IT gives me no pleasure to argue publicly with the Governor, but with the future of the Hong Kong people at stake, I think the public should be made fully aware of what he is proposing in the name of democracy. In this letter, I shall concentrate on one aspect only, the Election Committee. Mr Patten has gone on record as saying that small constituencies lead to corruption. I would agree that it is possible, but with the condition that it could only happen if both the candidates and the voters are corrupt people. Not all of them are, I should hope. Nor can one say that larger constituencies are corruption-free. For example, we all know of incidents where elderly people, many of them illiterate and totally a-political, are given free lunches, dinners, concerts and picnics, asked to finger-print application forms to register as voters, then instructed for whom to vote. There are others who hold parties or offer travel facilities to make friends with voters with the intention of procuring votes at future elections. These practices are not corruption-free. Candidates should be elected on their work performance, not on their ability to popularise themselves by being ''nice guys''. Now I want to ask Mr Patten a question which I hope he will answer. If he considers small constituencies lead to corruption, how can he justify his proposal to set up an election committee composed of only 346 elected district board members who would have the power to elect not just one but no less than 10 legislators? Simple arithmetic shows that that would amount to one seat choice for every 34 or 35 members, if worked out proportionately. Worse still, under that system, any political party with manpower or money could set up a strong team in each district board area to catch the few hundreds or maybe thousands of votes necessary to procure a district board seat, and by this means procure half the 346 district board seats (that is 174 seats); and with a voting majority could secure for their party all 10 election committee seats on the Legislative Council. Moreover, in his paper to the Chinese Government in early 1990, Mr Hurd himself proposed that the election committee be ''broadly representative'' and include ''members of the community of experience and high standing''. Without belittling any elected district board members, may I ask who is to guarantee that the members, some of them very young and with their feet for the first time at the bottom of the political ladder, will be ''broadly representative, experienced and of high standing''? In fact, in February 1990, Mr Hurd proposed that the election committee be composed of 25 per cent from the industrial, commercial and financial sector, 25 per cent from senior political figures, 25 per cent members of municipal councils and district boards, and 25 per cent representative of statutory and advisory bodies. Are these not persons of experience and high standing? China apparently accepted Mr Hurd's proposal and it appears in similar form in the Basic Law. No doubt these persons could be elected by their groups in the same way as China set up the Basic Law Consultative Committee about 10 years ago, thus covering all sectors of opinion. I would like to ask any fairminded person whether or not the proposal by Mr Hurd in 1990 was not more democratic than the proposal by Mr Patten, which is definitely a backward step and can easily lead to corruption and abuse, not to mention the politicising of local authorities unnecessarily. ELSIE TU Kowloon
