Honking on the Alluring Oil (to no avail)
At last, Kowloon City has a nominated District Council candidate who is not personally on the nominating committee1. Still, although Tasha Tse Man-ting doesn’t declare any political affiliation, she’s no plucky independent: the newcomer is heavily backed by pro-Beijing election committee lawmaker Doreen Kong2 who, after falling out with NPP and FTU, looks hellbent on creating her own party of post-80s pep.
Kong’s Kowloon City South candidate Tse is a metaphysician who sells magic potions which, Tse claims, bring you love, money, success – for a limited time only, and for $75,735 (US$9,680) you can subscribe yourself and 14 friends to the “Plan C Group Buy” for the full package of oils including Alluring Oil, Love Oil, Wealth Oil and a bonus “Secret of Life”.
Worth every penny, I imagine. Just a few dabs of Alluring Oil will “enhance your popularity and improve your interpersonal relationships, making you extremely popular, loved by everyone, and become a heartthrob.”
Perhaps this is how she lured a nomination from the chairman of the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, Siu Chor-kee BBS, MH, JP (who still hasn’t responded to countless messages from me and one from the District Office, not even a “fuck off I’m busy”)?
I’m pretty envious of Tse’s lawmaker support: Doreen Kong lined up “six meetings a day” with nominators for Tse and her other Kowloon City candidate Jennifer Lam to share political philosophies and secure nomination support.
When this sort of thing is presented as the hard work of nomination3 , those of us who can’t even get a meeting or electronic response from nominators are going to look lazy. This is probably by design.
It’s not just me and the dems having this trouble. Even steadfast patriot Michael Tien (head of the Roundtable party) has complained he either doesn’t know the nominators or they’re not calling him back. In quite a scathing interview with HK01 Tien complains it feels like a beauty pageant, sitting around waiting for someone to love you. Worth a read and I hope English-language press picks it up.
Someone who needs no Alluring Oil, heartthrob Regina Ip, says this is all a load of nonsense. In fact, she says it’s “funny” that some other parties are having trouble when NPP, DAB, FTU and BPA are having no problems. Well, life’s a charm when you’re the Convenor of Exco and, as much as I’m a fan of Ip, I wish she would take some of these issues more seriously.
Not to be pessimistic, but Ziggy says there’s only a 0.8% chance I’ll be making the Three Committees nominations. Mathematically, there are only eight unused nominees left for my constituency which means there’s only possibly 2.6 more candidates allowed in Kowloon City North. Of the eight, I’ve blitzed three with no result for the last three weeks or so and five I just can’t find (I have sent a few guesswork messages out, with no joy).
For this reason, I’m shifting into a new campaign gear and concentrating only on hitting the streets. Let the nominators come, if they wish, but I’m going to spend the weekend talking to the Kowloon City residents, pitching a District Council platform of safe streets, clean air and worker safety, which was the whole point of doing this in the first place.
Add oil, Hong Kong!
We now have eight candidates nominated, of whom seven are on the nomination committee themselves.
Just to complete the circle, the 40 Election Committee constituency seats like Doreen Kong’s are voted by the Election Committee members themselves. Members of that committee, who get to pick the Chief Executive as well as 40 out of 90 LegCo members, are drawn from the establishment, federations and, of course, the “Three Committees” who also decide who can be a District Council candidate.
This is actually a theme now, with almost everyone nominated into any Hong Kong office, from the CE to clergymen to metaphysicians, talking about how many meetings they rushed about to on the busiest day of their campaign.