‘Do less, err less’ attitude lives on in the Hong Kong government
John Chan says the Wang Chau row exposes the mentality of officials who are quick to shirk responsibility for unpopular decisions, and our small-circle chief executive election only makes things worse
Brownfield sites in the New Territories go back a long way. Back, in fact, to the mass occupation of government and privately owned rural land for industrial and commercial use, in most cases illegally. It was regularised through the granting of short-term licences and waivers.
However, what started as a policy of tolerating in the short term the illegal occupation of government land, and allowing deviation from prescribed use on land parcels not immediately required for development, has fostered widespread abuse. Worse, it has become a tool used to regularise trespass and breaches of use. Many see this as caving in to vested local interests.
The government is pushing on with the first phase of the Wang Chau development plan in Yuen Long, evicting the non-indigenous villagers living on a green-belt site to build 4,300 public housing units. But it has taken no steps to terminate the short-term licences and waivers granted to the adjacent brownfield sites so that the remainder of the 17,000 planned units could be built.
Political ambitions must not be allowed to harm governance
Things turned ugly when both the chief secretary and the financial secretary denied playing any role in the decision to defer the project. Hong Kong people have been left wondering why no one in government, other than Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, seems to have been responsible.
At a press conference on the issue attended by both Leung and Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah, Leung said it was “his decision” as chairman of the Wang Chau project to develop it in phases, by adopting the Housing Bureau’s recommendation to build 4,300 units in the first phase, without touching the adjacent brownfields. He choked back tears when he talked about the difficulty faced by his government colleagues in “trying to find parcels of land bit by bit”.
