Have you registered as a voter for the 1998 election? I've been asking myself this since a reader in the New Territories last week told me: 'Your column is lap sap [rubbish] and embarrassing to read! Can you beef it up?' But of course! As an open-minded columnist, I always take on new suggestions, even if it means extra research, using my loaf and coming up with articles that are insightful, critical, analytical, serious and . . .
Zzzzzzzzz. . .
Sorry! What was I saying? Ah yes, lap sap. Well, we shall have none of that this week because today's topic is the first SAR Legislative Council election. What does it mean to ordinary people like you, me and our grandfathers? A call to my grandfather (a nonagenarian, bless him) in To Kwa Wan: 'Grandpa! It's me! Have you registered as a voter?' Grandpa: 'What? I can't hear you.' 'HAVE YOU REGISTERED AS A VOTER, GRANDPA?' Grandpa: 'What? You are coming around for dinner this evening?' 'NO, HAVE YOU REGISTERED . . . AS A VOTER?' Grandpa: 'Yes! People have come knocking on our door three times already. But I told them to go away because I am too old! When are you coming around?' What about my young colleagues? Have they registered as voters for the 1998 election? 'Of course! I was woken on Sunday at the unearthly hour of . . . noon!' one said. 'I was still in my pyjamas when I answered the doorbell and found someone asking me whether I was a voter.
'So I told him everyone in the flat had registered and shut the door.' A friend has this to say: 'Someone rang our doorbell at 11 . . . at night! I was in my bed clothes already and my hair was in a mess - I told them I had already registered.' So, when the Deputy Director of Home Affairs Augustine Cheng Luk-san said if the so-called 'voter registration ambassadors' did not knock on your door today, they would tomorrow, he really meant it.
Today, these ambassadors will have, in theory, visited every single Hong Kong home. If you haven't met them, you were probably (like myself) in the bathroom when they came knocking - or not wearing your pyjamas.
But no one should really be surprised by their efficiency (even though they were only paid a meagre $42 an hour) because the week-long door-to-door, voter-registration exercise cost taxpayers (that's you and me) about $61 million.
And the aim? To get us all on the streets voting in the forthcoming Legislative Council election.
