Our Desk | On calling Macau home

Daniel Beitler

Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum [“I am a Roman citizen”]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner!”… All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

John F. Kennedy, 1963

The latest brainchild of our government shows that creativity and imagination are running thin among bureaucrats tasked with improving the city’s quality of life.

Without a cause or benefit in mind, non-resident mothers will soon be asked to pay MOP8,775 for natural births and MOP17,550 for caesarean sections, a whopping 800 percent more than they currently do.

The Health Bureau, responsible for the proposal, was quite clear in a statement delivered last week that increase is not expected to raise the hospital’s financial revenues, thereby permitting it to – for example – recruit more specialized medical professionals or purchase sophisticated equipment.

Without elaboration, the bureau said the change would “ensure provision of quality services for residents.”

Accounting for just 8 percent of the 3,371 births at the public hospital between 2015 and 2017, there are no concerns of maternity ward overcrowding, no suggestion that overburdened medical staff are unable to treat resident mothers, and no need to deter non-residents from giving birth in Macau.

Instead it is justified on the basis that the current fares have not been updated in almost 20 years.

A Macau Daily Times report back in June last year found that, according to official government statistics, Macau consumer prices in January 2017 were roughly 80 percent higher than in January 2004. There is no need to extrapolate that figure back the full 20 years to highlight the absurdity of an 800 percent increase in birthing charges.

Instead, the policy can be understood in the same vein as last year’s proposal to increase non-resident bus fares.

Out of ideas but desperate to do something to the benefit of Macau locals, the Secretary for Transport and Public Works Raimundo do Rosário had the idea of “positive discrimination”; a way to exaggerate the benefits to residents by revoking the privileges of non-residents.

The bus fare hike, like the increased birthing charges, may either represent a lack of imagination on the behalf of Macau bureaucrats, or perhaps a lack of willingness from the government to effect change that benefits all of the city’s resident population.

But these policies are also a message to non- resident workers; a not-so-subtle reminder that they are not ‘one of us’ and they are here only by the grace of the Macau government and the city’s employers.

Never mind that they plug an important and gaping hole in the Macau workforce and that the gears of the casino-economy would not turn without them. Or that most of them are taxpayers in one way or another. Or that though they earn far less than residents, it is their labor contribution that is returned in the annual handout to which they have no claim.

Lawyer Sérgio de Almeida Correia wrote this week that many in Macau are failing to learn the lessons of the past. He was referring to the successive waves of migration to this tiny enclave and the cultural contribution each wave brought with it.

As the government continues down its course of discriminatory, unimaginative and unnecessary policy-making, it is worth remembering that we all call Macau home and we all have a stake in its future.