Thank your lucky stars (Letter to Editor, 8 June 2007)

Teacher Steven Wong criticises me for opposing the civil service pay rise ("We deserve pay rise, Mr Tien", May 29). He complains that he is in negative equity after the economic downturn wiped 50 per cent off the value of his property and left him unable to afford a new car and new clothes and take his family for a holiday.

While I sympathise with Mr Wong's plight, I would like to make two observations. Civil servants are not the only ones to have suffered from the dip in property prices and no one should expect the government to compensate them for their unfortunate investments losses by awarding them unjustified pay rises.

Neither I nor any of my Liberal Party colleagues have anything against civil servants.

However, it must be remembered that they are already paid significantly better than people in the private sector - 30 per cent better if pension and medical benefits are taken into account.

Even using government surveys that exclude pension and medical benefits and use a benchmark of 75 per cent of private sector pay as a basis for comparison, civil servants are paid 5 per cent more than the market rate. If we award them another 4.6 to 4.9 per cent, the gulf will widen significantly, leading to a spiral of pay demands and putting small firms under intense pressure to raise wages or lose staff.

We in the Liberal Party believe that taxpayers would prefer to see the annual extra pay rise expenditure of HK$5.3 billion spent on more pressing causes such as helping the poor and improving our education and health system. Those are measures that will benefit Hong Kong as a whole.

James Tien Pei-chun