New | Hong Kong people must not settle for anything less than universal suffrage

The government has finally published its long-awaited consultation document on methods for selecting the chief executive in 2017 and for forming the Legislative Council in 2016. While Hong Kong 2020 had no great expectations, given that the public had already been advised it would contain no specific proposals, we did not expect it to be quite so lacklustre.

The document is repetitive, full of clichés and, despite the government's commitment to pave the way for an open discussion of options, takes some very uncompromising positions on interpretation of key parts of the Basic Law. The constant falling back on references to interpretations by mainland officials make it all too obvious that, while the document may have been drafted in Tamar, its tone and content was steered from the central government's liaison office in Western.

Hong Kong people must not be hoodwinked by the government's assertion that it is yet to have any position regarding the methods for selecting the chief executive and for forming Legco. A careful reading - not just of what the document says, but more importantly what it doesn't say - gives a strong indication of the sort of package we are likely to be presented with at the end of next year.

With regard to election of the chief executive, the document reminds us, again and again, that under Article 45 of the Basic Law, "the ultimate aim is the selection of the chief executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures".

We are told that when it comes to defining what is meant by "broadly representative", we should assume the term has the same meaning as in the case of the Election Committee. This completely ignores the widely held opinion that the Election Committee is anything but "broadly representative"; on the contrary, it is dominated by pro-Beijing business and professional elites and elected by a mere 240,000 individual and corporate voters - some of whom can vote in multiple sectors and thus wield a totally disproportionate influence on the electoral outcome.

If the future nominating committee is to have credibility, its structure and the size of its electoral base must be different from those of the Election Committee.

Then we come to the issue of the nominating process. Having been told that we must take reference from the Election Committee, the document sends a strong signal that the nominating procedure could be completely different from that of the Election Committee. Up till now, aspiring candidates for the post of chief executive have had to obtain individual nominations from a minimum of one-eighth of Election Committee members (currently 150). However, the document suggests that the future nominating committee should undertake a form of "organisational or collective nomination".