My Take | Pull or push? Opposition always on wrong side of the door

Anarchic lawmakers will boycott meetings they are invited to yet when they are shut out, they’re only too happy to cry foul

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Pan-democrat Lawmakers protest outside meeting room during a closed door meeting of Committee on Rules of Procedure at the Legislative Council building in Tamar. Photo: Edward Wong

Published: 1:05am, 25 Oct 2017Updated: 1:05am, 25 Oct 2017

Cats, according to the eponymous Broadway musical, are always on the wrong side of the door. Keep them in and they want to go out. Put them out and they insist on getting back in.

Members of our opposition are behaving exactly like felines. Too bad they are nowhere nearly as cute. You invite them to meetings and they boycott them. You try to have a members-only meeting and they gatecrash it.

Pandemonium broke out when several anti-government lawmakers such as Eddie Chu Hoi-dick and Ray Chan Chi-chuen, who are not members of the Legco house rules committee, gatecrashed a committee meeting.

They denounced such closed-door gatherings as “black box” operations, even though several members of their camp, such as the Civic Party’s Dennis Kwok and Alvin Yeung Ngok-kiu, sit on the committee. Because the meeting was to address proposed changes to rules of procedure tabled by government-friendly lawmakers to curb filibustering, they insisted on their right to hear them. But why the urgency, when it was to be all talk and no vote on those proposed amendments?

Couldn’t they trust their own colleagues to report back accurately on what went on inside?

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