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The newer breed of Legislative Council Members too should not boast too much about their representative calling via what they call 'indirect' elections. The title 'Honourable' carries with it no magic baptism of fire or wisdom. These members should pause and consider that most of them were elected with less than twenty votes, and that in total they represent less than 0.5 per cent of 5 million people. They should recall the manipulation that took place in some indirect elections, making them not really elected but indirectly appointed members, owing allegiance to their senior members alone and not to the public.
I have also become rather suspicious of some members of the democratic front, who call for elections for no other reason than the fact that 1997 is just round the corner. The call for a democratic element in the Government began over a century ago, and has continued until now, but every move has always been blocked by the type of people who still sit there as appointed or indirectly appointed members determined to keep power in their own hands. The pressure for democratic elections to the Legislative Council has accelerated through the last century, and was very strong when I first joined the Urban Council in 1963. This pressure was bound to increase as more and more young people born in Hong Kong became educated and realized that they were living under a system that gave them the absolute minimum share of Hong Kong's prosperity. The democratic movement was not newly invented after the signing of the Joint Declaration in 1984. Yet some of the most outspoken for democracy now kept their mouths shut throughout the twenty years of effort in the 1960s and 70s. Those who lived here in those days but did not speak up, are now jumping on the democratic bandwagon. They should consider what their motives are now. Our younger politicians who were still at school in the 1970s may be in a different category, but they should examine the political motivation of the older ones now riding on the bandwagon.
These are exciting but dangerous days, when we should consider which of the new politicians, as well as the old appointed brigade, are genuinely working towards the stability, the prosperity and the social justice of Hong Kong.
If the older generation of Legislative Councillors had cared for the people during their years of service to the Government, they would have looked into the legal system and found that those who cannot afford a lawyer (and that is the vast majority of Hong Kong people) have to face petty charges in the lower courts without any knowledge of the way courts are conducted, with little or no knowledge of the language used, and without a lawyer to defend them unless the offence with which they are charged falls within the very narrow limits of the jurisdiction of the Law Society's Legal Aid and Assistance Scheme. Our law enforcement system may reach a high detection rate, but accused persons are frequently the innocent, and the guilty often go free. The present Legislators claim they have no time and it is clear no interest—in looking into blatant cases of injustice. Yet they had time to try to rush through the Powers and Privileges Bill in an effort to protect themselves from public criticism.
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On another issue, if the present Legislative Council had cared for the people, they would have considered more deeply the fact that in future the proportion of elderly people in the community will have increased, and unless some provident scheme is introduced, it will mean that taxes will have to be raised or benefits cut. The present trend of social welfare suggests that the second choice, that is, cutting down benefits, has already been implemented, because allowances have not kept pace with the cost of living in the past three years. Instead of working out practical plans for the elderly, the sick, the handicapped—and I would like to include ex-prisoners of war—the legislators have nodded their heads to extortionate benefits for their well-off masters with salaries plus pensions, highly subsidized rents for the upper grades of the civil service and other outrageous fringe benefits. The use of public money is a public scandal, but the legislators keep their mouths shut about it.
If the Legislative Council had cared about our young people, they would long ago have insisted on education in the mother tongue, instead of hanging on to an elite system that favours their own children right from kindergarten to university.
The Legislative Council was always a set of puppets on a string, until 1997 loomed in sight, and then they suddenly began to plan how to maintain their own status quo for the time when the hand that always moved the puppets would no longer be there. Steps towards democracy should have started long ago. The fact that they have started from legislative quarters and at this point in time should make us stop and question the motive behind the sudden surge of interest. How can we believe that the legislators want any kind of real democratic system, when this kind of person has resisted every step towards democracy for more than a century. The steps taken by the legislators in 1985, when indirect elections were introduced, seems to have been calculated to make sure that most of those elected were friends of the existing members. The elections of 1985 were merely an effort to get their own people entrenched before 1997. Very few if any of them had ever made noises about existing injustices before their so-called election in 1985, and very few of them are doing so now in 1986. Existing injustices are apparently not their main interest, but retaining their privileges is.
Legal and social injustices have existed all the 35 years I have lived in Hong Kong, and for more than a century before that. I am waiting for those who talk about 'our rights' after 1997 to do something about 'our rights' now. If they shut their eyes and ears now, they are not likely to open them in the next 10 years, or even the 50 years that follow. They are just the wrong kind of people, with the wrong motivation, and when I hear them argue I am inclined to say 'A plague on both your houses', so long as you play politics and ignore people. To me the test of their sincerity would be to have a ruling that no person holding citizen rights except in Hong Kong should have the right to stand for election to the Legislature.