tim's experiment

I did not start this little outlet so that I could criticise the people still toiling in the vineyard where I laboured happily for so long, but what happened to the Sunday Post this week? Your lead headline, in the usual 60pt type, said “Convicted sex pests may still be teaching”. And since when, I wondered, did we inform readers about what may be happening? Next week: Martin Bormann may be alive and well, living in a Kowloon Tong old folks home. The following week: Michael Jackson may have faked his own death and may now be secretly touring selected Masonic lodges.  What is the point of having an investigation team (three reporters were credited) if you end up telling people what you don’t know?

The story of the story went like this. The three sleuths compiled a list of 31 school staff who had been convicted of offences in which sex was an ingredient, over the last ten years. I presume this involved a search for keywords in the Post’s digital archive. They then took the list round to the Education Bureau, and asked the EB spokesperson to find out, and tell them, which of the 31 people were now working in Hong Kong schools. The EB, and I find this neither surprising nor worthy of criticism, refused. At this point a serious investigator who wants to generate new information has to think of another move. Can we beg, borrow or steal a copy of the register of teachers? Can we compile our own by collecting school staff lists?  Alternatively, you give up the story and move on to something else. What you did not do, at least when I was an investigative reporter, was to write a story about the fact that the EB refuses to tell any passing stranger who walks in its door whether or where a person or group of people are working.

This little scandal was wheeled round a selection of the usual talking heads — chairman of Legco Ed panel, legislator for legal sector, parents’ organisation and so on — who all duly confessed themselves helpfully shocked, which was nice of them. Clearly, while reporters may not be popular, they are more popular than sex offenders, which is something to be grateful for.

Frankly I thought hell would freeze over before I wrote a piece defending a government bureeau — after all there is a whole department of civil servants paid to do nothing else — but the EB’s attitude seems to me to be entirely correct.  They keep a register. They remove from it teachers who have been convicted of offences involving abuse of their position. They urge schools to require new hires to state whether they have a criminal record, and also whether they are on the register.  Clearly the onus is on the schools to be careful who they unleash on their victims, and that is where it should be.  Some people would like to go for a more formal register, and we were taken on a quick global tour of other countries’ arrangements. But whatever changes are introduced, I doubt if they will cater for journalists who want to take a name out of a ten-year-old court report and ask where the person concerned has got to.

We also got a tour of selected horror stories from the ten-year  trawl of the archives. I could have done without this. Not only did it leave me thinking I needed to wash my brain. It also seemed to involve gross unfairness on people who were named as the perpetrators of offences merely because the reporters had been unable to find out whether they were teaching, dead, emigrated or … maybe working in the newspaper business. We also got names and details of two people who were aquitted.  They didn’t do anything, the court decided.  In any case, the charges of which they were aquitted involved adults. No doubt their joint appearance in a story about perverts in the classroom will cheer them up considerably.

Our former dog – she died last August – was not much of a walker in her autumnal years. Five minutes and a quick performance on a newspaper were enough. Her replacement (we only lasted a week) is a frisky young thing, so I am now revisiting all the coutry walks within reach of an energetic dog and a mature owner. This has had its sad moments. I occasionally forget which dog I am walking. But it is nice to get out. Since my last career as a long-distance dog walker, though, one controversial amenity has appeared: concrete steps.

Some people get quite apopletic about the appearance of concrete in country parks so I had better explain straight away that for this particular flight of fancy there is a good reason. The stairs lead up to a hill-top on which a small reservoir has been built, so that a village in the valley below has a proper water supply instead of depending on informal tappings of a nearby stream. I must also say that the piece of path now replaced was not a popular favourite. It was steep, and being shady and windless was rarely dry. In a way I shall not miss it. On the other hand our piece of country park does exemplify the problem. Many of the paths have either disintegrated or been subjected to artificial help ranging from a bit of volunteer spade sculpture to full-blown replacement with concrete,

One long slope which I occasionally reached with First Dog  became a flight of steps some years ago. This was unavoidable. A much-used path eventually becomes a waterway in the rainy season. The water then sculpts a gully which could have been designed by nature to break ankles. Huge holes appear. Unless an alternative route is available the path has now reached the end of its natural span, and must either be replaced or decorated with warning notices suggesting that people should walk somewhere else. In other paths the efforts to patch things up with small planks embedded in the steps have reached decrepitude. The dirt which the planks supported has eroded away. Someone has tried to repair the steps with bricks and small splashes of concrete. But the steps are disintegrating. Drastic action will soon be needed. Some subsiduary paths which used to be difficult to follow have now disappeared altogether. Two small bridges have collapsed. Other paths which are still perfectly usable must be difficult to find if you have not used them before. They are very overgrown and there are no signposts.

And this seems to be the real problem. Hong Kong has some great walking and a lot of hikers. But the hikers, and the park-keepers, pay all their attention to the same few routes. The path which is much walked and frequently maintained is the one which goes up to the Maclehose Trail. Get off that beaten track and the only paths which get any attention are the ones required for access by the water people or China Light and Power. Whole networks which are clearly marked on old maps have disappeared. So the busy paths get busier, until they have to be concreted, and then the walkers complain. We need a local counterpart of that NGO in England which used to campaign to keep public footpaths open. Otherwise the popular and well-cared-for places are going to get awfully crowded. And those of us who like solitude at weekends will have to walk in Central.

