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been causing all these delays and slow motion? If resources are available to stamp our city indiscriminately with patches of mini-soccer pitches why cannot such resources be consolidated to do something for our athletes in other sports.
The last subject I would like to touch upon is the provision of parking spaces in Housing Authority estates.
At present, there are in total approximately 1,600 parking spaces available in the nine Housing Authority estates each charging the user less than $60 a month as against a realistic capital/maintenance cost of over $200 on the part of Government. In other words, Government is heavily subsidizing the car owners who, being estate tenants, are already subsidized in a way, But this is not all, for there are cases of car owners using their cars for a dual purpose: for pleasure and business. For this reason, Government is also indirectly subsidizing private business. This, I feel, must be discontinued.
Therefore, the current piecemeal policy in estate parking warrants immediate review and a new long term policy regarding parking formulated especially when the ten-year building programme to house 1.8 million people as announced by the Governor in his Legco Speech was to commence. The current policy is certainly unjustified when public money is to be spent on such a magnified scale for such a purpose. If a certain estate tenant needs a car badly, he should solve his own parking problem. It is not fair to expect Government to allocate land space and money for such purpose at the expense of thousands and thousands of prospective tenants who have been on the waiting list for years. If the parking problem becomes widespread and the demand for parking facilities universal, I am sure the commercial sector will only be too glad to provide such service at current commercial rate if Government can provide the land. Perhaps this is a worthy point the new Secretary of Housing Department would like to consider when he takes his seat in April next. (Applause).
DR. DENNY M. H. HUANG (In Cantonese):-As one of the campaigners to make Chinese an official language I am happy to see Cantonese being used for the first time in this Council today. However, I have never been carried away by the implementation announced earlier this year, for that is only the first step towards a much more meaningful end, i.e. to enable non-English speaking people to serve on all councils and government advisory committees. Furthermore, it is Cantonese, one of a number of Chinese forms of speech, that is to be used and for our monthly public meetings only.
(Mr. Peter P. K. NG left the meeting at this point.)
I hereby urge the Government to promulgate without delay a definite date when a large number of able and public-spirited citizen
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who are non-English speaking will not be disqualified from serving on this and other councils as well as various government advisory committees.
Furthermore, since all Chinese textbooks are written in Mandarin and Hong Kong, one of the great international ports, is yet the sole place in the world where the Chinese community speaks practically only Cantonese, I feel that this is the time Mandarin classes should be re-instituted in primary schools and translation classes re-opened in Anglo-Chinese secondary schools and that, if the word “Chinese” is to be retained in its title, The Chinese University of Hong Kong should make Mandarin compulsory for all its students until they have acquired a reasonably adequate command of the language.
In a speech delivered at the Congregation on the third of this month the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, Dr. Rayson HUANG, said "And even while this university compares favorably in quality with most universities in developing countries, we cannot dismiss the fact that, as far as access to higher education is concerned, our figures-6,000 university places for a population of over four million-put us well behind many of these countries." He then cautioned against too rapid expansion of a university, declaring that "Such an institution suffers not only from staff-student ratios but also a severe drop in teaching standards because of inexperienced and underqualified staff”.
Being a medical practitioner, I am, naturally, particularly concerned with the problem of the shortage of university places for medical students and the overall shortage of doctors in general. As a Chinese language campaigner, I am concerned over the fact that the University of Hong Kong is the only university which provides professional faculties and that, being an English university, it virtually excludes all graduates from Chinese middle schools from entry.
According to statistics published in the World Health Organization's Chronicle for March 1968, the doctor-population ratios in metropolitan cities in the Far East are: Tokyo 1/730, Taipei 1/970, Seoul 1/1,090, while that for Hong Kong is approximately 1/2,100. In other words, unless additional medical schools are provided, it will take some 42, 24 and 20 years to catch up with the present status of Tokyo, Taipei, and Seoul respectively, provided that the recent increase of 50 places in the medical faculty will all graduate on schedule and that those cities will not take steps to further improve their supply of doctors, a situation that can hardly be acceptable to the people of Hong Kong.
The recent dispute, widely reported in the newspapers, between a European police officer and the Medical Department has illustrated
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