I don’t like everything Hemlock posts but once in awhile he hits the nail on its proverbial head, as in this post (Thursday December 4):


… the Top 10 Official Screw-ups of 2008, as voted by our readers. There was the political appointees, allowed to keep foreign passports one day and then arm-twisted into losing them the next. There was the political appointees’ salaries, starring a 28-year-old bag-carrier getting HK$130,000 a month, almost 10 times the city’s median household income. There was the old people’s ‘fruit money’ allowance, to be means-tested one day, not means-tested the next. There was the levy on foreign maids, suspended in such a way as to cause an administrative nightmare, then in a less stupid way, first for two years, then for five, when all they had to do was kill it.

There was the HK Monetary Authority and the Securities and Futures Commission blaming each other for letting banks sell high-risk ‘minibonds’ to illiterates. There was the Great Bank Run Panic. There were embarrassing Executive Council members like David Li and Henry Fan, featuring respectively in an insider trading charge and the grotesquery that passed for corporate governance at CITIC Pacific. Then there was the predictable bed-wetting about the economic downturn, with every round of layoffs at banks, restaurants and retailers being met with promises to create more and more construction jobs. (This last trauma came with a silver lining, in that few politicians – even among the opposition – raised so much as an eyebrow at the announcement that the administration would spend HK$100 billion on infrastructure to create 40,000 jobs. Divide HK$100 billion by 40,000 and you get HK$2.5 million – rather a lot to create, say, two years’ work for a HK$10,000-a-month imported labourer. But apparently fine by our genius pro-democrats.)


Of course it would be nice if Hemlock would fix his RSS feed (broken since February), have links to individual posts and allow comments. Some may say I’m a dreamer ….

Hongkie Town
  • Share/Bookmark