Opposition good for keeping officials honest

Candidates in the Legislative Council election are making all manner of promises of what they will do if they are voted in. Some promise to secure a better environment, others claim they can wave a magic wand and produce better housing, and another hapless candidate reckons he will improve traffic flow.

What unites all these pledges is that they are complete and utter nonsense because legislators have zero powers to make things happen. They do possess the power to stop the government in its tracks, but such an occurrence is rare thanks to the rotten borough system in the functional constituencies, which allows the government to scrape up a majority of votes for more or less anything.

This, then, is the reality of Hong Kong's constitutional structure, in which we have a legislature stripped of power to initiate legislation. Indeed, if one of its members is rash enough to propose any legislation involving expenditure implications (that's more or less everything), it can be introduced only with the permission of the chief executive.

Therefore, legislators are reduced to the rather impotent role of scrutinising bills put forward by the administration, but even here they really have only the power to change them by using the blunderbuss of withholding funding. There is no midway house. Only once has a major policy initiative, Tung Chee-hwa's anti-subversion legislation, been stopped in its tracks, but that was because of a revolt in the streets that finally found an echo in Legco.

What all this means is that, come election time, voters effectively have the choice between electing a loyal or disloyal opposition. They cannot, of course, elect the government, and it remains to be seen what extraordinary contortions will be devised when the direct election of the chief executive is introduced.

Because Legco elections are essentially a choice of opposition candidates, the pro-government candidates are burdened with a distinct disadvantage. But, as the wily Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong has shown, this obstacle is not insurmountable. The DAB flaunts its closeness to the administration and says that, because of its good government connections, it can get things done. In addition, it has adroitly positioned itself as Hong Kong's most patriotic party, capitalising on a large residue of Chinese patriotic sentiment.