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Wednesday, October 17, 1973
OFF-COURSE BETTING ON HORSE RACING TO BE LEGALISED
New legislation will be introduced to permit the Royal Hong Kong
Jockey Club to extend its totalisator betting facilities to off-course betting
on horse races in Hong Kong.
Announcing this today, the Governor, Sir Murray MacLehose, made it
clear however that the government proposed "to do no more than this at the
moment."
The decision to make "only a limited move, " he told the Legislative
Council, was made after the different views on existing gambling laws had been
carefully weighed.
On the one hand, he said, the view had been expressed that present
gambling laws "are tou restrictive, are unenforceable and should be relaxed,
while on the ether there were those who sincerely believed that changes of
this nature "would be harmful and that it would be wrong for the government
to move too quickly to relax the present laws."
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The decision follows recommendations by a Working Party, set up in
May this year, to examine the extent to which off-course betting might be
legalised. The Working Party submitted its recommendations to the government
in August.
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