Rear Window | There is always room for improvement

Severo Portela

“There is always room for improvement” is a well-known educational motivator, and rather acceptable paternalistic driver, but also, and unfortunately, one of the more annoying clichés pervading the MSAR political lingo. We believe that if somebody uses the cliché sparingly – as one of the many resorts to overcoming inconvenience – he or she will move away without much ado. Macau believes otherwise: the more baffling the speech, the safer the speaker will be. May be… but probably there is an unwanted consequence of the abuse and overuse of the annoying phrase, “there is always room for improvement.” This is a good omen for political observers.
Let us consider the example of another Macau political mantra; when somebody states he or she is about to deal with things in a scientific manner this immediately gives a warning to the observer of the strong possibility le verbiage antiscientifique is on the way.
When the AL president is challenged to comment on the idea that the work of the standing and monitoring committees – precisely the ones that go behind closed doors, according to the House Rules – could be more open, Ho Iat Seng candidly said that…there is always room for improvement. This also sounds as an alert for us to go beyond the cliché and find out why Ho Iat Seng threatens to disclose what legislators say behind curtains, regardless of the fact that he is circumventing the actual Rules of Procedure of the Legislative Assembly.
We take this as a sophisticated move to safeguard his position regarding the very crucial matter today hanging over the Macau Special Administrative Region: the attempt to correct the 2014 Land Bill, or the Gabriel Tong initiative.
The opposing camps express two perspectives about an Executive proposal of law that moved swiftly through the Legislative Assembly. One proposal which we dare to name revisionist is about the reversion of the full consequences of the Land Bill on void plots; the second camp which we dare to name as legalist is strictly by the letter and spirit of the law.
The latter camp seems to be going quietly since not only does their draft succeed in purging the old law of anything related to discretionary/arbitrary powers of the Chief Executive – the leitmotiv behind the decision to replace the 80s regulatory framework – but also seems to have the agreement of the courts and judiciary.
The revisionist side, (which we also dare to name pro-big entrepreneurs) piled up a set of arguments essentially reducible to one absurdity and one butterfly effect. The absurdity has to do with LA lawmakers alleging insufficient awareness of a bill that went through forty-three (43) committee meetings; the butterfly effect has to do with how a small cause can have enormous consequences in chaos theory. This one has to do with the dire straits the developers would face if they cannot recoup the idle plots that the government repossessed, and last but not the least – exactly the other way around as the weight of arguments go – the alleged exposure of the big banks and the financial system in general.
As to the financial exposure as an argument, albeit there is no apparent precedent, we should travel East of the Pearl River Delta and learn how Hong Kong Chief Executive C.Y. Leung broke the monopoly, or rather the total dominance, of the five majors, by scrapping the Application List system, and opening the land auctions to local SM players growing their financial muscle through joint-ventures with Northern companies.
Back to Ho Iat Seng… he ordered LA services to recall the tapes of all the 43 meetings. It takes time, he gains time, time is on his side… and he can again say he is not running to be the next CE. “I have no desire to be CE.”
That is not the point; but there is room for improvement.