'Teacher' dresses down minister
Stephen Lam Sui-lung must have thought he was back in school yesterday.
Putting him on the mat was Democrat Cheung Man-kwong who wanted to know whether the government's stance on functional constituencies had changed since it described them to a United Nations committee in 1998 as only 'transitional'. Former teacher Cheung challenged the secretary for mainland and constitutional affairs to repeat this in Legco during question time, which Lam refused to do. 'Would you please read it after me,' asked Cheung in the best schoolmasterly fashion, waving a page of the report. 'If you don't, that means you have already made a U-turn and I will punish you by ordering you to copy it 100 times.' Apparently unable to do as Cheung asked because the government had already made just such a U-turn, Lam said he could only challenge the legislator to repeat after him the decision of the National People's Congress Standing Committee on how universal suffrage will be introduced. Leung has the nickname 'the human recorder' because of his reputation for endlessly repeating government policy, giving the same answers no matter what he question he is asked. Not this time.
Students get expensive election lesson
Talking of lessons, a group of Hong Kong students has just learned an expensive one. The five young candidates running in next month's by-elections under the banner of Tertiary 2012 spent HK$60,000 to print 300,000 copies of campaign material - only to find they can't use them. The Registration and Electoral Affairs Office says the pamphlets cannot be sent out to voters because they are standardised with the pictures of all five candidates, rather than individual ones for the relevant constituencies. 'We don't have money to print new ones,' said team spokesman Sam Wong Kai-hing. 'Should we distribute the pamphlets on the streets?'
Walls closing in on developers
