Opinion | New year, fresh hope? Carrie Lam’s ‘new governance style’ is hardly auspicious for Hong Kong

The No 86 fortune stick drawn for Hong Kong by rural chief and legislator Kenneth Lau Ip-keung on the second day of the Year of the Pig put a downer on all the New Year celebrations.

But we don’t need to be superstitious to expect that. The global economic situation, exacerbated by the US-China trade war and all the political uncertainties around the world, makes being cautious about the future necessary. And so, we shouldn’t read too much into the fortune stick. Sober prudence will serve all of us well.

And so it should be, too, for the embattled government, which was once sold to the public as something like the new year – a fresh beginning, a government that is “different” and “new”. Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor had been trumpeting her “new style” and “new philosophy” almost everywhere she went.

At the Kellogg-Hong Kong University of Science and Technology MBA 20th Anniversary Management Conference last year, Lam said: “My vision for Hong Kong is very simple. It is for a Hong Kong of hope and happiness … In order to achieve that vision, I have derived or designed for myself and my team what I call a new governance style, new government roles, and a new fiscal philosophy.”

Lam must have thought that the old way of working was too inefficient, so much so that she decided to initiate negotiations and make deals without consulting the very people she would need to secure votes from to actually carry out her plans. This could be seen in the government’s handling of its proposal to readjust cross-harbour tunnel tolls to ease traffic congestion. For something that would cost the government HK$1 billion and effectively translate into a price hike of up to double for cross-tunnel road users, it’s naive to think people would just say “OK, thanks!”