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HONG KONG PROVISIONAL URBAN COUNCIL
and asking the Housing Department to make hygienic rating of all the estates in Hong Kong. A new measure was just endorsed this month whereby USD staff is to go into the estate area to conduct regular inspection. Nevertheless, officials of the USD and Housing Department have been protecting and shielding each other. They have defied the Council's decision or are simply being perfunctory by adopting stopgap measures to tackle problems, thereby turning the public housing estates into special regions within the HKSAR, which are outside the Council's purview in hygienic matters.
The above has given us the impression that the government is too pedantic and the weaknesses of the Council are too deep-rooted. The Democratic Party therefore considers that in order to solve the problem of public housing hygiene, we must overcome ourselves first by fully involving ourselves in the supervision of the cleansing services of public housing estates. This is also our responsibility towards public housing tenants.
With these remarks, I support the motion. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WU CHI-WAI (in Cantonese): As far as we know, in the past two years, a number of discussions were held under different topics concerning freedoms of culture and art and freedom of expression. Unfortunately, very often we failed in these discussions to convey a clear message to the public and staff that it was the Council's explicit wish to protect freedoms of artistic creation and expression. It is also because of this that we have found our colleagues in the Department to be frequently over cautious and over-react over some cultural performances.
Last year we had the incident of the male version of 'The Princess Flower' and recently, we learned that the posters of #'' were submitted for censorship at the USD staff's request. The reason for submitting them for censorship was that the posters might arouse controversy or provoke the community. I wish to point out clearly here that if we were to uphold freedom of creation and freedom of expression, we should fully recognize the fact that the creative part of an activity having been defined as an art performance by us naturally includes the performance itself and the promotional activities. If these performance groups did break the laws of Hong Kong, they would certainly be monitored by the public and there is no need for the departmental staff to be too sensitive to take somebody else's job into their own hands.
On the other hand, I wish to point out that Hong Kong is a society in which Eastern and Western cultures have intermixed for more than a century and that it is by no means easy to develop a community which is both accommodating and open-minded. Basically it is generally recognized that Hong Kong society is one which is open and accommodating, but if we frequently judged a performance by personal moral standards, this land with great thoughts and creativity would likely wither gradually.
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