Help, Hong Kong’s legislature has been taken over by amateurs

Alice Wu can hardly believe the missteps involving a document edit and a pro-establishment lawmaker who should have been known better – the latest in a series of scandals that has engulfed the current Legislative Council

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Lawmaker Holden Chow quit the Legco select committee investigating Leung Chun-ying’s UGL payment on Friday, but maintained he did not do anything wrong by allowing the chief executive to get involved behind the scenes in setting the scope of the investigation. Photo: Sam Tsang

Published: 1:32pm, 21 May 2017Updated: 7:02pm, 21 May 2017

It has been a painful few months, watching amateurs from across Hong Kong’s political spectrum trip up over themselves. Can you imagine how our freshman Legislative Council president, Andrew Leung Kwan-yuen, would write his first annual report?

“The Sixth Legislative Council, returned in September 2016, began with unprecedented chaos. I was elected president under trying circumstances, with some railing against my status of being “handpicked by Beijing” and opposition members staging a walkout. All the while, I was pinned under a cloud of suspicion over the renunciation of my British nationality.

“The Fifth Legislative Council saw the ‘significant milestone’ – in the words of my predecessor Jasper Tsang – of an expanded legislature. I think we top that milestone, by getting ourselves embroiled in a drama centred on the validity of oaths and the subsequent disqualification of two members. I was dragged through the mud. Just 14 days into my presidency, I was asked to step down .”

Legco president Andrew Leung meets the media in October last year. Leung was elected despite opposition by pro-democracy legislators. Photo: David Wong

Rest assured that this will not be the version to go down in Legco history. The antics were amateurish, but we can trust the professional secretariat to present the account in a better light.

Not that it won’t be tough. Fresh material keeps surfacing for what will surely become the legislature’s Year of Living Amateurishly.

With several fresh faces unseating veterans in the election, the generational changing of the guards in the legislature was always going to be interesting. But how! It’s hard not to feel nostalgic for the “good old days” when professional politicians put on an entertaining show while managing to get very little done.