Daai Tou Laam Diary

The Maids Ruling: Some Quotes

tj_legg@hotmail.com (Tom Legg) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:20:53 +0800

FACV No. 19 of 2012

pp 4-5
7. Since the mid-1970s, with greater affluence and increasing numbers of households where both spouses go out to work, there has been a growing demand by Hong Kong families for domestic helpers. The local supply of such labour was scarce, so FDHs have been recruited from many countries including the Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Thailand and Sri Lanka to meet the demand. The number of such FDHs in Hong Kong grew from 881 in 1974, to 28,951 in 1986, to 70,335 in 1990, and stood at 285,681 on 31 December 2010. It is therefore plain that FDHs represent a highly valuable and indeed essential workforce. Many FDHs have had multiple renewals of their contracts with the same employer and have forged close personal ties with the families in which they work.

p14
(31. Re Ip Pui Man Nina) 31. Such a requirement – of ordinary residence of unspecified duration at any time during the preceding three years – obviously has a far lower threshold than Article 24(2)(4)’s requirement of a continuous seven year period of ordinary residence and reflects a statutory purpose wholly different from the purposes underlying the questions facing this Court.

pp 20-21
48. Leaving aside the detailed reasoning in those decisions, it is clear that a court’s orientation in construing a tax statute may be influenced by purposive considerations which are inapplicable in other contexts. Thus, the House of Lords was likely to have been anxious to avoid construing “ordinary residence” in a manner facilitating tax avoidance and for that reason gave the concept a wide meaning.

p. 25
59. The vital difference in Lord Scarman’s approach involved his Lordship’s decision that (except where presence in the country was unlawful) the immigration status of the students under the 1971 Immigration Act was irrelevant for the purposes of the Education Act.

p 28
67. A person may indeed be able to show that he or she had lived lawfully, voluntarily and for a settled purpose, as part of the regular order of life for the time being in the country over a given period of time, but questions are bound to arise in some cases as to whether qualitative aspects of all or part of that period of residence are of such a character as to render it other than “ordinary residence”. The qualitative aspects of FDHs’ residence in Hong Kong are obviously of potential relevance.

The United Front is Spinning CY Leung Hard

tj_legg@hotmail.com (Tom Legg) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:14:32 +0800

After spinning the Liaison Office's Scrooge McCY as a man of the people and someone to shake up HK's tycoons prior to taking office last July, the United Front is back with a vengeance on the day after his inaugural Policy Address.

Of course the actual Policy Address was a potpourri of goodies and subsidies for HK's tycoons with no asset checks, while the few benefits for the poor and middle-class individual were attached with massive strings and major asset checks.

Since housing is the major complaint of locals it's only natural to find Scrooge McCY addressing the problem. Of course his bosses at the Liaison Office and friends use Hong Kong property as a stable depository of questionable wealth, so this limits Scrooge McCY's options, but rest assured Scrooge McCY has maintained the belief system of property flipping as Hong Kong's primary personal economic ladder, which ensures HK's wealth will properly be diverted in to the pockets of the few HK and mainland developers that monopolise the market.

When faced with a problem of too much money (due to the CCP's binge spending on non-productive assets flooding Hong Kong with cheap cash) chasing a limited amount of assets, you either have to limit the cash or increase the amount of assets that can chased. Scrooge McCY diverted the cash from residential property at least temporarily in to parking spaces, commercial property, milk formula and the rest of Hong Kong life, while experts were figuring a way to work around the special stamp tax on mainland money. The real Hong Kong government way though is to create more opportunities for big profits for Hong Kong's tycoons. And Scrooge McCY's Policy Address delivered land, land, and more land for property development. Underground land to survey and turn into concrete. Sea to survey and turn into concrete. Greenspace to survey and turn into concrete. Must have MORE CONCRETE to sustain property developer's profits and provide places for the Liaison Office's friends to park their assets without creating an excessively bubblicious HK property market.

When faced with opposition from communities that would be destroyed by all of the concrete pouring, Scrooge McCY was resolute in his vow that divisions of opinion would not stop him screwing the communities. Of course Scrooge McCY was just as resolute in vowing to let community divisions stop him from considering whether to allow communities be treated equally based upon whom they screw. Never say Scrooge McCY isn't resolute in doing what his puppetmasters want him to do.

