Nominating committee is main dish at CY dinner
And question arises of just how many chief executive candidates Hong Kong can have
Talk at the dinner hosted by Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying last night dealt mostly with practical issues of electoral reform, such as the formation of the nominating committee and whether there should be a cap on the number of candidates in the 2017 chief executive race, the constitutional affairs minister revealed.
The Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Raymond Tam Chi-yuen said many of the guests were concerned about how the nomination committee would work and the number of candidates.
"The mainstream view is that we want to achieve universal suffrage for the chief executive election in 2017," Tam added.
Pan-democrat Bruce Liu Sing-lee, from the Association for Democracy and People's Livelihood, said one official told him that the consultation paper was ready and they were just waiting for Leung to call the shots.
But Tam flatly denied this, adding: "We will continue to listen and write our consultation paper."
Tam said the government had yet to decide whether to follow past practice and set up a team of three ministers to look at political reform - himself, Justice Secretary Rimsky Yuen Kwok-keung and Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor.