HK Observer: Punishing the old and poor

Robert Carroll

When a 73-year-old Hong Kong man was locked up for using a fake identity card, which he did in order to work beyond the retirement age and avoid being a burden to the community, there was considerable public outrage. However, the magistrate who subsequently jailed him for four months said that he could not “understand” why but it was “understandable because they are not lawyers.”
It’s clear that, apart from his limited ability to express himself, this judge lacks the empathy that should be part and parcel of his job. Why could the judge not understand why an old man, despite poor health, felt obliged to misrepresent himself for his self-respect so that he would not have to suffer the stigma of receiving government financial aid? According to the court medical report, Shih Chiao-jen, who suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure, supported his wife who also had multiple medical problems.
Now it is understandable from a legal perspective that obtaining false identification documents is a serious offense. The principal reasons for this are to detain illegal immigrants from working under false pretenses and to prevent fraud. Yet this man’s situation was entirely different. That did not stop the magistrate from lecturing Shih about how he had been fraudulently employed by several property management companies. If harm is inherent in the concept of fraud, how did this man harm these property companies?
There’s an irony here. While the magistrate justified his sentencing by mistaking harmless deception for fraud in relation to the man’s employment at property companies, dishonest practices among property management companies are widespread at the cost of vast swathes of the population. An example of this is bid rigging for maintenance work, where transparency leaves much to be desired. Often these management firms are subsidiaries of the big developers who have been legally swindling property buyers by exaggerating flat sizes, photos and mockups of estates, adding features that are non-existent in the final result. There is also the ploy of releasing fake high sales figures to pressure buyers, along with using quotes from so-called contented buyers who have actually been photographed at random and presented as real buyers. Why has all this fraud been tolerated for decades despite much public complaint?
This is because the cartels who dominate the predatory economy here are firmly entrenched in the legislature in the functional constituencies, and could always count on their men to block legislation to prevent these kinds of deception. Even though legislation has finally been passed to deal with the situation, enforcement is far from ideal.
So who have been the fraudsters here: a poor man saving the government social security payments; or rapacious developers and the management company offshoots?
There are other issues here too. Firstly, why does a security guard have to retire at 65? The job requires some alertness to recognize intruders and the mobility to patrol, but most people nowadays are reasonably fit at that age. Australia, much to its credit, has just raised the retirement age to 70. A person’s life expectancy increases with age, as the ones who have already died younger are no longer included in the calculation, thus bringing down the average. In developed societies, as actuarial figures show, a reasonably healthy 65-year-old can expect to live to their late eighties or early nineties.
The second issue here is the following: why is there is still no state provision or, for the elderly, even a plan?
Self-sufficiency is the cry from on high. But for the many elderly people working their whole lives in low-
paid jobs with inflation and almost non-existent interest rates on many years’ worth of savings, it has been impossible. Those people made significant contributions to Hong Kong’s economic success, and we should allow them more dignity in old age.