Interesting piece in this morning’s SCMP by Ms Regina Ip, on the passage of the railway resolution. Readers who are familiar with Ms Ip’s biography will not find it surprising that she sympathises with the senior civil servant landed with the job of propelling an unpopular proposal through Legco, nor that she is not overly sympathetic to street demonstrations. No doubt there are points which could be made either way on many aspects of this topic, but in one matter Ms Ip falls into serious error.

She points out, which I do not dispute, that there are laws against obstruction or molestation of any legislator “going to, being within or going from the precincts of the chamber”. I agree that “technically speaking,” as she puts it, demonstrators obstructing such legislators “might have broken the law”. Demonstrations commonly involve technical breaches of the law, even if no legislators are in the vicinity. In many countries the forces of law and order are expected to temper their enthusiasm for legality with a recognition that public manifestations of opinion are a valuable part of freedom of expression. So the breaches are tolerated. But breaches they are.
What I do not accept is Ms Ip’s inclusion in the category of potential lawbreakers those demonstrators who “pursued them (legislators) with jeers and insults.”

I do not believe that the powers and privileges accorded to legislators by law extend to the criminalisation of jeers and insults. Even if they did, they would be liable to overthrow by the courts, because the right to jeer at legislators is clearly a mode of self-expression protected by the provisions on freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights Ordinance, the Basic Law, and even – hilariously – the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. It is the right of any citizen of Hong Kong to jeer at legislators. It may even be a civic duty, as so many law-makers have an inflated notion both of their own importance and of the respect and affection which they inspire in ordinary members of the public.

I do not suggest that people should be encouraged to insult Ms Ip. Indeed if anyone did so in my presence I would be very tempted to apply some instant and crude plastic surgery to his nose. But even as my fist met his face I would be conscious that he was in the right and I in the wrong. For legislators, jeers and insults go with the territory. They are a poor substitute for the slave who used to ride in the chariot of triumphant Roman generals with the specific job of reminding the hero that he was still mortal. But they will have to do.

So we are going to get an express rail station after all. This is not all bad news. The question is not whether we want to be linked to the national express rail system; the question is whether we wish to be linked in the most expensive way that human brains can devise. I was impressed by the people who went to the trouble of producing an alternative, cheaper, plan. But this seemed to me a sad waste of their time.

The relevant bureaucratic manoeuvre in cases like this goes as follows: You criticise their plan. They chide you for only being destructive. You produce an alternative plan. The massive resources of the government are then devoted to pulling it to pieces, usually on the grounds that it is incompatible with some other plan which you haven’t been told about.

The official critics set about this task with such enthusiasm that by the official final debate some supporters of the government’s plan were arguing that it was “technically impossible” to put the station in the NT. Come, people, impossible is a big word. What would have happened if, a few months ago, Donald had sprung Archimedes-like from his bath with a cry of Eureka and announced that the government could solve all its problems by building the station in Taipo. Does anyone doubt that brains would have been stormed, shoulders put to the grindstone and noses to the wheel, imaginary problems would have been discovered to be illusory and real ones solved, so that we could all be told that this was the best of all possible plans, as the one the government currently favours always is.

So I stick to the sort of calculations you can do on the back of an envelope. These go more or less like this. The expense of the line is roughly proportionate to its length. So it would cost half as much in the NT. Putting it underground is at least twice as expensive as running it along the surface. So we could half the price by eliminating the tunnel — which if the station was in the NT we would not need anyway. This does not actually mean that three quarters of the vast sum voted by the Legco Finance Committee last weekend will be wasted. That would be unfair and inaccurate. Actually, all the money voted by the committee will be wasted, because the line could be built for a quarter of the real cost, which will come later.

The new line will not actually cost $66 billion. This figure was achieved by drastic massaging after the official total – which rose steadily through the planning process as such totals usually do – passed $80 billion. Sundry parts of the project which willl not actually have trains running on them were then transferred out of the total on the grounds that they were infrastructure which “would have to be built anyway.” They will, of course, still have to be paid for. Still in the future lie the cost overruns. Major public works tend to run over budget and those involving long bored tunnels tend to run massively over. A decent cheap connection could have been built from the money which legislators will be asked for later to make up for the optimism of the figures so far announced.

All this is the inevitable result of the foolish decision to merge the two railway companies. When we had two companies a project of this kind attracted two proposals, each of which had been prepared by a tesm which knew the win was likely to go to the cheaper one. Now we only get one proposal, for a sort of railway Concorde: a marvel of technology and a financial catastrophe.

The other interesting – though unoriginal – conclusion we can draw from all this is that the Functional Constituencies are not working as advertised. Remember all that highly-educated expertise and extensive professional experience which we were supposed to have installed in Legco through this system? It may be there, but it is not doing anything. There are members from technical, engineering, financial and business organisations and this was their chance to shine by asking searching questions about technology, engineering, finances and the business plan for the line, which seems to have come from the people who planned Disney. Instead they were staunch and dumb supporters of the official project. It is in the interest of professional and business groups to be beloved by the government and that takes priority over such trivia as exercising thedir specialised skills in the scrutiny of official extravagance. But we already knew that.