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City Cleansing
HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
It is with great interest that I read of your plans to keep our urban areas as clean as circumstances permit. I am confident that the Urban Services Department will do a good job in the main thoroughfares and also in the resettlement estates. I wonder, however, whether the residential areas and the side-streets are receiving as much attention at present as they ought to instead of being neglected by comparison. The resident is already paying the piper, as it were, in many other ways for the ubiquitous squatter and refugee. Will you please make a note of this hint, Mr. Chairman? And perhaps give some thought to its implication in relation to other work done by the Council?
However reassured I may be that the Department in question will be able to cope with city cleansing from day to day, I feel I cannot say the same in the case of an emergency. I trust that the experience gained last year from Typhoon Gloria will have since prompted your officers to study how to make good the deficiency in organization the next time they have to work under stress.
Resettlement
The three Select Committees with actual practical responsibility are only too well aware of the great work which is being done for our refugees by the Hong Kong Government.
Conceived with boldness and imagination the policy of resettling so many thousands who have sought a haven of refuge in Hong Kong is implemented in a practical and conscientious manner. If greater progress has not been made, it is simply because it has not been possible, having regard to the many difficulties we have to overcome.
While we still hope that outside help will be given us eventually, I believe it will be best for us in this Council to spend our energies in carrying out our own programme with the means locally available to us without distracting our attention with considerations which, although not extraneous, are yet perhaps best left to others in the administration of the Colony's affairs.
HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
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I have always been proud here and abroad of what Hong Kong has done for those who have come to live with us. I have good cause to believe that our action finds no parallel in scope and extent anywhere in the world.
Thus, because we have done so much and are planning to do still so much more for these refugees, I think it is only just that we should not forget at this time our own residents of longer standing. They are faced with many problems which such an influx of people must obviously cause. Should some consideration not be given to them, also?
Cemeteries
Here I must confess that I am not at all pleased with the policy which this Council is pursuing. This is no secret to the appropriate Select Committee.
Now that we are about to develop a new area for a cemetery of no mean proportions at Cape Collinson, evidently the time has come for us to review our policy instead of following the line of least resistance, which we are in danger of doing.
The present policy may have served its purpose a hundred years ago. Times have changed. Hong Kong has grown. More people of more varied faiths and religions contribute to the public coffers and the well-being of Hong Kong as a whole. They are surely entitled to equal consideration, dead as they are when alive.
It is topical to express concern over the cost of living. It does not seem to be equally conventional to talk about the cost of dying. Hence, this subject has not received the attention that it obviously deserves.
There can clearly be no justification whatsoever for the taxpayer to subsidize the burial of an extremely small percentage of the population who as individuals belong, by and large, to a privileged economic group. It simply does not make sense, whatever the specious argument which may be advanced.
True, there are free burial facilities for paupers. Still, in drawing my comparison, I am referring to economic classes other than paupers. They should all be given the same treatment without distinction of race or creed.
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