Public administration | Reforms needed to fine-tune the machine

Macau’s public administration structure is getting “more complex and bureaucratized,” and reforms are needed to impulse new dynamism, according to a former service head and a law expert interviewed by Lusa.
“In the post-handover era, the administration has become extremely complex and it is incomparably more difficult to solve problems and challenges. There is a need, as the Chief Executive pointed out, to introduce dynamism and innovation,” said Carlos Roldão Lopes, the former head of Macau’s postal services.
Mr Lopes points out that the strain on infrastructure caused by the gaming liberalization and by the increasing number of visitors “has put pressure on the services.”
IPM scholar António Katchi stresses the need to assure labor stability in order to improve the services. “We should go back to the basic principle that the permanent needs of the public services should be satisfied by permanent workers that enjoy career stability and can progress in their careers,” he said, criticizing the principle of hiring workers with short-term contracts to supply immediate needs. Official data indicates that the MSAR has 28,221 civil servants. However, only four in ten are permanent workers.
Mr Katchi, who teaches law and public administration, states that “without the replacement of the present political regime by a democratic system, there won’t be a place for a substantially different government and politics tend to be worse, or, in the best of chances, stay the same. Either way, the problems inherited from the past are bound to be aggravated.”
Roldão Lopes thinks that the evaluation is lacking and believes that “nowadays, a civil worker only needs to be alive to be promoted”. According to him there is also a need for training. He suggested that the administration should “qualify its workers, be demanding and confer prestige to the civil servants, getting closer to the Singapore model,” where the politicians and civil workers enjoy public recognition.
Otherwise, he added, the specter of corruption looms over the public administration, especially after the Ao Man Long case.
“After that, suspicions were launched about everything and everyone and unnecessary bureaucratic circuits were created,” Roldão Lopes says. MDT/Lusa