-5-
Doy" system. This works well up to a point (although it does tend sometimes to delay necessary actions) as long as there is accountability in that we can appeal to a democratically elected
Our House of Parliament working within a capitalist system. business community might not find things so easy if accountability shifts to an appointed Communist Government. (Incidentally, Hong Kong business men, and especially
industrialists and bankers, always say that democracy and direct elections would be disasterous because only left-wingers would be elected and then we would have social security, high unemployment benefits, much higher taxes, etc. etc..
However, we do have an example in the Urban Council of what happens when there are directly elected office bearers, and I can assure you that my elected colleagues are all eminently sensible and the most socialist of them is often more conservative than I am. When we had to ask Government to raise rates it was the elected who asked us to be careful about raising taxes, not the appointed! I believe firmly that we have a sensible population here and that direct elections will produce a conservative mix of representatives. But that is by the way).
Martin Lee made an important point to Ji Pengfei when he was here last December. He told him that there will be many people, the vast majority no doubt, who are going to be very careful what they say to members of the Advisory and the Basic Law Committee, because they fear reprisals after 1997. In the same way, there are many members in our business community who for business reasons will not speak their mind because they don't want to risk their company being blacklisted in future. Also, they may think that by echoing the party line they will receive business advantages after 1997. This constraint also applies to the press and other Media. No publisher or journalist or TV station wants to be disadvantaged or even banned after 1997. This is human nature and human nature will operate whether we have a fully directly elected LEGCO or a combination of a directly/indirectly elected LEGCO, or a half appointed/half indirectly elected LEGCO. There aren't too many Martin Lee's or T.S. Lo's, or even Walter Sulke's around not afraid to speak their minds. To be fair to all the others, one also has to say
that
of us who do speak out are mostly financially
some
independent and have achieved their goals in life and have somewhere else to go, so we are not really being as courageous
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