Contrary to many analysts and politicians, I don’t believe that the policy address delivered last week by our Chief Executive is the “worst ever”. Moreover, I simply refuse to side with the sneering scornful commentators who have been disparaging the wording of the address for its shallowness, unconvincing semantics and lack of specifics. Sure, just like every single year, the address reflects a lack of courage that derives from a subtle mix of personal equation—our less than charismatic leader—, a balancing act between vested interests—the “four families”, their many cronies and their concealed conflicts of interests—, and institutional design—the absence of any form of accountability that has been eroding the overall legitimacy of the whole system. Just like in years past, the address is rather short of breath when it comes to critically reviewing past achievements or lack thereof regarding the implementation of previous public policies, as if the usual process of “assess, continue, revise, substitute or stop” had absolutely no meaning in our land of milk and honey.
Despite all the free flow of renminbi, mistakes, blunders and more than baroque policy designs will ultimately engender problems that will become ever harder to disentangle—traffic and public transportation naturally spring to mind—or simply impossible to tackle due to lack of preparedness—imagine a SARS-like crisis in Macao given our 2.3 hospital beds per 1,000 residents, half the ratio of both Hong Kong and Taiwan. And here, I am not even factoring the apparent incapacity of several government departments to anticipate things to come and thus articulate a diagnosis somehow correlated with reality. Just looking into the execution of the budget for 2012, now examined in the second permanent committee of the Legislative Assembly, and in which government revenues stand at MOP145 billion and spending at MOP54 billion, one soon realizes how wrong the government had been in its prospective calculations back in November 2011 when the budget for 2012 was thought to reach revenues of MOP115 billion and spending of MOP77 billion, ultimately earning 26% more but spending 30% less! And then, on such a trivial question as home-ownership and just as Mr Chui was trying to justify the backseat position given to housing measures, both our top executive and his “grey eminence” Lao Pun Lap started quoting figures that seemed to contradict the statistics of the DSEC: do we have 82.3% of home-owners, as per the 2011 census, or 72.9% according to DSEC figures for 2006 (down from 76.7% in 2001)? And how come the trend has been inverted at a time of renewed speculation? And what is the actual relevance of that figure anyway when these concern households (not individuals) in which young people who already have jobs purposely stay longer with their parents and delay their entry into an unsympathetic real-estate market beginning a career?
Nevertheless, and in spite of all the shortcomings, this particular address is announcing a paradigm shift of some sort, one in which, for the first time ever, the “short-termism” of the whole exercise is being questioned: if not a vision yet, surely there is a wish to project the whole community in the future. This is reflected in the generic title of the address “Increasing global capacity and promoting sustainable development”, that somehow positions “well-being” and “standard of living”, the two dominant leitmotifs of the 2013 and 2012 addresses respectively, as a dependent variable of the capacity to cultivate “talents”, that is to prepare Macao’s residents to be competitive and more self-assured in an environment that is necessarily extroverted. Ultimately, the government seems to realize that by overemphasizing the traditional Weberian perspective of the “protective” father, it had been defaulting on its capacity to be a “nurturing” uncle.
Published in Macau Daily Times, November 22 2013
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