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Christine Loh

There are two important debates for Hong Kong in 2008 - how the city  moves forward on reforming its political system and on  spending its considerable public wealth. Both subjects are essential to deal with but will prove embarrassing for the government.
Beijing may allow  Hong Kong to elect its chief executive via universal suffrage in 2017. And there could be some preliminary reforms to the electoral systems for both the chief executive and the legislature in 2012.
So there is no time to waste if we are to achieve the greatest democracy possible within the limitations.
There is wiggle room to achieve advancement in 2012. That is not far away, and Hong Kong needs to put its shoulder to the wheel to achieve meaningful reform.
As for  choosing the next chief executive, the issue is not  whether the size of the Election Committee should be 800 or 1,600 people. The size of this body is much less important than how it  is constituted.
Previous elections have shown us how candidates seek votes and what they promise in return for support.  In the sub-sectors, many groups of voters act for commercial and other vested interests.  These elections are functional in nature.
Thus, engineers ask for more infrastructure projects. Members of the rural organisation Heung Yee Kuk  ask for developments that are good for  their members.
The question is, how can Hong Kong reform the sub-sector elections to produce  Election Committee members who are  less driven by narrow, vested interests?
Making the committee larger  is not the answer. We must not  fall into the trap of thinking a larger body would be more democratic, so that 1,600 members would be better than 800.
Then there is the issue of turning the Election Committee into a nominating committee to choose candidates for people to elect, rather than doing the actual voting itself.
The focus of discussions to date has been on the threshold of support - the number of nominations - that a person needs to become a candidate. The public wants to see  a reasonably fair system: we don't want to see a very high threshold, obviously.
The constitution of  the nominating committee is  also important, and this can be addressed through reforms in the sub-sector election system.
Broadening the constituencies beyond narrow interests will help candidates to develop policies that put the public interest ahead of what the sectors want.
So there is  much work to do in the coming 18 months, to sort out the electoral systems for 2012 with an eye to 2017.
We must be especially vigilant about the ways in which  functionally based elections can contravene the principle of universal suffrage - whether that involves the sub-sectors making up the Election Committee for the chief executive, or the election of half the lawmakers.
Such a contradiction exists now, so reform is needed to achieve much greater fairness in the short term - before functional constituencies can be eliminated in the longer run.
An even more urgent issue is the  embarrassment of riches that the government has accumulated.   On November 30, the fiscal reserves stood at HK$419.9 billion, enough to cover government expenditure for more than 20 months.  This is a vast amount of money to be just sitting around.
How will our chief executive and ministers propose Hong Kong uses this public wealth?
They will be tempted  to throw money around, especially for infrastructure projects. But what other options should we discuss as a community?
What more can we do for the elderly now? How can we clean up the environment here and in Guangdong? Will the government put forward options?
Christine Loh Kung-wai is chief executive of the think-tank Civic Exchange



Wiggle room