Public Eye | A house of cards - and here's the proof

Try to remember last week's long Labour Day weekend. Three things happened that had no apparent connection to each other. But look at them as a whole if you want to understand why Hong Kong has become such a time bomb. Workers marched for standardised working hours, the same number of holidays as white-collar workers, and a higher minimum wage. Name-brand stores, tycoon-owned hotels, and overpaid bureaucrats whined about a drop in mainland visitors even though official figures showed a surge in arrivals during the holidays. These are the same whiners who had scaremongered about doomsday if Hong Kong improved the wages, benefits, and rights of workers. They are the same whiners who warned of economic collapse if we limited the flood of mainlanders. Hotel owners whined just because they didn't have 100 per cent occupancy and had to reduce their exorbitant rates. Greed knows no limits. Well, doomsday never came despite a minimum wage law and hostility towards mainlanders. In fact, the holidays saw a mad grab for coffin-sized flats of 229 sq ft costing HK$3.9 million. Industry experts said the stock market surge had produced cashed-up investors willing to speculate in property. Proof, if you want it, that Hong Kong is a house of cards built on a foundation of property and stock market speculation. Workers with stagnant wages, fat cat bosses whining about their wallets not bulging fast enough, and coffin-sized flats with price tags few can afford - that's your time bomb. It came into sharp focus last weekend.

Public Eye has been thinking long and hard about the latest addition to our political lexicon: false legitimacy. Unlike "fake democracy", "genuine choice", and "pocket it first", this one is somewhat puzzling. False legitimacy, as the democracy camp logic goes, is when five million eligible Hong Kong voters freely elect a chief executive from a pool of candidates pre-screened by Beijing. Such an election would produce a winner with false legitimacy, not a true mandate. To grasp its logic, you must assume that voters - knowing that candidates have been pre-screened but who still choose to vote - are too stupid to understand that their votes carry false legitimacy for the winner. So, if you belong to the half of Hong Kong that wants to pocket it first, you're a numbskull. It doesn't matter that false legitimacy only has logic if voters are forced to vote for pre-screened candidates. That won't be the case if our legislature approves Beijing's framework. Yes, the framework pre-screens candidates. But if voters still choose to vote, it is supremely condescending to say their votes are worthless. An election winner - regardless of how candidates are selected - has legitimacy if voters can freely choose to vote or not to vote under a one person, one vote system. If voters feel candidates are undemocratically selected, they can choose not to vote. The only way a winner lacks legitimacy and a mandate is if enough voters boycott an election to make it meaningless. But democracy legislators won't give Hongkongers the choice of a boycott because they intend to vote down the framework.