My Take | More to fight for than democracy

Poverty relief and help for the elderly and underprivileged have been the centrepiece of Leung Chun-ying's policy goals. Next year, the chief executive wants to tackle the needs and aspirations of young people. But you can already hear his pan-democrat critics sneering at and ridiculing such policies, saying they will do nothing to address the problem of democracy and young people's demand for it.

Of course they won't, and nothing will ever stop our kids from hitting the streets. But that's beside the point. The demand for constitutional reform is not the exclusive prerogative of the young. Everyone in Hong Kong agrees on the need to reform our government and political system. We all know the status quo is untenable. But different people and groups have different ideas and agendas about reform, and that's what we are fighting over.

If I have an abscess and my dentist tries to fix it, I can hardly fault her for not trying to cure my stomach ulcer. Yet, most pan-democrats and Occupy activists have this tunnel vision that we must take care of democratic reform first because those other problems will be taken care of - they hope, fingers crossed - once we have "real" democracy.

What does this mean in practical terms? They are happy to consume all of society's and the government's energy on "democracy" and nothing else. Hence they have no problem with holding up much needed funding for public projects seeking approval in the legislature. They are happy to use scorched-earth tactics to paralyse the government, which in turn, proves it is both illegitimate and incompetent.

We have many social and economic problems outside of democratic reform. Some of these were listed by Executive Councillor Bernard Chan recently in this newspaper. They include a growing wealth gap, unaffordable housing and the dominance of big business. To these we may add the lack of quality public education, employment opportunities and poor social mobility, which are rooted in the low-tech levels and lack of added-value in our poorly-paid service industries.

They urgently need to be addressed. Fighting for democracy in the abstract without concrete policies does not address problems in the here and now.