Governor's letter on comments on Broadcasting Bill
Following is the full text of a letter the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten, has sent to the Hong Kong Journalists Association relating to comments made on the Broadcasting Bill:
24 January 1996
I was disappointed by your reaction on behalf of the Hong Kong Journalists Association to our announcement yesterday about the Broadcasting Bill and related issues. You seem to be suggesting that the Hong Kong Government's intention is to back away from important broadcasting and freedom of speech issues. Nothing could be further from the truth. What we are proposing is the most efficient way of tackling the top priority tasks in this area as quickly as possible. Let me explain the background to these proposals and why we believe they represent the best way forward.
Our original intention, as set out by the Secretary for Recreation and Culture to the Legislative Council on 19 July 1995, was that the Broadcasting Bill should be an omnibus piece of legislation covering the following components. First, it should bring all legislation governing broadcasting licensing into one ordinance. Second, it should ensure that broadcasting was regulated by reference to the nature of the service rendered rather than the technology employed to deliver it. Third, it should deal with the issues of ownership of the media in Hong Kong, including foreign ownership, so as to reflect the status of Hong Kong as the broadcasting centre of Asia. In addition, we had intended to use the Broadcasting Bill to bring Section 13C of the Telecommunication Ordinance, in line with the Bill of Rights, by removing the powers to prohibit programming presently vested in the Governor-in-Council and the Broadcasting Authority, and to vest similar powers in the courts.
It does not take an expert in the field to recognise the sheer complexity of these issues, and the time it would necessarily take if they were all to be resolved in a single comprehensive piece of legislation. We therefore examined each of the components of the proposed Bill carefully to see if there were ways in which we could make accelerated progress on those items of top priority, for example by extracting them from the main body of the legislation and proceeding with them separately.