The Pulse：The 2016-2017 Budget and in the studio, Fernando Cheung of Labour Party to talk about it,

On Wednesday, Financial Secretary John Tsang delivered his ninth Budget, this administration’s final full year Budget. For Hong Kong’s 1.9 million taxpayers, it is good news. Not only have tax allowances gone up – about 200,000 more people will be taken out of the tax net - there are also several short-term relief measures. Those one-off sweeteners will cost a total $38.8 billion. There has been much comment about the political undertone of the Budget, particularly in comparison to the Chief Executive’s Policy Address. Tsang began by mentioning the clashes in Mong Kok and the political impact on the economy. Unlike the Chief Executive, who mentioned Beijing’s “Belt and Road” initiatives more than 40 times in his Address, the Financial Secretary said it ws only natural to emphasise local issues. With us in the studio to talk about it is Fernando Cheung, Vice-Chairman of the Labour Party, we also invited representatives from pro-government parties but they were unavailable.
In his Budget, John Tsang described locally-produced Cantonese films as a key component of our local culture, and he injected an additional $20 million into the Film Development Fund to promote locally-produced Cantonese films on the mainland. But there could be some resistance: the mainland is already refusing to televise Hong Kong’s Film Awards this year due to the popularity of the dystopian local movie “Ten Years”, which casts a dark eye on Hong Kong’s future in the shadow of Beijing.
One story in that film is about a time when Cantonese has become marginalised in Hong Kong. The Global Times called the movie “absurd and ridiculous”. And yet events like TVB’s decision to use Simplified Chinese characters as subtitles for its newscasts in the Putonghua channel, have generated over 10,000 complaints. This use of simplified character is clearly giving rise to yet another anxiety. And then, there’s that recent Education Bureau consultation paper which suggests that schoolchildren should be taught Simplified Chinese characters.