New Macau urges gov’t to reform public subsidies mechanism

Scott Chiang

The New Macau Association (ANM) is handing a petition to the government that aims to reform the mechanism of government subsidies in order to make the system more transparent, the group’s president Scott Chiang said yesterday in a press conference held at the ANM headquarters.
In a letter to be handed to the Chief Executive (CE) the association requests the amendment to the Dispatch 54/GM/97 regarding the granting of public subsidies.
The letter comes as one of the consequences of the protest that occurred in May this year when around 3,000 people demonstrated against the donation from the Macao Foundation (FM) of RMB100 million to the Jinan University which, as explained by Chiang, led the ANM to propose the so-called “three-RR” (Refund, Resign and Reform).
“[Because] the first two RR  are not quite feasible, for now we focus on the third one first – To Reform,” said Chiang adding that such measures were “ a way to prevent further scandals from occuring.” He remarked that what the association is doing is “giving putting a step forward in order to change the subsidy culture.”
Chiang highlighted that the current regulations only require a quarterly release of the beneficiaries of public subsidies (such as those granted by Macao Foundation) with the name, the project name and the amount of the subsidy, without doing a follow-up of the process after the money is given or how it was in fact spent.
The president of ANM also mentioned that previous reports from both the Commission Against Corruption (CCAC) and Commission of Audit (CA) had already noted that “the lack of monitoring directly leads to certain unnecessary problems.” He additionally remarked that the main point of contention is “how well the [public] money is spent,” which in the ANM’s opinion “should be the golden standard to see if a certain organization should receive further subsidies or not,” by opposition of something that ANM calls a “rank of ‘closeness’ to the government” in which the organizations that are “friendlier with the government” get more subsidies.
This time in order to achieve their goals, the ANM chose to adopt a strategy that its leader called “more polity”, making use of power given by the public administration code within Article 106 to request amendments by “interest parties,” that is, organizations eligible to apply for the subsidies.
In this way the ANM proposes an amendment to the writing of the paragraph 2.1: “The autonomous foundations and services referred to in the Paragraph 2 shall disclose the reports referred in Paragraph 1.7 from the day of the publication of the list of the beneficiaries on the Official Gazette.”
As noted also by Chiang, the new system will also help to judge “if some NGO will get a fairer treatment then the other” regarding the actual effects of the subsidy requested. In his opinion, this will “raise the standard on execution [of the projects submitted].”
On the topic, Jason Chao, vice president of ANM also remarked, “proposing an amendment to the [Dispatch] 54/GM/97 is the first step. We have a second step that is to propose an amendment to the law of the right of association” in order to establish a ceiling which requires the beneficiary associations to publish their financial statements, an “omission from the government which we reported 3 years ago to CCAC,” Chao said.

Jason Chao feels ANM is misrepresented at the AL

Vice president of ANM Jason Chao said during a press conference on the Association’s request for the amendment of a dispatch to make the subsidies granted by the government more transparent, “I have to admit that right now we don’t have effective means for us to propose draft laws. We need new candidates to represent New Macau Association to get elected to the Legislative Assembly before we can put [propose] bills to the other legislators.” The comment is veiled wish to see the ANM with more and different representation at the Legislative Assembly for the next legislative term.