City a long way from immunity to bad decisions
Alice Wu says plans to make jabs mandatory for foreign domestic helpers and quarantining of residents of entire buildings, regardless of vaccine status, show poor governance
Hell hasn’t frozen over yet, but last week, proestablishment lawmakers took turns counting the ways Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s administration has messed up, freely airing their grievances. Some named names, calling the underperformers unacceptable as they seek accountability and change. They even passed a motion calling for improvements in governance.
It’s unlikely that these lawmakers had a sudden eureka moment, because what they complained about isn’t news: that the government has taken the proestablishment’s support – in terms of securing their votes in the legislature – for granted; that the government has failed to show them respect, by not consulting them and seeking their advice; that officials don’t understand public sentiment; and that the government has failed to hold its members to account.
Hong Kong’s governance problem has been blamed on the dysfunctional executive-legislative relationship. But the absence of the opposition has only helped to show up the root of bad governance.
There are no longer political sideshows to distract attention from policies that are not up to par and a leadership that can’t take responsibility. The underlying problem is being out of touch with the masses, which would severely impair the work of any administration.
The knee-jerk panic over foreign domestic helpers contracting and spreading a mutated strain of Covid19 is a case in point. Mandatory testing is a sensible and necessary measure, but seeking to impose mandatory vaccinations on foreign domestic helpers, and only them, indicates a failure at the most fundamental level.
It is as if labour minister Law Chi-kwong had completely forgotten that, when the government was preparing for the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out at the end of 2020, Lam had said the programme would not be mandatory. “I cannot run a mandatory vaccination programme. I couldn’t even run it for the flu,” Lam had said then.
We should be outraged that no one thought to flag bad and incomplete policies before they were rolled out
The apparent policy U-turn on mandatory vaccinations is concerning. However, the flaws in the policymaking process are more disturbing. Why did no one cross-check the idea against what the chief executive had said before? How did the policy not raise red flags within government before it was announced and defended?
Officials, including the health secretary, were still defending the policy before their boss came out and halted it. Lam openly asked the labour secretary to “review” it.
The plan is discriminatory, even if protection of public health is the aim. Calling foreign domestic helpers’ line of work “high risk” does not make the policy defensible. Workers in elderly care homes are also deemed “high risk” – they have to be tested regularly but vaccination is not mandatory.
Meanwhile, sending the residents of entire buildings to quarantine camps has not been without public resistance and hiccups, and yet officials were unable to justify indiscriminately doing so regardless of people’s vaccination status.
On Friday, the government announced measures to ease quarantine rules – it’s long overdue. It is nonsensical that policy formulators came up with the complex four-tier dining policies but didn’t consider that such thinking should apply for restrictions on freedom of movement.
It indicates a truncated policy-formulating process. How could a government that encourages vaccination not have policies that would directly affect vaccinated individuals?
We should be outraged that no one thought to flag bad and incomplete policies before they were rolled out. The systematic failure to identify and own up to mistakes is unacceptable, and the opposition cannot be blamed for it. Our officials need a dose of common sense, a few shots of empathy and a whole lot of humility to achieve herd immunity against bad judgment.