The most interesting part of the Policy Address reflected the financial backing of Civic Exchange. The bus companies have been lobbying hard the last few years to reduce their labour costs, since the primary driver of Hong Kong's corporate wealth is labour exploitation via pathetic wages and excessive hours. The easiest way to reduce labour costs would be to cut the salaries of C-level staff by two-thirds, but that would run counter to every MBA course and tycoon's dreams, which demand firing front-line staff instead. Time to make bus drivers redundant with a government directive. Thanks, Ms Loh. And if you have a pile of rusting depreciated assets on hand that need to be replaced, you can be sure Scrooge McCY will have a big handout for you under the principle of The Polluter Gets Paid with no asset checks. Of course Scrooge McCY and Christine Loh may get reduced API levels at the paltry few roadside pollution stations the government runs, but please remember Bow-tie trying to hype the air pollution benefits of LPG taxis as the sun sets in to another smog-filled sky. Also be sure to note there are no new tarriffs on CLP or HK Electric for generating power and particulates and SO2 and CO here to ship the power north of the border for big profits, while overpaying for clean nuclear power from a company in which they are a major shareholder.

But remember it is only pragmatic that Hong Kong's Chief Executive hand out wealth and assets to the richest while feeding the scraps to the wretched and poor. This is because CY Leung truly has his heart in the right place and helps those that are most deserving, which God and The Party have shown by making them the wealthiest (or at least wealthy enough they have an address on The Peak instead of in Kowloon Tong or God forbid the public housing that Long Hair was living in when he was elected to LegCo).

What's Your Plan?

tj_legg@hotmail.com (Tom Legg) — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 12:33:36 +0800

Hong Kong pan-dems pushed forth a motion of impeachment of Scrooge McCY that was pushed back by the non-democratic shoeshiner monopoly of power. Hong Kong's most annoying shoe-shiner castigates the pan-dems for this futile waste of time over minor affairs, almost sounding like Carrie Lam's bullshit script to LegCo.

It's true the motion had no chance of success, but Scrooge McCY's old age living allowance has no chance of success of even ameliorating the problem of old age poverty in Hong Kong either given it's stingy wealth requirements. (or the expansion of medical vouchers or travel subsidies or...) The real target of the impeachment process was tweaking the nose of the Liaison Office. A not-so-subtle reminder that the Liaison Office, their boy Scrooge McCY, their shoe-shiners and their green spray-painted astroturf roots are a Vichy government in Hong Kong.

And like clockwork the new head of the Liaison Office promptly replies that the Liaison Office does not run Hong Kong and that they have no intent on removing Scrooge McCY from office. In hierarchies, the person running the show is the one that can remove other people from their positions in the hierarchy. Can the people of Hong Kong remove a much detested CE from office? Can the Liaison Office remove any CE from office? Can the Liaison Office tell people whom to vote for in a LegCo or CE election and expect obedience? So now we're all clear on where accountability in the HK SAR lies and who is running the show here.

And of course when the plans of the great and powerful are rubbish, much like Tony Blair and George W. Bush, the cries go out, "But what's your plan?" This of course shows a rather shallow understanding of local affairs gleaned from shoe-shiner/pro-tycoon rags, which only run negative stories to rubbish the pan-dems. For example the pan-dems, if I'm not mistaken, were the ones to suggest to CY to build public housing on government plots that hadn't had auctions triggered by developers. Intriguing idea that CY pondered for a day, but promptly did a 180 and rubbished it because developers didn't like the idea that the government might use the developers' yet-to-be-realised landbank and that "those people moving in next door" might destabilise the neighborhood property markets.

The pan-dems also put forth a motion for the government to buy back the Link REIT, which was shut down by the astroturf roots of the DAB and their tycoon Functional Constituency cohorts. This came shortly before the numbers were posted that public housing had a bad debt this year and the reserves were dwindling. These were the reserves from the Link REIT privatisation deal that the government promised would fund HK's public housing in perpetuity. Guess what? The government that had Scrooge McCY as ExCo convenor and property guru lied. It hasn't benefited public housing tenants despite what the government said and was accepted by HK's courts. That court decision on the judicial review of the Link REIT, which was backed by the pan-dems and not Scrooge McCY, was the one where I knew rule of law was dead in HK.

A reliable stream of commercial rents for the tycoons is more important to Scrooge McCY than the store ownership opportunities for tenants that existed pre-Link. Community is the dirtiest word to a government that has declared multiple times that the only measure of a property's utility is the money generated at auction, since the community is an infestation that blocks the will of Scrooge McCY and his friends from maximising property values.

