Call for AL indirect election revamp

There should be a proportion between an association’s number of members and its number of votes, the participants of a public consultation session on political reform have said

The method for the election of functional representatives at the Legislative Assembly (AL) should be revamped and the different sectors should be better defined, urban planning and construction experts have said.
In a public consultation session on political reform held late Monday, several participants said the government should clarify the criteria for collective voters.
“An association has 11 votes even if it only has 20 members while an association with 2,000 members also gets 11 votes,” the president of the Macau Engineer Association said. “We should have a proportion between an association’s number of members and its number of votes,” Leong Man Io explained.
In 2008, before the last elections, the government increased requirements for the 940 associations acknowledged as collective voters. Only associations operating for at least seven years are now allowed to vote, unless they have failed to report any activities for two consecutive years.
But a representative of the Macau Computer Society said the changes are not enough. “Do we know how many members an association has? There must be a better way to choose a representative from each sector and optimise indirect election,” he said.
In the previous five consultation sessions the discussion focused on an increase to the number of directly and indirectly-elected lawmakers.
But on Monday economist Kwan Fong said there should be fewer indirectly-elected seats.
And the member of the council for the renewal of old neighbourhoods said “the political participation of the Macau population should be increased in a democratic way”.
Kwan said functional representatives should be elected directly by the members of each sector. “And this idea should also be applied to the composition of the electoral committee for the Chief Executive,” he added.
A member of the Macau Engineer Association supported this suggestion. “It would increase the population’s participation in politics and representatives would have more credibility,” he said.

Professional areas

The participants also warned that in several situations the line that separates the different electoral sectors is quickly fading away. They particularly called for a clarification of who belongs to the professional sector.
“How do you define what a professional is? What kind of jobs are we talking about?” a member of the Macau Engineer Association asked. “We must have a relevant regulation, that appropriately sets the criteria,” he said.
The association president agreed: “We should better clarify what is the professional sector, according to international-level definitions.” Leong Man Io also said this sector should be split up “as it happens with the social, education and cultural sector”.
“An engineer, a physician, an architect; they are all professionals but at the same time those are very different jobs,” a member of the Macau Electrical and Mechanical Professionals’ Association stressed.
But the overall distribution of the indirectly-elected seats should be changed as well. “There should be a more scientific method to calculate the adequate representation for the different sectors,” a representative from the Women’s General Association of Macau said.
“Of course we should increase the number of indirectly-elected members,” another participant said. “But we can’t just hand out more seats without looking at the distribution.”
Late yesterday there was another public consultation session with representatives from the social affairs and culture sectors. The last of eight sessions, and the only one open to all residents, will take place tonight.
Last week the Chief Executive spoke about the possibility of organising more sessions open to the public before the consultation period ends, on January 31. “As I heard that people are demanding more public consultations to express their opinions, we should analyse their opinions from different channels,” Fernando Chui Sai On said.
On Monday the secretary for Administration and Justice, Florinda Chan, stressed that the government had already moved today’s consultation from the much smaller main hall of the Macau Polytechnic Institute to the grand auditorium of the Cultural Centre, which holds up to 800 people.
Head of the Chief Executive cabinet, Alexis Tam Chon Weng told Rádio Macau that on the last day of registration not all seats were taken.