On the harbour, I plan to take the same approach. Just get the pain over with as quickly and cleanly as possible. Link Hong Kong and Kowloon with one humungous housing and commercial development with one of those typically depressing Hong Kong names like "Harbour Gardens".

On tourism, well, we've got 150 million mainlanders crowding all the gold shops. But we're completely neglecting other overseas visitors, the ones with more than 5500 renminbi in their wallets. I mean, with SARS again in the news we have to act quickly to get the word out. Tell the world, "No SARS here! Don't worry. We've got dengue fever, hepatitis B, and cholera in the seafood. But no SARS! So come back! Hey, we're Asia's World City! And if you can figure out what that means, please come here and explain it to us!"

If we really want the foreign tourists back, we need to bring back the old ways of doing things - the things we were doing back when they were still coming here by the container load. Let's swindle the stupid tourists, bait and switch them until they're dizzy, elbow past them into taxis. I will enact legislation requiring restaurants to provide English menus with 30 percent higher prices than the Chinese ones, like they did back in the good old days. In other words, give the tourists stories to tell back home! No one comes to the steaming Orient for a safe, bland, uneventful holiday. For that, God created Belgium. Let them go home with tales like "God! What a filthy, polluted, pushy den of thieves Hong Kong is!" Sounds so much more alluring than "Oh, the view from the Peak was luverly." Then spend the equivalent of the entire social welfare budget of Bangladesh for fireworks - oops, we're already doing that! You'll see, the foreign visitor numbers will skyrocket.