And it was the community that forced Scrooge McCY to take any action on the flood of hot money from the mainland inflating and distorting Hong Kong's economy. Hong Kong's most annoying shoe-shiner and the property analysts at the most important financial skimmers kept saying the problem was low US interest rates and US monetary expansion. Sorry guys, the problem wasn't that, it's what I was saying all along, hot money from the mainland, which still has double-digit M2 growth due to off-books financial voodoo. Of course Scrooge McCY wasn't serious about stopping the flow of hot money, so he just diverted the money away from the most talked-about pain point, residential property. The money is still inflating and distorting Hong Kong's economy as even the most cursory glace at McDonald's prices could tell a dimwit, but the diversion is enough to gain a pat on the head from folks like Chugani, who then curse as greedy the folks in other sectors that soak up the excess cash with inflated prices. So my first plan, if I were CE, would be to institute strict money laundering penalties with a strict definition of money laundering and transparency for banks to stop the flow of hot money, something like surrender all transaction fees gained from laundered money plus $5ⁿ penalty where n is equal to number of illegal transactions prior to notification of authorities. I'd also ensure the courts list the names of beneficiaries of money launderers unlike the current court case of the Guangzhou man that laundered HK$2b over 5 months. And the transparency requirements run counter to Scrooge McCY's proposal to reduce corporate transparency in Hong Kong to keep his friends' skeletons in the closet hidden from the community.

Stemming the flow of mainland money would be combined with statements that the HK government is more committed to its communities and would have no interest in maintaining a stable property market and had plans to ameliorate owner-occupiers with underwater mortgages due to a bubble collapse, but won't lift a finger for investors and speculators under the principle of caveat emptor and moral risk. This would be combined with a mandate for the HKMA and friends to post clear and convenient economic data on their websites, such that even dim-witted property analysts could look at the mortgage loan data in Hong Kong and see it isn't driven by US QE#.

I'd also move on the School Nets scam that's designed to keep classist Hong Kong classist and artificially keeps demand high for properties owned by the classists. This is a start of a program that would put Hong Kong communities first, even if it wiped out a lot of asset-inflated wealth along the way.

Predictable Behaviour From Scrooge McCY and Friends

tj_legg@hotmail.com (Tom Legg) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 10:48:15 +0800

Given Scrooge McCY's history as a surveyor, it's predictable that his solution to Hong Kong's housing problem would be the equivalent of some over-the-hill pop band doing a one-hit wonder revival tour. Scrooge McCY's one-hit wonder was helping to lay out Shenzhen. So obviously to this man the solution is laying out new towns, which is why he's revived the plan that was consistently reshelved by his predecessors for the Northeast New Territories' New Towns. Makes me suspect that the plan was pushed by his predecessors' ExCo convenor, but blocked by more sensible heads. If only HK's press could figure out who that ExCo convenor, perhaps HK could be spared the dismal failure of the project going forward and spared the destruction of more living communities for the greed of absentee land owners and the ego of a faded one-hit wonder.

The proposal from Scrooge McCY's developer gurus is increased plot density and smaller apartments. Affordability is to gained by reducing livability instead of reducing price per square foot. This is totally predictable given the history of Scrooge McCY's Sec for Development Paul Chan. What was the solution that Paul Chan's companies had for affordable housing? Increased plot density and small apartments, also known as subdivided flats. Welcome to Hong Kong, where the post-handover political appointees do their best to institutionalise every bad policy idea that enriches their friends while feeling like they solve the problems of the poor.

Scrooge McCY and His URA

tj_legg@hotmail.com (Tom Legg) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 09:59:45 +0800

The options were obvious: 1) Favor the tycoons, 2) Favor the small property owner, 3) Keep your mouth shut. Isn't it obvious which one Scrooge McCY's URA chose?

Given the "Big market, Little Government" propaganda that floods HK, you'd expect the government to keep their mouths shut about a private property market transaction. With the propaganda about Scrooge McCY favoring the little guy, you'd think his URA might come out in support of the small property owner.

