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And what are we to make of lanes and byways where pornography is dispensed so freely. Who has not seen calendars where the object is not to tell the day of the year? Who has not seen youths and tourists pawing over books that are certainly not cheap editions of the new Oxford Bible? Who has not heard of the travelling salesman with a portmanteau of articles such as neckties, etc. intended to conceal obscenity in postcards and photos.
Who is not aware of respectable areas on both sides of the harbour which have been converted into red-light districts despite the protests of residents' associations, kaifongs, churches and schools?
Is the Government going to persist in doing nothing about all these. Sensible people applaud a government which is liberal, but not one which is libertine.
Mr. Chairman, we must stop paying lip service to the youth of to-morrow, and do something for the youth of to-day. They are not likely to ask you for control of boarding houses, or the banning of massage establishments, as they have asked you for the use of the roof garden of Blake Pier. Some moments in history call for unwanted gifts, and this is one of them. Control of trouble makers must not be seen to consist of suppression of political subversion merely. There are trouble makers who lay the groundwork for future dissension in a sphere that is non-political to begin with, but which becomes so eventually by a slow accretion of indifference. Licence leads to excess. Excess soon comes to require discipline, and in the climate of agitation resulting from the imposition of discipline comes unrest on a political level. And the sufferers are always youth. We know this is so because last year we had warning of it: commonsense is repelled by a state of mind which sees the lid of Pandora's box open, but does not close it.
Just as hawkers have a control force, so should a force be created to administer discipline on a moral level. Health inspections must not stop there, but must proceed to moral inspections. Sanitation must extend to the spirit.
The Wan Chai reclamation should be used as a temporary playground, and library services enlarged to include every district. For a city of four million, a library of 250,000 books is pitifully inadequate.
I also believe Sir, that the government is remiss by not having done anything concrete to give us more schools for vocational training, and more industrial schools. Committed as we are to an endless programme of export expansion, it is strange that the commercial sector is left to find its own devices for the pool of technicians, with particular skills that any community depending on industry must automatically require.
You do not pick technicians out of the air, and it is uneconomic to keep recruiting them from abroad. I believe that an ounce of enterprise
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now will produce a pound of results later—and more youths involved in mastering industrial skills means less youths at liberty to absorb immoral ills.
So I am back at the point where I began. I plead for less talk about the future and more concern with the present. I ask for an urgent review of our laws for an immediate strengthening of their moral fibres for less preoccupation with dances and more with decency, for less pandering to the trivial and more devotion to the transcendent.
We need not be too concerned about the availability of jobs ten years from to-day. Ten years ago, the pundits envisaged this age as one of doom for Hong Kong. Yet we have never been more prosperous. A materialist society will find the materials, and the markets with which to prosper. We will cross these industrial and export bridges when we come to them. That is the lesson of Hong Kong.
But it is the height of folly to be complacent about the immorality at present in our midst. What was a trickle is now a flood, aided and abetted by external hippie influences which together comprise the shame of the West.
It is not too late to bring the lid of the box down.
But if we choose to fiddle while Rome burns, we can scarcely expect our fate to be any better than that of the Emperors.
Mr. Chairman, I support the Motion. (Applause).
MR. JAMES M. H. WU:- Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak on this occasion on subjects including those not included in the jurisdiction of this Council but are nevertheless of great concern to the community. These are (1) The Ward Office and the C.D.O. (2) Education and training for industry at all levels.
Ward Office and the C.D.O.
A great deal has been said on bridging the "Communication gap" between government and people. No doubt this work should deserve high priority and Government should be constantly reminded of its deficiency in this field. It must also be borne in mind that not a few of our citizens, before their coming to live in Hong Kong, had been deprived of an adequate normal education, being victims of war, civil strife and poverty in this age of turbulence. The congested places of accommodation and intense working conditions, provide increased opportunities of friction and frustration, a situation that would by itself demand handling with fairness, understanding and care. That last year's disturbances were successfully contained was a tribute to the
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