The Pulse：Police Rally & Budget

Until relatively recently, the Hong Kong police have gone a long way towards improving its reputation as “the best police force money can buy”, after the dark days of the 1970s when police officers stormed the ICAC offices demanding not to be prosecuted for decades of corruption. There has not been another major police gathering until last Wednesday when police officers and their supporters came together to express their anger over the conviction of seven policemen for beating up protester Ken Tsang during the Occupy Central protests. Given the history of police protests it was perhaps surprising to see Maria Tam, the head of the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s operations review committee, addressing the crowd. The meeting was organised by the Junior Police Officers’ Association, and the Hong Kong Police Inspectors’ Association. The associations said that more than 30,000 current and retired officers and their families attended. They shouted “fight for justice”, complained that protesters had called them bad names, chanted foul language slogans and compared themselves and their treatment to that of Jewish people in Europe during World War II. That shocked many, including the Israeli Consulate in Hong Kong which, on Thursday, issued a statement saying that this reference was “inappropriate and regretful”, and that it wished “no further comparison will be made to the Jewish Holocaust”. The German consulate also expressed unease stating that “the comparison between the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and police officers convicted for an abuse of power is utterly inappropriate”. With me now in the studio are Senior Counsel and former Chairman of the HK Bar Association, Philip Dykes and legislator Priscilla Leung.
On Wednesday, the new Financial Secretary, Paul Chan delivered his first and probably last Budget as this is the final one for the current administration. At a press conference to explain the Budget, Mr Chan was asked how much he’d actually contributed to drafting the fiscal policies during the month or so he’d been in the position. He answered pretty much along the same lines former Financial Secretary John Tsang answered us on this show two weeks ago: saying that the Budget is not a personal effort but a collective government policy. The Budget contained few big surprises, but, yet again, the size of the surplus was a bit of a surprise. This time it totalled HK$92 billion. Given the size of the surplus, many were hoping that more of this cash hoard would be used to help the poor and the middle class.