For the record, the government's still lacking accountability
The Legislative Council will today debate a motion calling on the government to immediately enact an archive law and provide channels for the public to access records. The motion is unlikely to pass, as the government opposes it.
The situation is not without irony. The government rarely lifts a finger unless convinced it will get Beijing's approval. Yet our national government keeps records of everything, as Frank Dik?tter, the author of Mao's Great Famine, discovered to both his and our subsequent benefit.
The Hong Kong government's attitude towards proper record-keeping is pitiful. Unlike most other places in the West and in Asia, including Macau, there is no archive law governing the collection and maintenance of government documents.
The government's approach to record-keeping and archives has been well set out in an article in the Hong Kong Lawyer by William Waung, a former judge and a founding member of the Archives Action Group, which was set up three years ago. Among the many shortcomings he points to are that in the past five years, 'government departments and bureaucrats have been reluctant to turn over their records for selection and preservation' by the Public Records Office (PRO).
He further notes that the number of records turned over to the PRO dropped 44 per cent between 2008 to 2009 and 2009 to 2010. Also, important government policymaking agencies, such the Chief Executive's Office and Chief Secretary's Office, have not made records available for selection since 1997. The government's attitude towards archives has been in the spotlight lately following the revelation that, with the government's move to Tamar, 1,181.71 linear metres of records from policymaking bodies were destroyed. Donald Breech, the first director of the Government Record Services and a professional archivists, unlike the present incumbent, who is an administrative officer, has voiced serious misgivings over this exercise and the government's practice with regard to record-keeping in general. He says that the level of destruction of documents from, in particular, the Chief Executive's Office 'must be seen as excessive for an agency with central policy and executive functions'. So we have yet another example of the government pretending it is doing one thing while in reality it is doing another.