And given the "rabid anti-CY" sentiment it's not surprising that on December 28th Green Sense and the Neo-Democrats staged a protest at Scrooge McCY's Urban Renewal Authority concerning this issue. Given the usual commentary from HK's most annoying shoeshiner, you'd expect the pan-dems would be out protecting the tycoons from CY's interventions on behalf of the little guy. Sorry all of that propaganda is just hot air, as Scrooge McCY's URA spoke out on behalf of the property developer and urged the small-time property owner to sell out, so the property developer could get on making big bucks in Tai Kok Tsui.

Apparently the DAB's grassroots are looking more like well-manicured green shoe polish, as it's the pan-dems that are out in support of the little guy seeking decent compensation to sell out to the tycoons. And what was the response of Scrooge McCY's URA to the protest?

But the URA spokesman, Lawrence Yau, denied that the authority had intended to put pressure on the owner.

That's as dumb as Elsie's excuse that her calls for National People's Congress Standing Committee to decide who gets to live in Hong Kong wasn't meant to pressure the judiciary.

Scrooge McCY and The Night Before Christmas

tj_legg@hotmail.com (Tom Legg) — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 10:50:41 +0800

Even HK's most annoying shoe-shiner is heaping praise upon the PR maneuvers this holiday season of Scrooge McCY. The band has squawked loudly about him breaking the monopoly of the monopolists and Scrooge McCY being a true populist, but that's all bah and humbug.

What has Scrooge McCy done? Why today HK finds that Scrooge McCY won't open the beef market.

He {Secretary for Food and Health, Ko Wing-man} said the government will study whether Hong Kong's beef supply is being monopolized by Ng Fung Hong {Hong Kong's sole beef supplier and a mainland firm}.

Have to study if a monopoly supplier is monopolising the market. *lolololololol* Only hiding behind years of a flood of "Big Market, Little Government" propaganda could you make such a dumb ass remark.

What other presents has Scrooge McCY brought this year? How about Law Reform Commission proposal for changes to adverse possession. In order to more fully utilize property in Hong Kong, the government maked it easier for developers to force poor owners out of their property by lowering the ownership percentage requirements for redevelopment but makes it harder for squatters to actually utilise property unused by inattentive absentee owners. Can you figure out who Scrooge McCY favours this Christmas?

The only affordable housing Scrooge McCY has created for the middle class has come by reallocating it from the poor. True expression of benevolence and cause for celebration.

But what about the Old Age Living Allowance? Doesn't that prove Scrooge McCY cares? Exactly in the same way that Darth Bowtie's Travel Subsidy and Medical Vouchers did. *lmao* Programs designed primarily as a PR stunt to prove that "the proper class" cares about the less fortunate, while ensuring that minimal expenditures are actually made from the public purse due to the stinginess of the government restrictions imposed on the program.

The only thing that the Old Age Living Allowance debacle demonstrates is the real problem with having Hong Kong run by the Liaison Office. They're still happy to squeeze every free dollar out of Bob Cratchit while remaining smug since they've made action on the CCP's big problems in little Hong Kong without ever compromising with any of those dirty old dissidents.

The pro-CCP Federation of Trade Unions thought that Scrooge McCY's restrictions on the OALA were stingy. Even the CCP's local lip-synchers, the DAB thought the restrictions were stingy, but they should only be relaxed after the program's passage or it might provide some credit to those dirty dissidents fighting for HK's grassroots, which by shoe-shiners' rights was their claim to glory.

How bad is this hatred of dirty dissidents? Scrooge McCY brought in Christine Loh to help with his environmental credibility and by only listening to the pro-government district councillors in Tai Po has forced her to defend a ludicrous Environmental Impact Assessment and endangered animal resettlement plan that has left Ms Loh with zero credibility and a post-government career path as a turd polisher for BP/Exxon-Mobil.

Scrooge McCY gets to relive his Shenzhen surveying glory days with the northeast New Territories new town development plan. Ignore the dirty dissidents actually using the land and only listen to pro-government absentee land owners. Only ignore the pro-government absentee land owners when they are assaulting the dirty dissidents, especially the Hong Kong Police ignore the tomahawk chops of dissidents with the megaphone played repeatedly on the news channels.

Yes, Hong Kong, Santa Claus may be a lie, but so is everything that comes out of Scrooge McCY's mouth. And unfortunately it's infectious as lies become the standard operating procedure for Scrooge McCY's ministers, from the environment to education to immigration to arrests and prosecution. And even worse than the lies is that Scrooge McCY and his friends are starting to believe their own lies and as the late, great Izzy Stone said that's the government that's really dangerous.

