Last night's non-election non-debate made it pretty clear that Donald Tsang Yam-kuen will not get the job done on most of the social promises made during this non-election campaign.

Carine Lai over at Civic Express summed up the future prospects for Constitutional Reform under Tsang once the fait accompli is sealed.

Of course, this is probably the point. After the election, Donald Tsang is just going to come out and say that we can’t make any progress towards universal suffrage because the CSD “was unable to come to a consensus.” “Views,” he’ll say with the expression of a doctor announcing the death of a patient to the relatives, “were just too diverse. I’m sorry.”

One of the other big items was reform of the education reforms. One of the questioners brought up the recent targets for primary school closings and asked how this was in line with Tsang's recently assumed position on small class size education. Tsang hemmed and hawed on the question and refused to commit to stop closing schools. Alan Leong pointed out that other Asian countries had taken advantage of dwindling school age populations to move towards small class size education, but Donald Tsang would have none of that. The best Tsang would commit to was a pilot program and kept saying the whole idea was too expensive. (The quickest way to kill a popular social program is over-estimate its budget and claim that it would be too expensive to implement and then you can avoid implementing it based upon overblown budget estimates designed to kill the program).

And for economic development policy, Tsang clearly showed the out-of-touch hand of someone who has been working in a civil service position for 40 years, where shoe shining is the requirement to climb the ladder. Tsang even defended the abysmal flop of Cyberport, which accomplished diverting funds to the Li family but has been a miserable failure at jump starting Hong Kong's hi-tech IT/Software sector. When stating that Alan Leong might be fomenting class welfare by opening up Hong Kong's economic sector to competition and reducing government policies that prop up high land prices and high commercial rents, it showed that Donald Tsang's grasp of the economic conditions in Hong Kong have come from too many private meetings with the Li family and Lau family and the Liaison Office of Beijing's Foreign Ministry and not enough time in Sham Shui Po or Yuen Long (and never been to Peng Chau) going over how the non-tycoon families make ends meet. 40 years of being out of touch with the job market and the feasibility of market entrance for new businesses is a loooooong time and it shows.

p.s. should I even mention Roland at ESWN playing up the exchange at the debate that fanned Beijing's paranoid anti-democratic wetdream of splittism in Hong Kong?