THE Government should feel ashamed of itself this weekend for its part in coercing the Legislative Council to reject comprehensive anti-discrimination laws for Hong Kong.
Despite her partial defeat at the end of the Council's marathon session, independent legislator Anna Wu Hung-yuk can still feel proud of her achievements, as she steps down after three years in Legco. She has forced the reluctant Government to enact legislation prohibiting sex and disability discrimination.
As many of her colleagues made clear in impassioned speeches during the closing hours of the Legco sitting, the time will come when the rest of her anti-discrimination proposals are implemented without dissent - one hopes within the next few years.
In the meantime, those who argued that the time was not yet ripe for such measures must live with their consciences. That is especially true of the Government. Instead of performing an honourable role by giving a moral lead to the community, it resorted to dirty tactics to block Ms Wu's bills - including at least one instance of putting pressure on a legislator through his employer.
Four years ago, the administration took the initiative in persuading Legco to decriminalise homosexuality. But rather than move forward since then, it now prefers to pander to prejudice, with Secretary for Home Affairs Michael Suen Ming-yeung attacking Ms Wu's attempts to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sexual preference by questioning the 'liberal values implicit in the provisions of the bill'.
Nor is it good enough for the Secretary to argue, during the closing hours of the Legco session, that Ms Wu's bills contained flaws: this was inevitable, giving that the administration gave no drafting assistance.
The Government may be right to warn of the dangers of simply copying the anti-discrimination laws of other countries without fully studying if they are appropriate for Hong Kong, especially on sensitive subjects such as race, where a badly-drafted bill could jeopardise localisation efforts.
