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”.

Secretary for Home and Youth Affairs 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 said 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. Another 33 did not speak in more than 80 per cent of meetings.

Mak added that unless residents wished to see eight- to nine-hour 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 members take up office in December 2023.