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HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
As I said, Mr. BERNACCHI's service goes beyond the confines of this Council. Many institutions have been helped over the years by the time he gave to them and by the legal counsel he offered in their time of need. Today, we bid farewell to Mr. BERNACCHI, but as he told this Council in January, he is retreating to prepare his position to return two years hence when the Council is enlarged and there will be other boards in the ten urban districts. So, we say good-bye temporarily, and we say "thank you" too, and we wish also Mr. and Mrs. BERNACCHI abundant success and happiness in all they do.
DR. HENRY HU was elected to the Urban Council in 1965 for the first time. He served in many committees and was Vice-Chairman of this Council twice. Members will remember Dr. Hu for his very friendly disposition and his good humour. Everybody is Henry's brother. And, Henry is now in the Legislative Council, where he continues to serve the Urban Council's interest when problems arise. We know too that, notwithstanding all his many services to Hong Kong, his heart is in the field of education and he has made a great success of it. So, we also wish Dr. & Mrs. Hu abundant success and happiness in the years to come. (Applause).
MR. BERNACCHI (in English): -Mr. Chairman, thank you for your kind words and thank you, all members very much for the present that you, I am informed by no less an authority than the Chairman himself, will be giving to me shortly after the meeting, on my temporary holiday from the Urban Council.
A holiday caused by 29 years of complete frustration trying to get some sort of democracy, even at a low level, into the Government of Hong Kong. The Green Paper proposed that elections on a universal franchise basis would be held next year. The White Paper has now put it off to 1983. When elections are actually announced I will believe that they will be held. Until that time, I am off on holiday from public administration.
Nevertheless, the Council, and I say advisedly the Council, have from time to time made certain important inroads to the established Government, particularly when both Elected and Appointed Members work together and not in conflict with each other. Although public housing is now no direct concern of the Urban Council, it was the unofficial members of the Council who played an important part in the very foundation of the idea of public housing. I remember an Urban Council special committee after the Shek Kip Mei fire, chaired by the late Sir Douglas CLAGUE, then an official member of this Council, and on which Mr. Philip Au and several other Elected Members sat, played a very important role in recommending the formation of the old Resettlement Department. It was this Department that was so largely responsible for public housing for so many years, and it was directly under the Urban Council. A name that comes readily to the fore front in my memories of discussions on what was called the Resettlement Policy Select Committee is Dr. Alison BELL, its Chairman for a number of years. Again, of course, the Housing Authority itself was almost completely composed of the whole Urban Council, for the first years of its life.
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Committee is Dr. Alison BELL, its Chairman for a number of years. Again, of course, the Housing Authority itself was almost completely composed of the whole Urban Council, for the first years of its life.
It is so long ago now that I will disclose, for the first time ever, that a previous Chairman of the Urban Council, a very good friend of mine, disclosed to me a top secret Government file about a certain beach in the urban areas on my request for more information. This file contained a very peculiar procedure on a certain tender, involving some top names even on the then Executive Council. As a result of the information contained in that file, and as the delegated member in regard to beaches, I issued certain orders in the name of the Urban Council which caused a lot of embarrassment to those named. After I have returned the file to the Chairman, there was a fire in the Chairman's safe, but strangely enough that file was the only file that was utterly destroyed. As I have said before, all this happened a long long time ago.
Again, when I first came on to the Urban Council, public meetings taking more than 2 minutes were considered too long, and it was very unusual for a Select Committee (all chaired by official members) to actually meet, as opposed to doing its work by circulation of papers. I suppose the actual time taken on Urban Council work was then considerably less than one hour a week. Members of the Council can themselves compare that, with the time they spend at present on Urban Council work per week.
I think that the Urban Council was a big factor in the formation of the Social Welfare Department. It has never had anything directly to do with Social Work as such, but as so many of its duties infringed on social welfare, Urban Councillors, perhaps more than any of the unofficials of the other Councils, realized the importance of Social Welfare in the down-trodden life of early post-war Hong Kong and its community. In fact, in the middle 1950s, the Social Welfare Officer, then a Mr. MCDOUGAL, although still under the old Secretariat for Chinese Affairs, came on to this Council as an official member in view of the very fact that we were encountering so many social welfare cases. Indeed, the officials on this Council played a very big part in the Council's work and often put the Council's interest above their own interest as Government servants. I for one was very sorry to lose them when the Council became financially independent in 1973. I remember a Deputy Director of Medical Services, who was at that time the Vice Chairman of the Council, suggesting, to the horror of some other Government servants, that air-conditioning in resettlement estates was a necessity not a luxury. Unfortunately, connections for air-conditioning are still not yet available for a number of rooms in public housing estates.
Generally, the public sees the Urban Council only in its public meetings where there is this constant cut and thrust, and sometimes indeed gets the wrong impression that its time is taken up by squabbling. Such of course has always been the impression given from these public meetings which are,
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