There’s a deep malaise at the heart of Hong Kong politics

You read that correctly: a significant bloc of 86 out of the 1,200 people or so who will decide who holds our highest public office for the next five years. By way of comparison, the financial services sector has 18 votes.

Kuk members basically want two things: the glorious gravy train of the small-house policy to roll forward unchecked; and for a blind eye to continue to be turned to illegal alterations and additions to existing village properties. They were not disappointed.

Everyone in Hong Kong – including, one assumes, the three candidates themselves, plus, in their hearts, the members of the kuk – knows that the small-house policy cannot possibly continue. It gobbles up precious land with three-storey luxury villas in low-rise rural settings when there is a shortage of sites for intensive development to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of inadequately housed urban residents. Yet, on the day, all three pretended not to know. A fourth candidate, retired judge Woo Kwok-hing, had sailed a similar course on an earlier occasion.

Former chief secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor ducked the issue by claiming the small-house policy was the subject of legal proceedings. This was a cop-out. One aspect of the way the policy is implemented is under scrutiny by the courts, but the underlying rationale of the overall policy is not. Lam did speak up on the issue of illegal alterations. Some years ago, as development secretary, she promoted a scheme to get villagers to register their changes for “temporary exemption”. Rural leaders vehemently opposed the scheme and publicly urged a boycott, but now pretended that some villagers had “missed their chance”. Lam thought the scheme might be reopened.