How to achieve democracy of masses?

The spirit of democracy is active participation of public in policy decision making process and other public affairs. Electoral democracy is essential in modern democratic systems, but it still cannot represent the will of the many.

It is because elected governments or councils are not truly representative of national opinion since discrepancies often found in most voting systems, which election results cannot correspond to proportion of votes of each candidate, and thus certain groups or communities, or their agents are excluded from policy making process.

Most of the funds of politicians actually come from powerful capitalists. When we cast our votes to them, we do recognize the legitimacy of the ruling system, which is subject to predatory capitalism, and surrender our power to officials or councilors, who are often subject to the power and interest of capitalists.

There are lots of evidence to prove that electoral system cannot reduce, but expand the economic and social inequality. For example, in the past three decades, several governments reduced taxes of the rich, relaxed the regulations on banks, property sector and capital flow. Many public utilities have become share corporation. That has lead to wild fluctuation in asset prices, escalating public and private debts, unstable employment, wage reduction, increasing disproportion in wealth distribution, bank crises and deposit protection in expense of taxpayers. Another example is various governments set up surveillance systems and anti-terrorism laws under the name of "protection of safety of citizens". The major reason of this is only a FEW major enterprises and politicians being involved in the legislation process. In the other words, the voice of general masses are IGNORED.

Therefore, we should find out other methods to make our ideas or views to be represented and practised. To practise the "real" spirit of democracy, we should actively participate daily issues around us, and to raise the attention of these among our family members, relatives, schoolmates, colleagues, union members and friends. For example, residents of an estate should express their opinions and involve in decision of setting and management of communal facilities because they are familiar to the facilities and daily operations of the estate, rather than officials.

The participatory democracy system can be implemented by steps below: First, we should mention the problems we faced to other members of the community, such as quality of public services, labour rights, like wages and working safety conditions, welfare issues, etc. and persuade relatives or colleagues to concern about these.

Second, we can gather the opinions of an issue that we concerned, and propose recommendations to tackle the problems. We may set up posters or billboards at communal places of housing estate, schools or universities, or on walls outside community centres, councilors' offices, trade union centres or religious gathering places. We should respect comments of the members and find out the pros and cons of ideas by each one. In order to reach consensus, we can analyse and discuss all possible methods and discuss to each other. This can make the members of communities to understand and agree the proposed plan.

Third, we can draft an action plan for the issues that we concerned. We can connect authorities or organizations that are responsible to the scope of the plans. Also, any members who have spare time may join the organizations in order to involve in the planning and implementation process directly. That may make our projects become practical. We can find local councilors to seek support in organizing activities, since they can help us to promote the activities to other residents or groups, and to explain the importance of participation. Those promotion can let more people being involved in implementation process and make the actions powerful.

In Hong Kong SAR, not all of district councilors are elected by voters. Some of them are appointed by the government and the rest are ex-officio members, who are rural committee chairpersons. Moreover, district councils are basically advisory boards and do not have much power to manage amenities. They also cannot decide the town planning, use of funds and provision of public services. The absence of city council also impede co-ordination of social projects involving two or more districts, and reduce the efficiency of handling territory-wide issues.

Because the existing ruling system in Hong Kong SAR is dominated by administrative departments, the district councils should have wider range of functions in management of amenities and regional matters, and all of the councilors should be directly elected, in order to make the councils represent the will of the public. The total district council members should be reduced to 300 in order to smooth the decision-making process. Also, more resources can be allocated to each councilor to improve the services to the communities.

The original text was distributed on 5 July 2012, 10:56pm.