Luxury housing to rescue economy, again

The Development (sic) Bureau announces plans to cover coastal areas in the New Territories and outlying islands with oh-so original tourism/luxury housing eco-concrete, starting with southern Lamma… 

The site – a disused quarry on Lamma Island covering an area of around 25 hectares, including a five-hectare artificial lake – would be “suitable for development as a high-end lakefront and hillside resort,” the bureau said.

It would be accompanied by a marina, as well as low-density luxury housing, it added.

Obvious question: why? 

The government press release says…

Its tranquil seaside location in a rural island setting, wealth of tourism and recreation resources particularly a large man-made lake, and proximity to the urban area have rendered this site suitable for development as a high-end lakefront and hillside resort, to be complemented by a world-class marina and low-rise luxury housing. The initiative aims to help promote yacht tourism on the one hand, and also help support the development of island hopping in Hong Kong. For this EOI, we will consult the market on ways to optimise the use of the site by suitably incorporating the above-mentioned elements in its overall development and synergising with other attractions in the area. On implementation, it is proposed to adopt a single-developer approach for this project.

You might have thought the various attributes would have ‘rendered’ the site suitable for leaving alone. But no.

Being charitable – I put Saint Francis of Assisi to shame sometimes – if you were a Hong Kong bureaucrat ordered to fix the economy by next week, could you come up with anything better? Remember: no radical reforms are welcome, and you’re hitting retirement age in six months.

On the subject of tranquility, the Standard reports the silence of some all-patriot District Council members…

District councillors were silent during meetings to avoid redundant remarks and save time to serve their communities, Secretary for Home and Youth Affairs Alice Mak Mei-kuen said.

This came after media reported that after more than a year into their four-year tenure, 33 district councillors did not speak in 80 percent of their district council meetings, and among them, six remained silent in all of the meetings they attended last year.

Mak told reporters yesterday that district councillors or lawmakers do not wish to repeat what others have said as it is not an efficient use of limited meeting time.

“For a council with over 30 members, if everyone repeats the same points, it does not make efficient use of the meeting time…

Why would they all be repeating the same points?

And where have we heard the phrase ‘island hopping’ before? Well, yes, it was during World War II, when the US Marines clawed back Japanese-occupied dots in the Pacific. (Read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.)

Which sort of brings us to the latest bout of panic – because there’s not enough mayhem in the world right now. Anyone spending too much time on the wrong websites will have noticed some vaguely thoughtful people confidently predicting a Chinese invasion of Taiwan within a few months, supposedly to take advantage of all the other international tariff-related chaos going on. (They are prompted by this.)

This would mean Xi Jinping choosing to outbid Donald Trump in the stupidity stakes. It would entail a massive and crippling economic embargo on China leaving markets even more wiped out than they are already. Among various possible sideshows: the Internet cut off; a coup in China if it failed; executions of hundreds of Taiwanese splittists if it didn’t; martial law in Hong Kong just to be safe, etc, etc, etc. You don’t want to think about the worst-case scenario.

We don’t need any more excitement right now.

On the off-chance anyone wants it – think-tank type Matt Turpin bravely sort of explains what the US administration is perhaps attempting to do tariffs-wise, assuming there is some underlying logic. My hunch is we are in ‘make it up as you go along’ territory.