Abolition by expansion eyed for Legco trade seats

The legislature's functional constituencies should be abolished, and the best way to achieve that is by allowing more people to vote in them, a leading researcher on the evolution of Hong Kong's political system has proposed.

'Don't chop them, feed them,' said Michael DeGolyer, director of the Hong Kong Transition Project, as he released a report outlining a two-step expansion of functional constituency franchises in the lead-up to universal suffrage in 2020.

The second step reprises the functional constituency reforms proposed by Hong Kong's last governor, Chris Patten, in 1992. Lord Patten's reforms gave every working Hongkonger a vote in a functional constituency and in a directly elected seat in the 1995 legislative election.

The report is based on the responses of voters and potential voters to questions about the future of functional constituencies. The survey was co-sponsored by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a non-partisan US government body working to support and strengthen global democracy, and the Community Development Initiative Foundation, a non-profit local body that provides a platform for groups and think-tanks to collaborate for a common purpose.

Professor DeGolyer said the impasse over scrapping functional constituencies was not because members were sceptical about a fully directly elected legislature, but because they were unwilling to see their constituency scrapped before others.

His team's study found more support among functional constituency voters than others for the idea that ending the constituencies' disproportionate power would make government policies fairer.