As Policy Address looms, residents wonder if there is any hope at all Carrie will heed her boss

^{Carrie Lam getting instructions from her boss on one of her regular duty trips to Beijing. Will she listen?}

Will Carrie Lam follow the lead of her boss, Mr Xi? We will know in two months when the Chief Executive gives her Policy Address. The CCP Chairman called last week for all layers of government to address “ordinary people’s agonies over unequal distribution of income”. Oxfam has calculated Hong Kong’s top 21 richest people hold assets more valuable than the Government’s reserves of $1.8 trillion. This while the poor struggle to exist in nano or subdivided flats, many of them pushing carts around the street collecting cardboard. Will Mrs Lam attack inequality at tycoons’ expense?

^{How some live…..}

In China a commission led by Mr Xi has said the country must “regulate excessively high incomes and encourage high-income groups to return more to society.” While the party had long encouraged people to get “rich first”, it should now prioritise “common prosperity for all.” How might this be done? China’s wealth gap might be closed partially by changes to the tax code, raising levies on the richest businesses and individuals, and by implementation of a property sales tax.

The CCP has recognised vast inequality can threaten to undermine its legitimacy and it must improve the quality of people’s lives. The same applies in Hong Kong. The protests that led to riots two years ago were fueled in part by the frustration of the young feeling hopeless in an unfair society and knowing they have little chance ever of owning their own home. Hong Kong has the world’s highest property prices averaging US$1.235 million a flat in 2019. Many people thought during the riots that the kids were protesting about the wrong things. The city’s Gini Coefficient — a ratio measuring distribution of wealth where zero is perfect equality and one is perfect inequality — is 0.54, a shameful eighth worst in the world after African countries and Brazil.

^{. . .And how others exist}

Mrs Lam has said her focus as she approaches the end of her first term in office will be “housing, housing, housing”. Given the dismal record, few expect fundamental change. Small scale housing projects for the poor and application of bandaids are the norm. The Government’s answer to the obscenity of nano and subdivided flats was to establish a commission that recommended dutifully as required that limits be set on rent increases. What a joke. A sad joke at the expense of the poor. Such distressing living conditions can lead to mental illness, family strife and crime.

Boldness could bring about great change, but no-one believes we will see it from this Government. It could take part of the $1.8 trillion in reserves and employ architects and contractors to build minimum 700 sq ft flats for the middle classes and sell them at affordable prices. About 50,000 apartments built annually for 10 years — after seed capital the programme would finance itself — would transform the housing market. The tycoons wouldn’t like it. Has Mrs Lam got the stomach to take them on?

Will she also address fairer distribution of income? Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed that everyone with net assets exceeding US$50 million should be taxed two per cent a year. Apply that to Hong Kong and relate it to Oxfam’s estimate of the assets of the richest people here. Try to calculate how much money that would bring in for the Government and . . . Poof. The calculator goes up in smoke.

Will we see such vast change from Mrs Lam in October? Unlikely. Will she get a second term as Chief Executive? Quite likely.