15/10/2017 A brief discussion about the transportation subsidy policy

The current Chief Executive(CE) of Hong Kong, Mrs. Lam, just released her first Policy Address 2017 on last Wednesday. Policy Addresses used to be irrelevant for people who are not taxpayers and did not own apartments as the main policies benefiting people of Hong Kong in terms of financial aid is through the refund of salaries and 物業 tax. However, there is a  new policy helping people of Hong Kong with huge transportation expenses. This article will explore the features of the transportation policy and the impacts towards citizens.

The policy focuses on benefiting those who spend more than $400 for transportation thought Octopus in a month. The public will receive a 25 percent of refund after the transportation expense is over $400 HKD, which will benefit for more than 2 million workers based on the statistic provided by the government.  For people having vacations in Saturday and Sunday, there will be 22 working days and they will be benefited if they spend over $18 a day, which is the amount people move from Kowloon or New Territories to Hong Kong island. Given that the transportation fees have been increasing recently and it results in unsatisfaction among the community, this newly released policy will definitely ease their financial burden and improve their quality of life. However, as the calculation method of the transportation is only based on the history of Octopus, which means miscalculation may also occur. 

Fees for other purposes will be included as well. Octopus record is not accurate enough for recording the transportation history of working. For instance, one of the most controversial issues towards the policy is that it would help parallel trading activities due to the decrease in transportation expense from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, which means they would always receive the maximum subsidy. Also, the amount of maximum subsidy, $300, is calculated per Octopus card. In order words, over $300 subsidies could be received for holders with several Octopus cards. Hence, some express their view that people with parallel trading activities, instead of workers of Hong Kong, received the most from the policy.

Once this opinion is brought to the community, the C.E., Mrs. Lam, said that compared to the number of workers in Hong Kong, residents with parallel trading activities are just a minority, Restrictions should not be added because of them as it will, therefore, decrease the number of people benefiting from the policy.  It is the difficulty of formulating policies as it is almost impossible to design a perfect policy with only benefits to every stakeholder and no drawbacks.  What the government needs to consider is to formulate policies that could help most of the public and try to minimize the negative influence caused by it. I appreciate that the government understands one of the main principles of policies formulation and I look forward to more housing policies which help adolescents in Hong Kont afford their first apartment.