All over the world – that is, almost all over the world – Summer is considered the silly season. Nothing relevant seems to happen; media outlets appear to fight a losing battle against a shortage of stories worth publishing. The news fills up with the trivial and the irrelevant. Many readers’ minds are elsewhere, or so it is presumed. The epithet is possibly not wholly deserved: tough. But that is not the issue here today.
Recently, a reader of the local news might wonder if it is Summer all over again. Even references to problems that one would deem important and relevant ring somehow hollow or pointless. Maybe this is the tail of the New Year season, the latter becoming a sort of second coming of the silly season. Or it is perhaps a sign of the times. The case below is but one example of the public discourse becoming more obscure and formulaic. Some readers may find this trend a source of increased apprehension about the direction and clarity of public policies.
In a speech made on the occasion of the Lunar New Year to a very prominent local association, the Chief Executive declared that the Macau economy would face in 2018 “multiple difficulties and challenges.” In a very general sense, this is just so. Life is almost by definition a continuous struggle against all types of difficulties and challenges. It was unclear what he had precisely in mind and what that could mean for all of us in practical terms.
If the government is aware of specific or unusual obstacles the local population and companies are likely to face, wouldn’t it be essential to identify them and indicate any plans intended to deal with them? The promise “to continuously improve the various policies and measures,” and perfecting the “corresponding legal documents,” seems just too vague. It is, consequently, unsatisfactory. Which problems, policies, laws? Either they were not defined, or the local media missed them.
It is therefore not clear which label fits these almost enigmatic statements: circumstantial, warning, advice, some combination of these? Maybe the best word to describe the state of the political debate in the region can be summed up by the comments made in a newspaper about the performance of some new members of the Legislative Assembly: light! But if the “difficulties and challenges” are significant, superficial and evasive approaches or statements may become just one more of them.
