Don't kill subsidies till lifeline grabbed

In contrast to Cathay Pacific Airways' sacking of thousands of employees and its closing down of an entire regional airline, i-Cable's move to lay off dozens of journalists and supporting staff in the news department may appear to policymakers to be too small a number to warrant serious attention.

And a few dozen people losing their jobs will have no impact on the statistics.

But the policymakers, including Labour Secretary Law Chi-kwong, would be wrong to treat the incident as just another inevitable episode.

If the pandemic crisis does not end quickly, they will soon discover that - drop by drop - there will soon be a sea of jobless people struggling to make ends meet.

The government must give serious consideration to extending the subsidies that have kept so many struggling industries afloat. Without them, the business death toll would have been truly horrific, with many lives ruined.

Vaccines offer a lifeline but, until Health Secretary Sophia Chan Siu-chee actually gets her hands on any of them, the government should seriously consider extending the employment support subsidy scheme to keep companies alive.

With the government having already given out the subsidy a couple of times, it would be unwise to stop doing so now as the world is expecting to reach the tunnel's end after all these difficult months of alternating clampdowns.

Surely, stopping the support now would invalidate all the efforts and sufferings made over the months to protect the basic structure of the SAR's economy from falling apart.

A favorite saying repeated by local politicians in recent months is that "nobody should forget the origin of this or that."

So what was the purpose of the employment support subsidy in the first place? Was it not meant to protect our economic fiber to ensure we have an economic infrastructure that is able to rebound quickly once a cure is found to end the agonizing pandemic?

After having spent hundreds of millions of dollars so far, policymakers should not have ruled out a new round of subsidies, bearing in mind that Hong Kong is not only halfway through the tunnel but, indeed, well into the second half of it.

The SAR was willing to spend billions of dollars to rescue Ocean Park because it would have been a waste to give it up now in light of all the investment made in the past despite the park's disputable business model.

And if the Airport Authority remains as committed as before to finishing the third runway - even though the pandemic is believed to have permanently altered the pattern of global travel - then policymakers should not have ruled out further subsidies for ailing industries.

If restaurant and transport company owners have somehow managed to survive the previous pandemic clampdowns, it is hoped that the current one will be the final round after which things will start getting better with the delivery of vaccines.

Giving up now could well rob the economy of its agility to recover when the city is set to reach the tunnel's end.