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Widening the scope for tenders will, as I have already said, raise the tender prices offered. This may be good for the Treasury (if that is our purpose), but it will have an adverse effect on the tenants from whom shopkeepers will certainly recover the money spent in tender from their customers in the shortest possible time. Is it our purpose to resettle squatters and subject them to higher prices for the commodities they buy on the estates? Some squatters, who have never paid sizeable rents for their huts, already find resettlement rents an extra strain on their resources.
But more urgent than the reasons I have already given for supporting the motion is the social welfare aspect of the work. Squatter shops eligible for resettlement (or at present, for compensation) have operated for ten or twenty years. The shortest possible time of operation is nine years, since only those registered before 1964 are even tolerated. The squatter shopkeepers have been told repeatedly that only those registered at that time—that is 1964—are eligible for shops. To tell them now that we have changed the policy and the promise has been reduced to a sum of money is already looked upon by squatter shopkeepers as a breach of faith on the Government's part. It would be right and honourable, in my opinion, to go even further than the motion today, and give resettlement shops to all squatter shopkeepers tolerated since registration in early 1964. There cannot be too many left; and after that, we may more honourably change the system.
But that is not all. Since tolerated and therefore eligible shops have been so long registered, their owners have in most cases become heavily reliant upon their shops to support their families. Many are middle-aged people now, and it is difficult if not impossible for them to find alternative employment if they have done nothing else before except shopkeeping. The Department constantly tells us that they are given a few thousand dollars in compensation, but what is the use of $6,000, or even the maximum $20,000 to a man who has no other trade, and who will run through this sum of money in one to three years, probably at a time when his dependent children are more numerous and are trying to finish their education.
Unless they are given this priority implied in the Motion, I am firmly of the opinion that these dispossessed shopkeepers will form a new generation of illegal hawkers and squatter shopkeepers, who will plague the new resettlement blocks with their illegal structures, for the simple reason that they have to live, and they will find some illegal way if the Government, which has tolerated them for so long, does not offer them a legal way to live.
I have heard the Commissioner for Resettlement say on several occasions that if the ex-shopkeepers are in need, they can get public assistance. He is braver than I if he would say that, not to the Council, but to the shopkeepers, who would spurn any attempts to make them beggars depending on charity. I would not dare to suggest such a course except to the aged, the widowed, and to men who are temporarily unemployed because of sickness. The Chinese people should be encouraged in their traditional characteristic of being self-supporting; they do not want charity thrown in their faces.
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I have heard others on the Council say that the shopkeepers should go into industry, but although I have tried to find jobs for the dispossessed from the very people who talk like that, my efforts have never succeeded. Industry, it seems to me, is only for the young or the skilled: it does not pay enough to support the livelihood of a family man if he has no skill or experience. In fact, to put it shortly, the new shop policy is creating unemployment, encouraging people to accept handouts from the Government, and preparing the way for new illegalities in shops and hawker stalls. And to what end? Only to bring in higher tenders from outside shopkeepers who are in need of rehabilitation!
We shall no doubt be told by the Government side, perhaps supported by some others on the Council, that the old system lends itself to such irregularities as shop transfers and illegal subletting, and that the resettlement shopkeepers in the past regarded the shops as their own personal property. That is an obstacle easy to overcome by the simple expedient of carrying out the law that already exists against transfers and sub-letting, and by introducing leases, renewable only if the tenants have been keeping the law.
As I have already said, I should like to go even further than the Motion and propose a return to automatic shop resettlement (under strict conditions) for all eligible squatter shopkeepers. However, this Motion proposed by Mr. BERNACCHI is in my opinion a step in the right direction, and it will alleviate the hardship to some extent, as well as allay the bitterness felt by old squatter shopkeepers who feel they have been badly let down by the change of policy to tendering instead of allocation as of right.
If only those involved in a clearance are allowed to tender for shops (albeit in a more limited way), that will ensure that all resettlement shops go to bona fide tenants of resettlement estates, instead of complicating the issue by bringing in non-residents just for the sake of a few extra thousands of dollars, which we shall lose again by having to employ more staff to control illegal businesses that will certainly arise as a result of the policy.
Sir, I strongly support the Motion moved by my colleague Mr. BERNACCHI.
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