THE HEAD MUST RULE THE HEART

FOLLOWING my comments last week in the Sunday Morning Post on Governor Chris Patten's political reforms, a number of people have questioned me about my opposition to the nine new functional constituencies, as proposed by the Governor.

Some callers have urged me to press to make the nine constituencies representative of territory-wide industrial groupings as Mr Patten has outlined. Their arguments are based on the belief the Patten proposal is not incompatible with the Joint Declaration, the Basic Law and other general understandings between Britain and China. However, my opposition to the nine constituencies as proposed by Mr Patten is that they vary significantly from the well-established local understanding of the nature of a functional constituency.

My callers have also argued that since China is going to dismantle the system in 1997 anyway, and rebuild it using Beijing-friendly faces, why not just support the full democratisation of the Legislative Council? Why not allow the territory through such an assembly to demonstrate it is capable of looking after itself given full democratic representation? I expressed the view that there are fundamental agreements in place on the construction of the political system which must not be set aside. Neither the Legislative Council nor the Hong Kong Government has the authority to do that. There are genuine differences of opinion in interpreting the detail in these agreements so in the absence of negotiated settlements, it is permissible for each side to take its own view and act accordingly. There is no disagreement however about the basic structure providing for 20 directly elected seats, 30 functional constituency seats and 10 seats elected by an Election Committee on 1995.

It is not therefore permissible, nor is it wise, to set aside the basic framework of agreement as some legislators appear to be pushing for. It would be futile to try to introduce a full house of directly elected legislators by 1995. Any attempt to do so, although stemming from a heartfelt belief in democracy, would be bound to fail because it would have no basis in law and for this reason would be blocked by both the Hong Kong and British governments.

Likewise, any plan to approve the so-called OMELCO Consensus to provide 30 elected seats in 1995 with, presumably, the Election Committee and its authority to elect 10 councillors being eliminated, would also be bound to fail. Such an initiative would have strong emotional appeal and would establish its protagonists as genuine democrats and supporters of human rights. But it could not succeed and Mr Patten is clearly aware of this. Hence his ingenious proposal to widen the nine new functional constituencies to become, in effect, broad-based directly elected constituencies.

When Mr Patten first set out his proposals, the Hong Kong Democratic Foundation which I helped found four years ago recognised that proposal wouldn't fly! So did others including several Legislative Councillors. We all said so publicly but without co-ordination. Several groups made formal representations to the Governor and the Government setting out counterproposals. Most of these listed the characteristics of the existing 21 functional constituencies and aligned the nine new ones accordingly.