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Objects and Reasons.
1. The first important licensing enactment in Hong Kong was Ordinance No. 11 of 1844, which was in effect a Liquors Ordinance, but provided for the licensing of certain games (billiards, skitttles and ninepins), and thereafter as necessity arose, other Ordinances regulated many other licences, such as Liquors. Opium, Tobacco, Boarding-houses, Ferries, Prospecting and Mining, covering a wide range of subjects which it was impossible to correlate and deal with in a general Licensing Ordinance.
2. In the Licensing Ordinance. 1887, No. 8 (originally No. 21) of 1887, the then existing provisions relating to the issue of various licences were collected from the enactments in which they appeared.
3. The Vehicles and Traffic Regulation Ordinance, No. 40 of 1912, superseded and repealed certain sections of the Licensing Ordinance. 1887. which with minor amendments has remained unaltered till the present time.
4. The Licensing Ordinance, 1887, was merely a general collection of provisions dealing with a number of mis- cellaneous licences for which no special provision had been made in some other Ordinance. This Ordinance has a similar object. It leaves untouched the special Ordinances such as the Liquors Ordinance, 1931, and the Liquors Amendment Ordinance, 1932, the Prospecting and Mining Ordinance, 1906, and the Boarding-house Ordinance, 1917. But it substitutes for Ordinance No. 8 of 1887 an enactment dealing with miscellaneous licences in which the licences dealt with by that Ordinance have been included, revised and extended. The title has been changed, on the ground of clearness, and certain necessary amendments in form have been effected.
A Table of Correspondence is attached which indicates the source of each section and the nature of the various amendments.
C. G. ALABASTER,
Attorney General.
September, 1933.