With Hong Kong’s annual budget in the works, we have been reminded of the many serious challenges facing the city. Our deficit is more than double the original forecast and the city’s gross domestic product last year was 2.5 per cent, a lower rate of growth than a forecast just months ago.
Advertisement
There is talk of possible pay cuts or freezes for civil servants and taking back – in some form or another – the HK$2 public transport concessionary scheme for the elderly. There is also talk of universities needing to dip into their reserves in anticipation of budget cuts.
Pay freezes, rolling back benefits for the elderly and cuts to education funding certainly don’t sound promising. But such is Hong Kong’s reality. We are at the whims of geopolitical volatility, Trump 2.0, weak local consumption and a residential property recovery that, according to S&P Global Ratings, “may be slipping out of view”.
Whether the worst is behind us is something we may not all agree on, even though Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu proudly made that declaration in 2022. However, we can all likely agree that we must improve our storytelling skills. Despite being tasked with telling the world good Hong Kong stories, we seem unable to find the plot. Telling the “good stories of Hong Kong” seems to have just become another buzz phrase, along with being a “hub” for almost everything.
Last month, the Post learned that one of the city’s tycoons plans to spearhead a US$50 million fundraising drive to promote the city through a worldwide public relations campaign. The effort would involve placing advertisements in foreign media. Whether those efforts will come to fruition, we’ll have to wait and see. The bigger problem could be that we don’t know what message we are even sending to the international community.
Advertisement
In his Lunar New Year message, Chief Executive Lee has promised that “Hong Kong will once again show its agility and resilience with flexible thinking to innovate, to reform and to seek further development”.
