CE-elect visits LegCo chief on day one
Chief Executive-elect Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor on Monday again stressed her commitment to improving relations between Hong Kong’s administration and legislature when meeting the Legislative Council president a day after her landslide victory in the CE race.
The move is seen as the first step the CE-elect has taken to realize the pledge given in her winning speech to make “healing the divide” and reuniting Hong Kong top priority.
Speaking after the meeting, Lam stressed she would meet different political groups in LegCo “as soon as possible” and explain her political platform in person.
Lam highlighted that she will extend her efforts to improve the relationship between the administrative and legislative sides, which has been beset by conflicts in the past few years.
In return, LegCo President Andrew Leung Kwan-yuen appealed to lawmakers to respond positively to Lam’s overtures and give the new leader and her team “more time and patience”.
Leung said the fact the CE-elect visited the LegCo one day after she was elected showed Lam valued the relationship between the two branches.
“Now is a good opportunity to improve the administrative-legislative relationship,” Leung said. He hoped both sides could free themselves from bias and work for the common good of Hong Kong people.
Besides building trust, Lam will focus on seeking opinions from the city’s education stakeholders and lawmakers from across the political spectrum on how to allocate the additional annual recurrent expenditure of HK$5 billion that she proposed to put into education. By doing so, she hoped her vision to reform the city’s education system can be realized smoothly.
On the same day, Lam also met the city’s outgoing CE Leung Chun-ying. Leung Chun-ying said ensuring a smooth transition of government was the most important task for his team and his meeting with Lam also focused on the transition.
Meeting the head of Hong Kong’s judiciary — acting chief justice of the Court of Final Appeal Robert Tang Kwokching, Lam stressed that judicial independence and rule of law were core values of Hong Kong. She assured Justice Tang that she would safeguard those values steadfastly.
In the following days, Lam planned to also pay courtesy visits to three major central government authorities in the city — the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Commissioner’s Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the HKSAR and the People’s Liberation Army Hong Kong Garrison.
Throughout the day, Lam had received extensive support during her post-election visits to various districts in Hong Kong. Stressing her trust in Hong Kong people, she pledged to listen to their views more closely in future.
Lam, the city’s first female CE-elect, won the race for Hong Kong’s top position after clinching 777 votes from the 1,194-strong Election Committee on Sunday. Her election platform also underlined addressing the city’s housing woes and promoting development of the now-stagnant economy.