It was at best shortsighted of the government to claim it was unreasonable to halt demolition of the Star Ferry and Queen's piers. Its reasons? Work on the Central Reclamation scheme was proceeding at full steam, and all procedures had been duly followed, it claimed.
A recent study on Hong Kong's competitiveness identifies that the city's ranking is suffering because of its land policy, high land prices and deteriorating environment. Overdevelopment is destroying the quality of life, and will ultimately destroy economic growth.
When the government says development can't be stopped, officials are not talking about technical issues or contracts. The government always retains the right to make any changes it chooses, thus minimising compensation. What the government means by 'development' is its land disposal programme and road works to support and enable land sales. Fifty years of property- and infrastructure-led development has the government believing that this is the only form of progress suitable for Hong Kong.
With the dependence on land sales revenue, the large number of overpaid government road engineers without meaningful work, and the interest in the status quo by developers, we have a powerful inertia which makes change difficult. This is especially so for the likes of Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen and Secretary for Housing, Planning and Lands Michael Suen Ming-yeung, who have grown up in this system.
The protest over the Star Ferry clock tower is but the latest attack on the government's land disposal programme. Leaving the clock tower standing would have made the sale of the site, and maintaining the intensity of the proposed groundscraper development, more difficult. Or so officials think. Neither Mr Suen nor his department's permanent secretary, Rita Lau Ng Wai-lan, have any idea about how they could combine the two. Nor do they have any working relationship with professionals who could show them how. At no stage did they communicate with activists, harbour planners or conservation groups.
Clearly, whatever the cost, they were not going to let this new attack on their land sales revenue succeed. But they miscalculated the tenacity of the protesters. More importantly, they miscalculated public sentiment in support of cultural and heritage preservation, and public antipathy for the overdevelopment of our city. And they still don't understand what is really driving public sentiment.
