is attractive young ladies, but I think that is just for entertainment purposes. And as might have been expected we heard complaints last week that in order to leave so many upstanding citizens frisk-free, other groups were being victimised. Suspicion falls particularly often on members of racial minorities.  Official spokesmen denied any “profiling” was going on, but it seems the Force has a pretty good idea of who they think is suspicious.

Only it isn’t a very good idea because less than one in 100 searches produces any tangible result. The other 112 unsuccessful stops are not costless. The citizen so victimised is delayed in going about his lawful pursuits. His time is taken from him and if the proceedings are not conducted with the utmost tact his dignity as well. Those people who are stopped frequently are going to develop a hostile view of society in general and the police in particular. This may be inspiring more crime than it prevents.

Clearly no rational consideration of the sensible uses of police time or the purposes of policing can justify this overuse of an ineffective and offensive technique. It has become a habit, fostered by the “management” technique of asking people to produce records of work done, however meaningless that work may have been.  Given the present “we never apologise” posture of the Force we shall, I fear, not see any signs of official contrition over this. But perhaps, behind the scenes, someone could inform the boys and girls that stopping and searching only counts as productive work if it produces something. Those officers whose suspicions are too easily aroused by the innocent should find another way of looking busy.

Read Full Post »

Real confusion in this morning’s SCM Post. At first I thought it was a simple matter of the same story being used by the News people and their sporting counterparts. On A13 we had “Elvis has left the building, and image, to new owners”. Not a bad attempt at an interesting headline, though I did wonder why Hong Kong readers should be interested in 15 paragraphs on a change in the group of fat cigar smokers who have the right to make whatever money can still be made from the dead King.

On C11, in the sports section, we had “Ali joins Elvis on branding firms books”. Only seven paragraphs this time. Sports version is credited to AFP in New York, News version to AFP in Memphis. But wait a minute. If you examine the headlines carefully you can see that this is not the same story at all. The company is called Authentic Brands Group (ABG). The AP version – from Memphis – includes several other companies which need not concern us here, but the only actual quotes are from members of Presley’s family. And the gist of the story is that ABG has bought the rights to Elvis, which it did not previously own. Elvis’s afterlife was formerly the property of a thing called CORE Media Group, which is also to blame for American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance. There is no mention of Muhammad Ali.

In the AFP version – from New York – on the other hand  ABG already owns Elvis (and Marylin Monroe). Ali is the new acquisition and the rest of the story is about him. Elvis only gets a mention because ABG is introduced as “the company that owns licensing rights to Elvis Presley”.

So what the Dickens is going on here? Well don’t ask me – I only know what I read in the newspapers, which on this topic are not very helpful. The Guardian did not cover the story (at least  on its web-site, which is searchable). The BBC had the Memphis version, but it also supplied a link to the ABG website, on which the latest news was Ali and Elvis was not mentioned.

In the end one has to wonder, who cares? This posthumous branding rights racket is a peculiarity of American law, which is made by Congressmen most of whom are for sale, and benefits people engaged in the morbid, if not sordid, business of making money out of dead people’s fame. If this must be covered at all, shouldn’t it be on the Business pages?

Read Full Post »

A campaign is under way to drive down the level of local wages. Of course it is not described like that. Employers may be insanely greedy but they are not stupid. So we are presented with a “manpower shortage”. What this was doing as the lead story on the front page of the SCMP I do not know, but the campaign is gathering steam so we need to consider exactly what it is.

The most eye-catching feature of the Post’s headline was the announcement that “industry leaders” feared the manpower shortage. I thought Hong Kong’s industries had all long since migrated to more congenial environments north of the border where stroppy workers are dealt with properly … and shot. On closer inspection, though, it seemed that “industry” was being used in the more general sense to apply to three pursuits which have to be done here because this is where the customers want the work done: construction, restaurants and old folks homes. These are, apparently, “key sectors recently identified by the government”, which was news to me. How can construction be a key sector? Either a building is needed or it is not. If other industries are prospering then more buildings will be needed, and if not, not. Anyway leaving aside the official status of the three industries where was the evidence for a shortage and what was the government supposed to do about it?

We’ll take the second question first. The government was supposed to reform the importation of labour scheme so that the proprietors of building firms, restaurants and aged homes could benefit from the resulting influx of labour. Among the benefits would be a reduction of wage levels in the industries concerned. This is an elementary feature of those laws of supply and demand on which employers are so keen when discussing minimum wages. More pay, fewer workers. More workers, less pay.