Hong Kong Politics via Yesterday's Demonstrations

tj_legg@hotmail.com (Tom Legg) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 10:11:07 +0800

It's clear that the accountability moment has passed in HK. LegCo elections are over and the need for a populist message from the DAB and property tycoons is put to rest until the next election.

First, the property tycoon buskers are back out in force around IFC. The time for chatter over affordable housing is dead. Even CY's Secretary of Slum Development has said that the "Hong Kong property for Hong Kongers" program isn't to create affordable housing, but merely to keep a stable housing supply. Notably, HK property analysts suggest the land price for these properties in Kowloon Bay will be much lower, but the flat prices will not be any lower. Their analysis is that PRC buyers account for 20% of demand for HK property and that a 20% drop in demand will have zero impact on the demand-supply price curve, but only increase the profit margins of property developers for the plots. Can you spot the free market?

Second, the DAB was off protesting at the Japanese consulate. The HKEx (home of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange/Hang Seng Index) has had to shut down some elevators in the building. This comes as the CCP sends ships off to the Diaoyus and Scarborough Shoal, so obviously the DAB is acting as the CCP's local proxy. If you think this is a populist move, go study the LegCo election results for some of the protesters that actually landed on the Diaoyus and hailed as patriots.

Meanwhile, HK journalists from Ming Pao were detained by mainland security thugs for daring to interview the family of Li Wangyang. Before the accountability moment the DAB called for an investigation in to his suspicious death. Now? Not a peep on the CCP trying to silence the truth in the matter. One the flipside, the Democrats were out protesting at the Liaison Office. The night of the elections, the Democratic Party's Fred Li was on ATV's Newsline with Michael Chugani and "radical centrist" Michael "The through train is the way" DeGolyer. The discussion dealt with the electorate of Hong Kong being radicalised by the money being pumped in to Hong Kong's economy from the mainland. So the Democrats, who suffered the most from the Civic Party's idiotic election strategy, were out protesting at the Liaison Office and declining a social invitation to dine with CY.

Obviously the election has shown the Democratic Party that the CCP thanked them for the one-night stand on Electoral Reform and then got told the CCP just wasn't that in to them. At least this sets up an interesting run up to the alleged universal suffrage CE election.

Populist and Offshore Corporate Shells

tj_legg@hotmail.com (Tom Legg) — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 09:30:12 +0800

So CY rode in to office on a wave of populist rhetoric about the status quo politicians being out of touch with regular HKers.

Yet even before he took office, he was lying about whether he had illegal structures at his home on The Peak. His officials also had illegal structures. A lot of HKers probably do have illegal structures, so I guess this i is a bit of a populist touch, though it would be a populist touch for the much reviled Henry Tang as well.

The problem wasn't the structures themselves, but the lying and the fact that CY's government continues to hypocritically push policies to demolish illegal structures regardless of whether they withstood a T10 and would pass architectural safety inspections.

Then came the scandal over his first Secretary of Development and misuse of government housing reimbursements. Some might argue CY sacrificed his first Secretary of Development to ensure certain other senior civil servants involved in similar scams would be compliant. After all, men with possible jail terms hanging over their heads are far less rebellious.

And now comes the kerfuffle over the second big housing policy of the administration: coffin rooms in sub-divided flats. CY's nominee to replace his first Secretary of Development has been discovered to be involved in ownership of exactly this sort of sub-divided coffin rooms. Of course there is the requisite lying about what he knew and when he knew it. It makes one wonder about CY Leung's vetting of his staff.

But what I really want to point out is that Paul Chan's home is owned by two shadowy off-shore corporations. Given the kerfuffles over ex-CE Donald Tsang's Shenzhen flat and ex-Chief Secretary Rafael Hui's flat, you'd think ownership of Paul Chan's flat would have been investigated.

A minority of Hong Kongers can even afford their own home, even with government subsidised flats, due to rampant housing speculation. Of those that own their own homes, the vast majority of them own their properties in their own names. But Hong Kong's elite exist in a different world, a world filled with shell corporations, many of them based in off-shore tax havens. Anyone that has studied the corporate structures of HK's top companies knows of the shells within shells and cross-linked directorships. So it's not surprising that a man of the elite with a home on The Peak, like CY Leung, would find nothing out of the ordinary about the ownership of Paul Chan's home being held by shadowy shell corporations in off-shore tax havens.

