Stop political sabotage by filibuster

Chan Kin-por, chairman of the Finance Committee of the Legislative Council, presented his annual work report on Thursday, a day before the end of the current legislative year. He expressed great dismay at the record low efficiency of the Finance Committee this past year, and proposed several measures to prevent blatant waste of working hours through various forms of filibustering. Since all the committee's proceedings have been well recorded and covered by the press, members of the public are well aware of who blocked what bill with filibusters throughout the legislative year. Those "guilty parties" have been warned repeatedly they will pay for their wrongdoings one way or another, especially when it's for LegCo elections.

Chan revealed in his annual report that the committee spent 4.2 hours on average deliberating over each item, or two hours more than last year. And those two hours were more often than not used on handling requests for adjournment or roll calls, the most blatant waste of public resources and precious LegCo time because the sponsors didn't want to perform the duties they were paid to do. Such unacceptable behavior not only hurts public interest by indefinitely delaying the passage of funding for projects designed to serve welfare needs or improve people's livelihood but also gives representative democracy a bad name.

The proposed preventive measures, if adopted, should help reduce the wanton waste of legislative working hours by a considerable margin. That is why the usual filibuster sponsors and their fans will do everything they can to block the preventive measures and Chan said he expects fierce opposition because of this but he also believes members of the public would support his proposal once they see numbers and how the measures will work. We agree with and support Chan because he is trying to stop lawmakers from harming public interest by delaying the passage of funding bills in total disregard of the negative consequences their belligerent acts entail.

Very often in the past few legislative years people noticed a growing trend in which opposition parties openly turned their hatred for Leung Chun-ying, chief executive at the time, into unjustifiable acts of political sabotage in the name of "true democracy". The Finance Committee's plight was no doubt part of that show of desperation and vengeance but the fifth-term special administrative region government has just started operating with a new governing style aimed at reducing social division and building harmony, including more efforts to improve the executive-legislative relationship. This is a good opportunity for the opposition camp to replace their hate-driven strategy with something constructive, if only for their own good.

(HK Edition 07/28/2017 page10)