Opinion | Protests and pandemic will be Carrie Lam’s legacy, but she deserves to be remembered for much more
- While the focus as Lam concludes her term will no doubt be on her toughest moments, they shouldn’t define her leadership
- Lam has been a champion of art, innovation and heritage conservation, and has taken on seemingly intractable issues like housing and waste management
It’s a curious thing about memory that we tend to remember and dwell on negative events much more readily than on positive ones. Negativity bias is a proven psychological phenomenon. That’s why we recall insults better than praise. Or pay more attention to negative events than positive ones.
It’s no wonder then that Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s soon-to-be-concluded term may be remembered more for the 2019 protests and the once-in-a-lifetime Covid-19 pandemic than anything else she has accomplished. Most people would agree that her five-year term was the most challenging of any chief executive’s since the handover.
Perhaps we can remember instead Lam’s willingness to tackle long-standing and seemingly intractable problems, sometimes with controversial decisions, such as banning e-cigarettes, municipal waste charging and increased welfare spending.