For it is an elementary fact of economic life that there is no such thing as a manpower shortage. This is not only because half the workforce are not men, but also because there can only be a shortage at a particular wage level. The way the invisible hand works is that items in short supply become more expensive, conjuring up more supply. There is no job in Hong Kong that cannot be filled – at C.Y. Leung’s salary level.

And indeed it turned out that the main evidence the “industry leaders” were offering for a shortage was that they were being compelled to pay higher wages.

Let us start with Thomas Ho On-sing, chairman of the HK Construction Association. Mr Ho’s complaint was that “A cement mixer with no experience is getting paid $1,100 a day”. Now I have no idea what a cement mixer does – in normal English it means one of those machines which you shovel materials in and tip cement out of. I suppose Mr Ho is referring to some kind of machine operator, I suppose also that since experience is valued the job involves some skill and judgment. We may also suppose that it is done outdoors in a relatively dirty and dangerous environment. And the question which then arises is: what is wrong with the person doing this job being paid $1,100 a day? The job has some unattractive features and it is only right that these should be offset by generous financial compensation. I have no doubt that Mr Ho could recruit people in Bangladesh – or the Philippines – willing to do it for half as much. Where is the benefit in that for Hong Kong as a whole?

Next up we have Simon Wong Ka-po, President of the Federation of Restaurants and Related Trades, as the food biz now calls itself. Mr Wong fondly recalled the days when you could recruit a waiter for $35 an hour, and complained that it was now necessary to offer $60. So? This means that if you work 40 hours a week, which is enough for most of us (I have been a waiter), then you will take home $2,400 a week or, in round figures, $10,000 a month. Would Mr Wong, I wonder, like to live on $10,000 a month?

The old folks home spokesman did not have any horror stories of being forced to pay decent wages for a change. He was barking up a different money tree. The government “should pledge that a certain percentage of people will be getting a place in subsidised homes”, he said. Oh yes. So much more congenial than giving people a decent pension and letting them make their own choices.

The following day we had a contribution to this chorus from Shirley Yuen, the chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce. Miss Yuen cantered through the usual material: disappointing number of imported workers, why can you not import a waiter, etc. and then got down to the nitty gritty. “The unions say we should protect local workers by not importing workers. But are we protecting them when we do not do so? If we don’t do so, will we even lose the whole industry?” To which the answer is “No”. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We will not lose a whole industry and the suggestion is a silly scare tactic which will frighten nobody.

Business people are entitled to try to persuade us that what is good for them is good for us. Sometimes no doubt this is true. Exhibitions of shameless greed make this less obvious.

Read Full Post »

There are times when a columnist has the chance to put in words what many people are thinking, and earn the gratitude of all those who were hoping that someone, somewhere would say in public what they were thinking in private. Having in the past been occasionally quite critical of Alex Lo’s efforts I would like to record my profound gratitude that someone, whose pulpit is much bigger than mine, has told the Hong Kong SAR Government that its stance on the question of what should be done next about the Manila bus tragedy was erroneous to begin with and in the light of recent events in the Philippines now appears obscene. The politicians at every level who have chosen to dip their bread in this old pool of innocent blood should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. The kindest thing you can say about Hong Kong’s stand on the matter is that with so much else going on there is a faint hope that nobody outside the SAR will notice it.

I notice that since Mr Lo’s first words on the subject he has been joined in the good fight by several people who usually write for the newspapers and a few who don’t. A surprising level of unanimity has emerged, marred only by the crazy cow who writes for the Standard, who thinks the situation calls for “balance”. Apparently, however, as of yesterday morning, the people who make these messes on our behalf have not even considered that this might be an appropriate time to drop the deadline idea. I hope they realise what they are playing with here. We do not think much of the leaders chosen by the Liaoison Office on our behalf. We think far too many of them are conformist mediocrites and a few suffer from toxic levels of either ambition or greed. As they stagger from crisis to crisis we try not to get too impatient. They are a sorry bunch. But we do not hold them in contempt. Yet.

Read Full Post »

If you only plan to read one book this year, please consider Poverty in the Midst of Affluence, by Leo Goodstadt. This is not happy reading. In fact reading it made me extremely angry. Mr Goodstadt is to be commended for getting through the whole book without resorting to the violently abusive prose which his information would have inspired from a less respectable writer, like me.

