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HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL 1st October 1971.
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But while the sky-line changes, basic policies do not. As a government we are naturally still, as always, deeply concerned to serve the best interests of the four million people for whom we are responsible. Our care is still, as always, to do everything possible to ensure that Hong Kong enjoys fruitful and harmonious relationships with her neighbours in the region, and to ensure that within Hong Kong there is peace and personal freedom under laws as sensible and unconstraining as may be.
Equally, we have always sought to sustain Hong Kong's economy at a level which will not only provide good employment opportunities and a rising standard of living, but which will also enable us to carry through progressively more advanced policies for the provision of com- munity and social services. It is our aim, as it is the aim of any con- scientious government, to do all that is possible to enable each family and each individual to look forward to a better and a fuller life. These are continuing and unchanging policies but cannot be done with- out a close and sensitive relationship between people and government, and this also we have steadily sought to promote.
In preparing this address, I cast around in my mind to see if I could not detect some trend in the events of the past decade or so; some characteristic feature; to which I might draw your attention and illustrate by example. I came to the conclusion that I could discern us approaching the end of one period in our affairs, and entering another different but equally challenging one. For many years, since the war, we have had to concern ourselves primarily with meeting needs of an urgent, basic nature: mass problems, which had to be met with massive solutions, and which left few resources available for anything else. I believe that we can now turn our attention increasingly to rather more specialized and personal problems, and pay more attention to in- dividual rather than to mass needs. In short we are, I think and hope, coming out of an era of emergency action to ameliorate massive and immediate problems, and into an era in which we can hope to think in terms of refining and sophisticating over a wide field the quality of the various services we try to make available to the public.
We are also, I believe, reaching a situation, familiar already in many developing countries, in which increasing affluence and greater leisure, while both to be greatly welcomed in themselves, are neverthe- less giving rise to their own fresh problems. Among those, of course, that spring immediately to mind are pollution, litter, and traffic conges- tion, as well as the greatly increased pressure which now falls on various community services. There are also the undesirable social consequences that flow from the misuse of affluence and leisure by some. It will require strenuous effort to deal with these and other problems, and the road ahead will not necessarily be any easier.