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to forestall a new wave of disenchantment building up before or after 1991? What indeed is the logic or the attraction of having partial direct elections, creating an impotent minority of legislators but who are personally accountable to the electorate at large, if ultimately all legislators have to be elected anyway to satisfy the Joint Declaration?<
Sir, are we not creating a hybrid that will give us
the worst of all possible worlds?
In previous debates on 5th November 1986 and 16 July
1987, I have at some length explained the reasons for my opposition to a Westminster style parliamentary system and to 14 direct elections to this Council at this particular stage of
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Hong Kong's political development; reasons that considered valid and shared by others in the community. I shall not waste
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Calp 17 members' time in repetition, and since the majority view has
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expressed itself in favour of direct elections, I naturally accept this verdict. But public opinion was not at all 20 definite about the timing of direct elections after 1988 and clearly not fully conversant with the potential drawbacks in the creation of a confrontational style of government in a small and so far very cohesive community that has prospered under the umbrella of consensus: prawbacks that will be · incurred for the intangible benefit only of having a minority' representing the public at large in a partially directly elected legislature. No real effort was made by Government to analyse the pros and cons and to present the progressively expanding system of indirect elections as an additional strong option for 30 public consideration. The expressed public preference for having 31 direct elections in addition to, rather than instead of, direct
elections by the electoral college was also simply ignored in the White Paper proposals. ||By just reacting to the concentrated pressure on a single issue, I believe Government has let itself
be pushed unnecessarily towards a deadline commitment and has
missed an opportunity to act more deliberately, creatively, and
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