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HONG KONG PROVISIONAL URBAN COUNCIL
a Chinese conception to appraise the history of the former colony. Putting it in the jargon used in Mainland China, this is to introduce ‘a reversion of the past mistakes'. Such an ideological trend is exactly the most dreadful one in our eyes and in the eyes of the people of Hong Kong.
At the meeting, a Member also asked that the wordings used in future exhibitions should be censored to ensure the accuracy of the contents and the correctness of the viewpoints. It was even mentioned that the Hong Kong Government also exercised political censorship on films before, meaning that there is nothing wrong to have censorship today as in the past. Such views impressed even our fellow party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, as incredible and sounded an alarm to the Council's long-standing policy of supporting multi-cultural and arts development. Another thing that calls for greater attention is that if the SAR Government conducts a review to the two Municipal Councils or the district administration system and consequently centralizes the policies on culture and arts, we cannot see how the future Legislative Council with only 20 directly-elected seats can turn today's nightmare into tomorrow's reality.
Many Members mentioned that nothing has changed after the transition. They said that the past worries on politics, culture, arts and freedom were unnecessary and those who talked about these worries were ill-intentioned and were just trying to bad-mouth Hong Kong. However, a very prominent thing about this incident is that some of those having close contacts with the central authority have stated their wish for a re-valuation of the existing culture, arts and history of Hong Kong from a correct political viewpoint. Such a signal calls for the vigilance of the general public and those working in the cultural and arts fields. Lastly, I firmly believe that future historians will have an interesting comment about the history of Hong Kong in 1997. However, I do not want to see that 1997 is the starting point for a decline in the freedom of culture, arts and history of Hong Kong.
Next, I would like to talk about another issue regarding the establishment of a municipal tribunal. So far, there are roughly more than 40,000 prosecution cases involving different areas of municipal services annually. These prosecution actions are being criticized for seriously protracting the length of the banning and closure period of illegal food premises. As this is the case, we support the establishment of an independent municipal services tribunal to handle the prosecution cases within the jurisdiction of the Council so as to expedite all these cases. As regards food licensing service, we also see that although we have a provisional licensing system presently, there are still some delays. We therefore suggest that consideration should be given to the implementation of a pre-vetting programme whereby the owners of some shops and properties can submit the layouts or information regarding the surroundings of their premises to the existing food licensing authorities for pre-vetting purpose. In this way, they will know in advance if the applicant can meet the basic requirements which is the pre-requisite for the application of a
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