CE’s legacy is founded on substance, not style
Chief Executive Leung Chunying delivered his last Policy Address in the Legislative Council on Wednesday. This documented his hard-earned achievements in the last four-and-a-half years. It also outlined what he intended to do in the coming six months before he retires from office.
In Western electoral democracies, politicians’ election pledges are, well, just pledges. They are not to be taken too seriously. Look at US President Barack Obama, who is going to leave office in the next few days. He has not accomplished much for his country and people, and the US under his eight-year administration is worse off in practically every aspect.
We cannot blame the politicians alone because there are so many things not within their control. Look at poor Leung; whenever he wants to do something, our dissidents both inside and outside the Legislative Council, together with our mainstream media, will try their very best to block him from doing so.
At the same time, they hold Leung responsible for each and every item of his campaign pledges and blame him for not getting things done.
Yet despite all these obstacles, Leung managed to make his mark on housing, poverty alleviation, and retirement protection. Our senior citizens are especially thankful for his transportation subsidy. In the area of opposing separatism, Leung is known for his resoluteness and determination. For this, he earned the hatred of our dissidents.
Now that Leung is stepping down for family reasons, our dissidents and media keep hounding him to fulfill all his campaign pledges. As a “lameduck” Chief Executive with only six months remaining of his term, this is impossible.
In any case, Leung tried his best to address these unreasonable demands in the Policy Address, continuing to push reforms, especially of the healthcare system, such as training more doctors, building the first traditional Chinese medicine hospital, implementing voluntary health insurance, and so on. Progress will also be made in poverty alleviation, elderly care and support for the disadvantaged, as well as in retirement protection. On the very controversial issue of “offsetting” severance payments or long-service payments with Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) contributions, which labor groups are very much concerned about, this is to be progressively abolished.
A question hinges on whether our dissident lawmakers will permit Leung to do all these things within the next six months, and we all know they won’t. So the remaining hope for him is for his erstwhile assistant, former chief secretary for administration Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, to succeed his legacy and carry it on.
We all know this is wishful thinking. Despite all the goodwill between Leung and Carrie Lam — who has been totally involved in practically all the policy implementations in the past four years — we can never expect Lam to be a clone of Leung as some dissidents want The author is a veteran current affairs commentator.
In any case, Leung tried his best to address these unreasonable demands in the Policy Address, continuing to push reforms...
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Like everybody, Lam has her free own freeownwillwillandandherherpriorities,priorities,notnottotomen-mentiontion her own personal style. She will never want to live under the shadow of another person, not least the unenviable Leung.
So, irrespective of the well-intentioned wishes of Leung and some of us, the short era of Leung Chun-ying will soon come to an end, hopefully heralding a Carrie Lam administration and the first female Chief Executive.
Whether at least part of Leung’s legacy will continue regardless of who becomes our next Chief Executive ultimately lies with the central government. There is an obvious need for a strong stand against separatism. Independence is totally out of the question; it is a bottom line that cannot be breached. This goes to show that any policy that the central government does not support cannot be implemented. After all, we always have to keep in mind that Hong Kong is a special administrative region within the People’s Republic of China.