Your applause, please for the winner of this year’s Marie Antoinette Memorial Let Them Eat Cake Medal for Outstanding Ignorance of How the Other Half Lives. We need not wait another two months because it is inconceivable that any other contestant could better the mark set on Wednesday by David Pannick QC.
Mr Pannick was appearing for the government in an appeal against a decision of the Registration of Persons Tribunal. The appellant was a Filipino lady who has been in Hong Kong since 1991 and has a 14-year-old son who was born here and knows no other home. In 2008 she applied for permanent residence and was refused. For the lady, a domestic helper, it was argued that she had taken Hong Kong as her home, was a member of a church here, engaged in charitable activities, and was regarded as a member of her employer’s family. She had given up her right to vote in the Phillipines and no longer had a home there.
Mr Pannick, for the government, said that this was not enough. The lady concerned should have taken “positive steps” to adopt Hong Kong as her residence. An example was to own a flat in Hong Kong, he said.
Now pick yourself up off the floor while we consider a few things it would be nice to say to Mr Pannick. We could say, for example, that a single mother living on a domestic helper’s salary might be pushed to buy a flat in Hong Kong. Indeed many people on much more than a domestic helper’s salary would dearly like to buy a flat in Hong Kong but cannot. Would he accept a dog kennel? Or we could entertain ourselves by thinking of other ways in which a domestic helper might show her Positive Enthusiasm for residence in Hong Kong, like owning a racehorse, joining the Hong Kong Club, sending her son to Yew Chung International School or employing an expensive expat twit to argue her case instead of the local lady provided by Legal Aid.
The law is not an ass, we are often told. But some lawyers…
tim's experiment 
Hear, hear.