It would be better if you all would read up on labour law in Europe/US/OZ instead of speculating a bunch of nonsense on here.
You would find out that most of your 'wishful thinking' doom scenarios for the bases are simply not possible and/or way more expensive than just leaving things the way they are.
There is absolutely no advantage for opening up base slots for COS18 guys, so if you are HK based now, you will be forever.
Bases might be shut down at some point, that is true, but LIFO will still apply so based guys will always have the choice of coming to HK for a while...