The book sets out to answer the question why, as Hong Kong has grown richer over the last 20 years, the social problems associated with poverty have become more conspicuous. The answer is not pretty. He records how, in the closing years of the colonial administration, the civil service reluctantly, with much back-sliding and occasional sabotage, created a welfare state, in which medical help was virtually free at the point of delivery, large numbers of needy families were provided with public housing at reasonable rents, decent education was available to all and a start had been made on meeting the needs of the indigent elderly. He goes on to show how this structure was surreptitiously dismantled, mainly though not only in the period of Donald Tsang’s tenure as CE. This was accompanied by recurring criticism of the whole notion of “welfare” and the deliberate demonization of anyone who needed to receive it.

It is distressing to recall that many of us simply did not realize that this was going on. Mr Goodstadt notes that constitutional matters were taking a lot of attention, but that is really no excuse. What were our media doing, for example, when the government dismantled the public housing building programme, disbanded the teams who knew how to do it, and handed over the Housing Authority’s land bank to private developers? Was nobody connecting the dots and seeing what was going on here? We now find ourselves in a situation where it will take five years to produce any new public housing. This is one of the areas where defenders of CY Leung say he inherited a mess. But do not waste your sympathy on weasel-face: it’s his mess. He was the Convenor of the Executive Council at the time.

The frightening thing to me is the way in which it has now become possible to advance in public arguments not taken seriously since the 18th century. For example we are told that the erradication of poverty is impossible. Now this does, it is true, depend on how you define poverty. If your poverty definition is the bottom 10 per cent of the population then some people will always be there. But Hong Kong’s definition is a percentage of the average household income. There is no iron law of economics or anything else that says there have to be some people below this line, unless of course the percentage is 100. In fact some countries which measure poverty as a percentage of average income have virtually eliminated it. In Sweden, for example, the poverty rate is three percent.

Nor is it true that, as one appalling letter writer put it the other week, poverty has to be painful because otherwise people would not work. People work for a variety of reasons and countries where the fear of actual starvation has been eliminated do not find that work stops. Actually this is a red herring, although one of great antiquity. Back in the time of the first Elizabeth people who did not want to contribute to poor relief complained that their money was going to “sturdy beggars”.  Officials and politicoes, including Mr Leung, have been happy to encourage the impression that Hong Kong’s modest social security offerings were seducing the workforce from their proper allegiance to underpaid employment. Actually most unemployed people in Hong Kong (it varies a bit from year to year – about 80 per cent) do not claim social security and most of the people who do claim it are not available for work because they are too old, too sick, disabled or children in families headed by people who are disabled, sick etc. This is another area where a vigilant media might have done a better job. Some of the official statements on this topic were grossly misleading. On the strength of them the proportion of government expenditure devoted to social security payments was halved between 2001 and 2011.

Another newly popular antique is the notion that any interference in the terms under which people are employed is a distortion of the labour market, a threat to economic efficiency and destructive of jobs.  As far as destroying jobs are concerned this is a lie masquerading as a prejudice. The point has been extensively researched. Minimum wage laws do not result in lower employment rates. Probably this is because in the real world the job market is very different from the much-simplified (but useful) model developed for the purposes of classical economics. As for regulating the terms of employment, we should not forget what employers are capable of if greed is given full rein. The argument that employment conditions should be left to the benevolence of employers and market forces was, I think, first advanced against an act passed in 1788 to regulate the chimney sweeping industry. It prohibited the employment of children under eight for this purpose and also stipulated that they should not be sent up a chimney while the fire was lit, a precaution which was apparently often overlooked. Employees need protection. This should no longer be disputable.

In closing may I welcome Mr Goodstadt’s critical look at what has been going on in the field where I still occasionally work, higher education. Before the hand-over successive governors had sought to expand the proportion of the school population going to university by increasing the size and number of the UGC-funded institutions. After the handover the expansion of higher education consisted of making the degree a four-year course instead of three years. The only increase in student numbers was the launching of the Associate Degree, a new qualification, unloved, unwanted, unsubsidised and unclear in its purpose. All the local universities started offering ADs as a money-making enterprise. Many of them keep the AD students on a different campus to avoid any possible contamination. Moving from the AD to a real degree is not encouraged and under the new four-year arrangement the lucky student who makes the change will take five years to get a degree which used to be offered in three. Education generally has become increasingly expensive, with the predictable result that children from poor families rarely reach local universities, which have become a semi-compulsory finishing school for the middle classes.

Some months ago I wrote in this blog that government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich was continuing. Readers of Mr Goodstadt’s excellent book will discover how true this is.

