Christmas is a season for giving. But the gifts offered by the government yesterday - concessions on its constitutional reform package - have a Scrooge-like quality. They are very limited in scope and, sadly, are unlikely to be sufficient to secure the democrat votes needed for the reform proposal to be endorsed by the Legislative Council.
The scrapping of government-appointed district council seats would be a positive step. They were reintroduced after the handover and are not easy to reconcile with Hong Kong's democratic development. But under the government's plans, the phasing out will not begin until 2008. It will therefore make no difference to the arrangements for the election of the next chief executive in 2007. The government does not envisage the complete removal of appointed councillors until 2012, or perhaps 2016. It is a very modest proposal and one that does little to meet criticisms of the broader reform package.
There was also some humbug in the government's attempts to present the overall proposal as a big step forward for democracy that enjoys majority public support. Late last week, this paper commissioned the Public Opinion Programme of the University of Hong Kong to assess the public's latest views of the reform package. It found that only 37.7 per cent felt legislators should pass amended reforms if they were not accompanied by a timetable for achieving universal suffrage.
opinion shift
It is significant to note that the proportion of the public who approved of the amended package was substantially lower than that found by a poll by Chinese University after the big pro-democracy march on December 4. No opinion poll is conclusive. But the findings of these two surveys suggest that public support for the government's proposal has been dropping in recent weeks.
It will be the opinions of legislators, however, that will count when the package is tabled tomorrow. The overall package does make some slight progress towards a more representative system of government - but the changes are minimal. And the continued inclusion of appointed district councillors in the arrangements means the government reserves the right to stack the cards. It is not the big step forward the government claims.
The proposal is a long way from realising the hopes of universal suffrage for 2007 and 2008, which have been strongly expressed by the public in recent years and are permitted by the Basic Law. The government's package does not even make the most of the more limited room for change permitted by the ruling of the National People's Congress Standing Committee last year. This newspaper argued during the consultation process that corporate voting should be scrapped and functional constituencies expanded to include all people in employment. The government's package falls far short of these much more democratic alternatives.