For the rest of Hong Kong though, it's a reminder that CY was convenor of Tung's and Bowtie's ExCos. His campaign populism was a sham and really he's just as out of touch with the masses as the DAB, whose grassroots are only as deep as the gift bags they give to the elderly.

National Education Curriculum

tj_legg@hotmail.com (Tom Legg) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 12:05:47 +0800

Brainwashing? Propaganda? Almost assuredly. At least we can be sure from the National Education implementation that nothing has dramatically changed from the two previous HK CE's. The CE will implement his pet programmes over divided public opinion while claiming public support. The CE will block programmes he dislikes with the rationale that public opinion is divided and the public supports his blocking these programmes. The behaviour shows utter contempt for the people of HK and an unwillingness to treat them as adults. (Insert some ideas of modern neo-Confucianism as a rationalisation for authoritarians to treat the people they rule over as non-adult lesser beings.)

As the HK SAR government rams through their National Education programme, let's keep a few questions in mind when determining if it is brainwashing. First, will the HK SAR government fund alternative curriculum development? Second, will the HK SAR government delay implementation of the program until alternative curriculums are available? And third, will the government require alternative curriculums be approved as satisfactory by the Department of Education?

Could I develop a National Education curriculum that taught the Chinese Communist Party's insurgency from the 20s crippled China economically, militarily, and politically to the point it was an easy target for Japanese invasion? Could I teach that the US-brokered truce between the Communists and Chiang Kai-shek was the only thing that allowed the CCP to survive the 40s? Could I teach that the Communists ran the country in to the ground from 1949 to 1979 economically, thus producing an incredibly depressed baseline from which to judge current economic progress? Could I teach that during those 30 years that Chiang Kai-shek, Lee Kuan-yew, and even the British in HK, demonstrated the same economic growth that the CCP now claim to be superior to all others? Could I teach that the major driving force of the PRC's economic miracle of the last 30 years was a willingness to sacrifice Chinese labour as cheap serfs for HK and Taiwanese capital, which then produced knock-on unemployment in HK and Taiwan? Teach that the one true miracle of the CCP economically is a willingness to force unequal economic treaties on foreign companies who are blindly tempted by the ever unrealized notion of a billion person market? Could I excerpt a travel guide on Taiwan and state that Taipei's beauty was unrealised until democracy forced the KMT to pursue policies to make the Taiwanese people happy?

I'm sure my educational curriculum would be labeled as brainwashing by those who developed the government's curriculum. But given what I've seen of the HK Secondary School Geography curriculum, I'm not surprised at the brainwashing in education here. When I say Geography, don't think geography. The curriculum is closer to some sort of property tycoon urban planning nirvana. Living in over-priced under-sized mislabeled high-rise rabbit hutches is the natural order of things, so don't worry and be happy.

As for appeals to being Chinese and the importance of learning Chinese culture? It's as if the students aren't learning Putonghua. It's as if the students for generations haven't been brainwashed in to believing that written Cantonese is invalid and unworthy of study in favour of written Putonghua. It's as if the students don't already study Chinese history and Chinese literature. And if you want to teach a Chinese government class, do we need more than the Basic Law of HK and the Constitution of the PRC? Do we need the misinterpretations of the Basic Law by the Election Committee and the National People's Congress? Do we need to do more than hand our students rubber stamps for them to understand the CCP and HK's Executive-led governments?

Is CY Just Another Hustler With Empty Promises?

tj_legg@hotmail.com (Tom Legg) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 09:05:20 +0800

So two days in to his new term as CE of Hong Kong and CY is heading in the wrong direction. He may be rapidly uniting Hong Kong, but he's not uniting them behind his leadership. CY's continued to promise that he's bringing fresh air to the job, even though he was a major player since the Handover in one of the major problems, ExCo. Is CY's new listening tour an admission that he wasn't listening as ExCo convenor for the last 15 years?

