Being overly restricted by local laws, even ones focused on public accountability, would hamper her ability to fulfil her constitutional role, she said.

“But it doesn’t mean the post will be free from any monitoring, because the chief executive is also a central government official,” Lam told a radio show.

“No one needs to worry about it. If the chief executive is involved in corruption, the central government will definitely see it.”

Lam was referring to sections 3 and 8 of Hong Kong’s anti-bribery ordinance, which govern the conduct of ministers and civil servants, but exempt the chief executive.

Calls to address the issue first emerged in 2012, when then city leader Donald Tsang Yam-kuen faced allegations of accepting bribes from a businessman. A special committee chaired by former chief justice Andrew Li Kwok-nang later recommended the law be revised to cover the chief executive and require that they obtain permission before accepting advantages.

Running for the top job in 2017, Lam vowed to revise the ordinance as suggested and “resolve as soon as possible those constitutional and legal issues” necessary for an amendment. Following her victory that same year, her former chief secretary, Matthew Cheung Kin-chung, told lawmakers the government would “initiate the legislative procedure as early as possible”.

Lam said it was too easy for people to use the laws to accuse the chief executive of breaching the rules, pointing out that she had been the subject of anti-graft agency inquiries during her election campaign and that the allegations were later found unreasonable.

She also noted opposition lawmakers had previously attempted to constrain her by taking away her power to appoint representatives to statutory organisations and various committees.

That, Lam said, represented a threat to the absolute discretion the office was meant to enjoy.

“If there is a law passed by the legislature under which the chief executive does not enjoy absolute power in certain scenarios and can be limited by others, that goes against our political system, which is led by the chief executive,” she said.

But Democratic Party chairman Lo Kin-hei was not convinced by Lam’s reasoning as he highlighted the need for checks and balances at the highest level of governance.

“As the top management of government, the chief executive’s acts should be restricted in a more stringent way. But these calls are just asking for the city leader to be treated like others,” Lo said.

Stephen Char Shik-ngor, former chief investigator at the Independent Commission Against Corruption, questioned how changing the law would actually affect the city leader’s constitutional role.

Disputing Lam’s insistence the central government would handle any misconduct issues, Char said there was no mechanism in place for lodging complaints against the chief executive with Beijing.

Separately, Lam noted that a top mainland Chinese official’s recently shared vision of a city free of subdivided flats and “cage homes”– tiny, cramped living spaces rented by some of the poorest residents – represented a very long-term outlook. But she and her team were working tirelessly towards that end, she said.

The chief executive told lawmakers on Thursday that she planned to make tackling the city’s housing woes the focus of the final year of her term in office.

On Friday, the State Council’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office director, Xia Baolong, highlighted the housing issue when predicting that the city would achieve economic prosperity and eliminate its most deep-seated social problems by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.