(b)
(c)
(a)
(e)
The decision to rush through the very unpopular "false news" section in the Public Order (Amendment) Ordinance in March 1987, despite the
mo st vociferous objections to it from the public;
The enactment of the Film Censorship Regulations in June 1987 in the wake of a shocking revelation by a journalist that the Hong Kong Government had been unlawfully censoring political films in Hong Kong for over 30 years, despite the advice from the Legal Department that it had no such authority to do so;
The obvious helplessness of the Hong
Kong Government in its handling of the horrifying mistake discovered in October 1987 in relation to the construction of the foundation works at the Daya Bay nuclear plan t site where 55% of the steel starter bars h ad be en omitted in the first layer of concrete.
The mis-handling of the financial crisis in October 1987 when the Administration allowed the general committee of the Unified Exchange to close the stock market for four days when it did not have power to do so.
ways,
The last straw came on 4th November 1987 when the Report by the Survey Office on the 1987 Political Review was
in many published. The Report has been flawed
but the two mo st glaring criticisms relate to the phraseology of the
the Questionnaire used in the key question contained in
two
opinion public
surveys conducted for the
Office by Survey A G.B. McNair H.K. Ltd. and the very unfair and unjustifiable distinction in the treatment of signatures collected by the pro-democratic camp and the Communist-inspired opposing camp. As to the first, experts in the field of both market research and statistics have openly criticised the question relating to the issue of direct elections in 1988 as being totally unintelligable So that no conclusion could be drawn from the findings. As to the second, experts could not see any reason why the 70,000 odd pre-printed standard form letters which opposed the introduction of direct elections in 1988 h ad been treated as "submissions" whereas the 220,000 odd signatures collected in support of direct elections for
were not SO
treated.
1988
The result was that a completely distorted and false conclusion was suggested in relation to this issue, namely, that the majority of the people of Hong Kong are opposed to direct elections for 1988. But the converse is true.
For if
o ne
were to disregard the findings of the two surveys by AGB McNair on this issue (according to expert advice) and look instead at the other 9 territory-wide surveys conducted by other professional pollsters, and if one were to give equal treatment to the pre-printed standard form letters and signature sheets (also according to expert advice), the inevitable conclusion is that there is clear majority support for the introduction of direct elections in 1988.
The supporting materials are set out in Annex 4.
direct
The 70,000 odd elections
for
pre-printed letters which opposed came from pro-Communist preferential treatment by the
1988
organizations. They were given