Back

Note: This article represents the view of the author and not the University of Hong Kong.

In the battle against SARS, the SAR government highly praised our citizens' noble quality. When doing public consultation, however, does the government also value the public's quality in the same way?

Last year the government published a consultation document on Article 23 of Basic Law to solicit views from the public. Citizens then handed in altogether 100,909 submissions, involving 369,612 signatures. The government first classified the submissions as local or overseas according to the place where the submissions were submitted. And then according to the format, the submissions were further classified as submissions from organizations, individuals, standard letters which carry the same content or preprinted opinion forms, and signature forms.

In the Compendium of Submissions the government later published stated that "…the format and content of the submissions are highly diversified. In … compiling this analysis, we try to the best of our ability to identify and organize the views received in the submissions in as objective and comprehensive a manner as possible". Yet amongst the eight categories of submissions, the government just classified them in terms of key stands and the issue of blue or white bill for the provisions bill, as well as counted the number of submissions in different categories, number of signatures involved and their percentages. It failed to analyze citizens' attitude in other aspects. The Compendium of Submissions also released the classification of the 7,512 individual submissions therein: 51% supported legislation (category A), 34.7% opposed legislation (category B) and 14.3% cannot be classified.

The Research Team on the Compendium of Submissions on Article 23 of the Basic Law, constituted by several scholars including the writer, is of the opinion that if the government just needs a simple answer to the question "whether support legislation or not", this consultation exercise undoubtedly has wasted a lot of the precious opinions from citizens. Thus the research team members made further detailed analysis on the 8,000 and more "independent submissions" and believe that it is necessary to separately handle the two problems "whether support legislation in principle" and "whether support the proposed legislation content".

After analysis, it is found that 56.7% of the submissions supported legislation in principle, 35.5% opposed; and concerning the concrete content of the consultation document, 52.7% supported and 44.6% opposed. The proportions of support and oppose yielded from our analysis, whether on the legislation principle or the proposed legislation content, differ from the figures of the government: the number of people supporting legislation is larger than that from the government's analysis, the number opposing legislation is also larger than that from the government, only the "cannot be classified" group is much lower than the government's figure. Since the legislation of Article 23 is stipulated in the Basic Law, it is believed that there should be less controversy over the legislation principle. Nevertheless, if it was to solicit the public's views on the proposals in the consultation document, then understanding citizen's specific suggestions on the consultation document is more important than the views on the legislation principle. However the government just focused on the issue of legislation principle.

With this two-level analysis method, we are able to further analyze the as many as 14.2% (1,068) of the submissions which were "cannot be classified" under the government's classification. For example, 35.3% (377) of the submissions thereof are classified by us as opposing both the legislation principle and the proposed legislation content, whereas 9.4% (100) of the submissions support both the legislation principle as well as the proposed legislation content. Those whose stand really cannot be classified constitute only 16.1% therein. We also found that 731 submissions (9.1% of the 8,000 and more submissions), though support the legislation principle or have uncertain view, oppose the legislation content. However the government classified 419 submissions of them (57% of the 731 submissions) as "cannot be classified". The government keeps saying that more citizens support legislation than oppose. One of the reasons is misplacing as many as 14.2% of the submissions as "cannot be classified", resulting in more supporters than opponents. In fact many of the submissions therein support legislation in principle yet oppose the proposed legislation content in the consultation document, even more are those whose stand could be clearly classified but were wrongly categorized by the government.

Moreover, the government separately treated "standard letters" and "signature forms". Amongst the standard letters, 86% of the submissions support the proposed legislation content. If counted in terms of the number of people represented, 54,001 people (65.3%) support the proposed legislation content, whereas 28,677 people (34.7%) are against. But amongst the signature forms, those who are against constitute as many as 71.7% (196,745 people), only 24.7% (67,633 people) support. However, these opposing voices were not valued by the government.

We think that if the government were to have a "headcount" from the submissions, there is no reason to treat letters and signature forms separately, since both of them are simply ways to express opinions and there is no essential difference. If treating them the same, we find that amongst all individuals who expressed their opinions (involving 336,224 signatures), 62.9% oppose the proposed legislation content, only 36.2% support.

The government is very skeptical of these signature forms, such as "duplication copies; submissions which contain different names obviously signed by the same person; identical signatures on different pages of the same submission; and illegible signatures and dubious names found on signature forms, etc.". However, we also found that amongst the about 1,000 submissions from organizations, a number of letters came from organizations which differ greatly in nature and geographical location, yet shared very similar content or format, having no big difference from standard letters. Why did the government not doubt the independence of these submissions from organizations then?

Besides the core problems above, we also took one more step to analyze the underlying reasons for citizen's supporting or opposing legislation, the concrete concerns about the proposed provisions, differences in the submissions with various length, in different languages, and submitted in various periods of time, etc. These all are those the government failed to look into details. We think that if the government is to solicit public opinion through public consultation, information on these areas should be treasured. If the government is to do just a headcount in this way, then do it in a fair manner, but not play tricks and juggle with public opinion