Hong Kong’s public broadcaster hired many editorial staffers on a freelance basis because the government did not let it recruit more civil servants to meet the workload, a former union leader said.

The civil servant head count at Radio Television Hong Kong was frozen for more than a decade after the 1997 handover, former RTHK Programme Staff Union chair Janet Mak said.

Mak was criticizing a long-awaited government report on RTHK’s management practices, which noted that the station employed both civil servants and freelancers.

“RTHK has not put in place a compliance mechanism for quality assurance during the pre-broadcast and post-broadcast stages in order to minimize editorial risks (such as handling of conflict-of-interest situations and on matters of accuracy or impartiality),” the government’s Commerce and Economic Development Bureau said in its report.

In response, Mak said that after Britain handed Hong Kong to China in 1997, the government wanted to review RTHK and capped the number of civil service positions. For more than 10 years during the recruitment freeze, RTHK’s workload increased heavily, she said.

It created a situation in which employing freelancers was the only viable option, she added.

Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development Edward Yau denied that RTHK editorial decisions which touched on political issues needed to be raised at the highest levels of the broadcaster. It was the RTHK Charter, not politics, that specified putting controversial issues to management, Yau said on a radio program on Saturday.

The report recommended that RTHK introduce a mandatory referral system “with clearly defined editorial responsibilities and accountability at each editorial level and highlighting the decision-making role of the editor-in-chief in the system.”

Yau replied to a question on whether such a system would affect the efficiency of program production. He said that time was not the only consideration in determining if a decision should be asked of the higher-ups. If an error was broadcast, the effect on RTHK and the public would be more long-lasting, he said.

The minister also spoke about Leung Ka-wing’s early departure as RTHK director of broadcasting, which was announced on Friday. Leung’s impending exit was handled in accordance with his employment contract, Yau said.

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