First there is the cause celebre of the July 1st March: Hello Kitty. Why Hello Kitty? Because CY used Hello Kitty stickers as an excuse for not living up to his Mr. Clean billing. The use of excuses is a way of dismissing the concerns of others, which is the opposite of listening. Hong Kong's long suffering masses are used to excuses from their administration, like lots of people come out for marches because they want to take a nice holiday stroll in the sunshine. And if crisis management doesn't teach that people don't want to hear excuses, it surely teaches that apologies should NEVER contain the word "but". Yet CY (and his proxies Tsang Yok-sing and Bernard Cheung) used the word in his apology. "I was negligent, BUT I do not have integrity problems." It's like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Excuses and BUTs just piss people off because it shows you aren't willing to unequivocally take responsibility. This doesn't bode well for CY, since during the CE "campaign" his major positive was not being Henry Tang and his major negative was a slick ability to answer questions while avoiding answering the questions.

Then there's the police response to the protest march. It was the same old games with the numbers trying to downplay opposition. The FT BeyondBrics blog on the march and discontent coined a phrase: "one country, two realities". This is in response to official media not reflecting the reality that everyone else can see with their own eyes. Officials on both sides of the border are guilty of disappearing data, "massaging" data or fabricating data (like HK's CPU use of push polls). And after the police's unreal numbers, came the excuses. The clusterfuck of crowd control was everybody's fault but the police. This is Lau Nai-keung listening. Every one not supporting the government is a dissident and should shut up, so we can listen to the people willing to feed our vision of reality.

Next there's Carrie Lam in TKO with the Education Secretary in tow. As anyone who's followed the news in the last 5 years, the big issue in TKO is the landfill. She didn't bring the Environment Secretary, she brought the Education Secretary, like a job-seeker who couldn't be bothered to do even the most basic of research. Was she not listening at her last position in government? And again, when faced with the true concerns of the people, the government official goes on the defensive and pushes out excuses. The government can't do anything quickly, because it's a big problem. Again with the Lau Nai-keung listening. The problem here isn't the Civil Service getting stuck on their preferred solution, but the political appointee getting stuck on their preferred solution and refusing to listen and work with the grassroots.

Then there was CY himself. The confrontation with members of People Power may make the news due to being the big splash, but the real problem for CY was his answers on housing. The problem posed to him was housing not being affordable. The official response to the problem? That he wouldn't make housing affordable and then a deflection towards CY's programme to enrich his cronies.

Allow me digress here a bit in response to a Time magazine article on the march. The issue with mainlanders and property isn't a matter of them buying our expensive property. It isn't a matter of, "they're marrying our white women and moving in to our neighborhoods." Rather mirroring the US, where fraudulently easy credit in the mid-2000s skewed property production towards McMansions that became asset deadweight after the bubble burst, the fraudulently easy credit on the mainland since 2008 (see AlsoSprachAnalysts' graph on China's M2 growth) skewed property development in HK towards luxury estates to the point the government had to place restrictions on a few less prime land sales to provide non-luxury flats. And the excess cash in Hong Kong that was floating in from across the border was dragging the prices in the rest of the property market up from the top. And this was true, not just in residential property, but also in commercial real estate, where rents skyrocketed and shops were being skewed to provide luxury bling for the status-seeking nouveau riche of the mainland.

The real problem here comes back to the issue of one country, two realities. How do we know mainland money is skewing these markets? Look at the luxury jewelry stores popping up like 7-11s in tourist districts that have killed off mom and pop shops in nearby streets in a domino effect of gentrification. As for residential housing, all we have is a survey by one property agency of records that used putonghua for the anglicized names instead of their cantonese names. e.g. Lin vs Lam. When I wondered if there was official data on how much HK property investment came from mainland Trusts and investment vehicles that promised big returns, I was told there isn't any. If mainland officials told CY that many struggling mainland Trusts and investment vehicles couldn't survive bursting HK's property bubble and it would cause very bad problems for the Party on the mainland, what do you think CY's policy action would be? Take care of HKers and make housing affordable or take care of the Party?

We can't know why, but making housing in HK more affordable is off the table. Instead we are offered a resumption of the Home Ownership Scheme, a lecture on how his family bought a house with a few years' hard work with plastic flowers and so should you and a lecture on a need to come up with a plan for the future of land formation, which sounds a lot like the government's laughable Hong Kong 2020 consultation on Morlocks and reclamation. Previous governments, that CY was part of, told us they were listening and then Lau Nai-keunged the consultation results to create the reality the government wanted, which puts CY's listening tour in a deep hole to start. But after one weekend of CY in charge, it's pretty much the same story. And if CY doesn't start to learn truth from facts, he's truly in danger of becoming the next Tung Chee-hwa and not making it to the end of his term despite being the Party's Golden Boy.