Read Full Post »

A moment of enlightenment this morning while reading Alex Lo’s piece in the Post. I have been impressed for a long time with his ability to keep writing five columns a week. This is not a record – someone on the Irish Times, according to legend, wrote six columns a week for 30 years – but five a week is still a lot. Bernard Levin used to do three a week for the London Times, but complained when he stopped that this was too many. I used to have an irregular cycle – one weekly, one fortnightly, one monthly – which meant I occasionally had to do three in a week and it was not easy.  I had a full-time job as well but that was not the problem; inspiration is the critical item, not time.

So here we have Alex churning them out, and I suddenly realised this morning how he economises. There is a standard structure which is used again and again. We start with a local issue. This morning it was Occupy Central’s complaint that the Registrar of Companies had refused to register it as a company because its objectives  – or some of them – were illegal. Mr Lo opined, and this is clearly a good point, that the Occupy Central people were being a little disingenuous in pointing to their legal activities, however numerous. Civil disobedience is what gives the movement its importance and interest, and that is illegal by definition. This takes about half a column. Then we get a bit of international comparison, which gives the writer a chance to show off his cosmopolitan erudition. And then having loaded our tar brush we slap it over all the people we disapprove of, usually defined in very broad terms. Today it’s “many protesters today”, a category so vague that you can say anything about it. More often it’s “the pan-democrats”, although as the P-Ds are not a political party and encompass a very wide range of views this is no real improvement on “some demonstrators” or “many protesters”..

This is a nifty structure which can be used again and again. Start with a small reasonable point, throw in a bit of intellectual decoration, and then blame it all on whichever of your pet hates you feel like. This will save me time in the mornings because now I know how this works I only need to read the first paragraph and the last.

Meanwhile on the op ed page we have an unlikely new star in the local journalistic firmament: Carrie Lam, who has a day job as the Chief Secretary. You would think that having a whole government department devoted to explaining the government line Ms Lam could do without half a page of newsprint. The whole point of journalism is that a professional reporter can get Ms Lam’s thoughts down to about 10 column inches. Reprinting officials’ speeches looks like a way of saving money at the readers’ expense. That is not what bothers me about it, though. After all readers can draw their own conclusions about that question. What bothers me is that the by-line is a lie. Ms Lam does not write her own newspaper pieces, or for that matter her own speeches. This is not the way government works. Senior civil servants have what they conceive to be better ways of using their time. Speeches, articles, and other verbal contributions are written by a PR flunkey. I realise that having an op ed piece by Joe Wong with a little line at the end saying that Joe is the Chief Secretary’s press pusher doesn’t quite have the pizzazz of a piece by the Chief Secretary in person. But there is such a thing as honesty, and pretending that Ms Lam writes for the Post is not it.

Read Full Post »

I realise that it is now compulsory for the selection of a new University Vice Chancellor to be followed by some sort of row, but current effusions from Hong Kong University are emitting a nasty smell. The new VC is Prof Peter Mathieson. Readers will effortlessly infer from this name that he was not, as it were, raised on congee. He is a Brit. This seems to be the main problem, although all the people who are complaining have managed to avoid stating this explicitly.

Clearest hint came from Prof Ying Chan, who told readers of her blog that the new recruit had “a complete lack of understanding” of Chinese society and history. Prof Chan had an interesting new hint for committees seeking new Vice Chancellors. She went on to say that “if a medical professor from the British city of Bristol, with a population of 430,000, is to parachute into Hong Kong to save our freedom, that’s a big joke.” Now I take it there is no objection to medical professors as such, or to people being parachuted into Hong Kong, as Prof Chan was herself. Nor does there seem to be anything about Bristol which should make it an objectionable source, except for its population. This can simplify the hunt for a new VC considerably. Applications can be rejected out of hand if they come from Cambridge (pop. 123,900) or Yale (New Haven, pop. 130,761). Alas, Europe’s oldest university doesn’t make the cut either. (Bologna, pop. 378,000). This also helps to explain how we got stuck with Prof Chan. She came from New York (pop. 8.3 million).

Prof Chan also questioned Mathieson’s “sincerity” in applying for the post because he had not “tailored his curriculum vitae” for the Hong Kong post. This is a puzzling complaint. After all a c.v. is a summary of your experience and achievements. Updating from time to time, persons with only one life need only one c.v. It is not supposed to be a piece of PR writing. Points specific to the job applied for can be made in the covering letter. Prof Chan seems to be complaining that Mr Mathieson is not dishonest enough for her.

