Thankless task of selling reform package hurt top officials in the eyes of the public
Having to sell the reform package to a sceptical public was no easy task
When the debate on reform started on Wednesday, the chief secretary was still making a last-ditch effort to convince a few pan-democrats not to reject the package.
But by yesterday, when it was clear that all was lost, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor took the opportunity in the legislature to defend her work in the past two years, and that of her two reform task force colleagues.
"Looking back over the last 20 months, our consciences are clear," she said. "We have done our work according to the law … and to try to reach a consensus to push through the reform."
Along with justice secretary Rimsky Yuen Kwok-keung and constitutional affairs secretary Raymond Tam Chi-yuen, Lam became the public face of the government's electoral reform package. Will they now have to pay for its failure?
There have been calls from some pan-democratic activists for them to resign. But that is unlikely as there is no real public or government pressure on them to do so.
Still, their public standing has taken a serious beating, said Ma Ngok, a political commentator and associate professor of government and public administration at Chinese University.
"People at the start thought Lam was some kind of a political ace," he said. "It turned out she was just another government functionary."
Popularity polls by the University of Hong Kong's public opinion programme certainly supported Ma's assessments.
At the start of the Leung Chun-ying administration in 2012, Lam had the highest rating of any top official - almost 65 per cent. But after taking over the task force, her numbers fell to 55 per cent and have hovered there ever since. Still, she remains one of the more popular officials and her rating is way ahead of that of her boss, the chief executive.
As for Yuen, Ma argued that not only his public standing but his reputation as a senior barrister had been compromised.
At the beginning, his popularity rating hovered between 50 and 55 per cent until he joined the task force, at which point it started to fall, hitting 45 per cent at one point before recovering to 50 per cent.
Ma said that as a senior counsel and former chairman of the Bar Association, people expected Yuen to uphold the rule of law and take a more independent view of the reform package.
"But he turned out to voice Beijing's legal position on practically every important constitutional point about the reform package," Ma said. "That's why he has fared even worse than Lam."
Tam did not have an independent popularity rating, but judging from separate polling of public opinion by the HKU programme on the government's principal officers, his performance as well as that of Yuen was considered "mediocre".
If there is a saving grace, it is that the public's lowered regard for the trio did not come with the same venom and personal hatred that many felt for Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, now a New People's Party lawmaker, over the failed Article 23 internal security legislation more than a decade ago when she was security chief. Ip had to leave town and worked at a political makeover by pursuing studies in the US before she could relaunch her career.
"At least people realise those three are just paid to do a thankless job," Ma said.
