My Take | Lawmakers can’t rely and act on news stories alone
- Responsible parliamentarians the world over would interrogate or investigate the relevant government departments when they read worrisome news reports, which are just the starting point for inquiry, not confirmed evidence
Life is short. You can’t verify everything. Unsurprisingly, politicians and pundits, including yours truly, have to rely on news reports. But what happens when those reports turn out to be false or unsubstantiated?
Well, we have to accept responsibility. Not in Hong Kong, though. Some local politicians and commentators, when called out or caught red-handed, usually claim they read it in the news so it wasn’t their fault.
The latest? In a Facebook video, opposition legislator Kwok Ka-ki, who represents the medical sector in the legislature, claimed police had stockpiled 640,000 surgical masks and 13,000 N95 respirators, and planned to buy an additional 64,000 masks in the next two months.
Kwok said police didn’t deserve so many masks when the public was facing a general shortage, including medical staff. He also called the police “black cops” and “cowards”, saying they would “do anything to save their necks’’.
Those epithets might have better applied to Kwok’s public sector colleagues who went on strike in the middle of the coronavirus health crisis, an action which he fully supported.