Hong Kong minister defends 6 district councillors who didn’t speak at 2024 meetings

Hong Kong’s home and youth affairs minister has defended six district councillors who did not speak at any of last year’s meetings, saying that repeating views expressed by others would be “meaningless”.

Home and Youth Affairs Secretary Alice Mak Mei-kuen insisted that all district councillors achieved their goals set by authorities, and believed they had prepared adequately for every meeting.

“If [a councillor] raised their hands or pressed the button slower than their neighbour, with their point expressed by their neighbour, the options left would be to repeat what has [already] been said, or say that [their] opinion was the same. That would be meaningless,” Mak told reporters on Monday.

The minister was responding to a report by local media that six district councillors, all appointed or ex officio members, had no record of speaking at last year’s meetings, while 33 councillors did not speak in over 80 per cent of meetings.

Mak added that unless citizens wished to see eight- to nine-hour-long meetings with filibustering, “speaking for the sake of speaking” would be an ineffective use of time for councillors.

“This is definitely not how a meeting should work, speaking for the sake of speaking or speaking for the sake of [hitting] numbers. That’s not what we want to see,” Mak said.

Under a revamped electoral system to “depoliticise” Hong Kong’s municipal-level district councils after a landslide opposition victory in 2019, the city saw 470 new district councillors take up office in December 2023.