Hong Kong U academics seem to be very preoccupied with c.vs though. The chairman of the Staff Association observed that he had heard from a Medical School colleague that the new VC’s c.v. was “mediocre”. This would have been more illuminating if some details had been supplied. Academics are a jealous bunch. C.vs are rarely assessed as more than “mediocre” unless mutual back-scratching is in progress. One c.v. problem was cleared up on Thursday when Prof Mathieson was open for questions at the university. The bit in his mission description about “helping Uganda” was not left over from an application for another job; he has a long-standing connection with Uganda. God knows it needs all the help it can get.

Other complaints continued to be rather unspecific. Professor Enoch Young, director emeritus (whatever that is) of HKU SPACE (money money money!) expressed “reservations”. Prof Cheng Kai-ming, a former pro vice chancellor, said the new VC “might be a good administrator, but that was just getting the job done. A university shouldn’t be like that.” And what, one wonders, does Prof Cheng think a university should be like? Well he’s an honourary professor at another eight. All of them are on the Mainland.

In a class of his own, though, was Prof Lo Chung-mau, head of surgery and a member of the selection committee. He described the new VC as “ignorant and incapable”, according to the Post. This is astonishingly rude for a piece of academic discussion. One gathers that Prof Lo wanted someone else and was outvoted. Very frustrating, no doubt. But still. Were we not urged by Kipling to “meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same”? Gentlemen should be scholars. And scholars should be gentlemen.

Read Full Post »

Readers will recall that there was a minor accident at the Sek Kong airstrip over the weekend. A small Cessna was landing and the nose-wheel collapsed. The plane flipped over onto its back. Two of the four people on board were slightly injured. It seems they were lucky. No doubt everyone was wearing a seat belt.

This was a harmless little number providing some decent photo opportunities. Buried in the Standard’s version of it were some mind-boggling statistics: “The Fire Services Department deployed 25 trucks, seven ambulances and 150 officers to the scene.”

Really? 150 officers? What were they thinking? I realise the department needs to be quick off the mark, better safe than sorry and all that, but surely this was a bit over the top. A Cessna training plane like this is the size of a small car. It is not a Jumbo jet. I suppose a good time was had by all but you have to wonder what would have happened if there had been a real emergency elsewhere in the New Territories while this was going on.

Read Full Post »

On a street level, Hong Kong has to be one of the most corruption free countries in the world. No doubt there are funny things still going on in nooks and corners (anyone for the restaurant business?) but on the whole we have seen the back of the sort of graft where an official charges you an unofficial fee for doing what he is paid to do anyway.

This is a credit to the efforts of many individuals who, most of them unsung and some of them at considerable cost, were prepared to fight this good fight. We seem, however, to have drifted into a situation where junior civil servants are expected to be sea green and incorruptible, while their most senior leaders enjoy the subtler forms of corruption restrained only by shame and the rather remote possibility of embarrassment.

What went through the minds, one wonders, of senior civil servants who were apparently expected to do their best to arrange an audience with the Pope for Donald Tsang? This could not possibly be considered part of the duties of anyone concerned. Even if we concede some diplomatic heft to the Vatican, foreign affairs are expressly reserved to the central government of China. Of course Mr Tsang wished to meet the Pope, as many Catholics do. The idea that it was a function of the Hong Kong Government to arrange this for him was just as dishonest as stealing the paperclips and potentially a lot more expensive. I accept that the Italian gentleman who was acting as an intermediary in the matter was told that the rule of law could not be bent for his benefit. But what if he had asked for some more modest and doable quid pro quo?

Then we come to the distressing spectacle presented by the former head of the ICAC. Watching this sorry individual wriggling in Legco was nauseating. Have Administrative Officers totally absolved themselves from the rule that if you are the Captain you are responsible for the ship? I am not actually worried about the ICAC. The Commission is full of people who  take a firm line on matters of accountability and propriety. One of them was bound to blow the whistle sooner or later. What bothers me is what happens in Departments and Bureaus where the atmosphere is less puritanical. I fear the head of the ICAC was just exercising what he perceived to be the rights of department heads and such like senior people everywhere. Let there be mao tai, he said, and there was mao tai. The books can always be cooked afterwards.

The worrying thing about all this is not just the government money wasted (though that may be considerable) but what it says about our leaders’ relations with rich people they may encounter. The receipt of favours sooner or later leads to the delivery of reciprocal favours. It also leads to scepticism about official decisions generally. The recent decision about a boutique hotel on the Peak, for example, was greeted with shrugs. Nobody believes the official explanation. Of the unofficial explanation – people expect no better.

One also has to wonder how long junior government employees can be expected to behave themselves if they routinely see their seniors pigging it on perks. Not for ever, I fancy.

Read Full Post »