XN000022-1995-10-12 — Page 40

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Question: Good morning Governor Patten, I think when you came here you were hailed as an environmental you were going to be the green Governor and doing things about the environment in Hong Kong. As someone who has lived here for eight years and has very much enjoyed being here I think my time here is going to be severely limited because I now suffer from quite severe respiratory problems due to the air pollution in Hong Kong, which I feel gets worse all the time. I read very much in the newspaper. I think the Government's statistics on clean air are deeply misleading and actually quite dishonest and I'd like to know if you really intend to do anything. If Singapore can have clean air, if the taxis we have here are not allowed to run in Japan because they pollute the air too badly, I mean what actual measures are you going to take. If people can afford to run cars in Hong Kong, surely they can afford to run them on unleaded petrol and not on diesel.

Governor: You probably know that we put forward proposals the other day to move as many vehicles as possible from diesel to petrol and we also put forward proposals for dealing with those diesel vehicles that will still be on our roads, some of the bigger ones with tougher emission controls, with regular inspections for smokier vehicles. So, we are trying over the next year or two to make that step forward in dealing with air pollution that we are making in dealing with water pollution through the very big sewage strategy scheme that we have put in place. I hope that by the time I leave in 1997 we'll have not only cleaner water and a fragrant harbour again or something close to a fragrant harbour, but that we'll also have much cleaner air.

I was quite surprised when we put forward our proposals on a move from diesel to petrol that there were one or two newspapers which normally criticise us for not doing enough on the environment which then seemed to take the point - oh well maybe diesel wasn't so bad after all and maybe we were being unfair to diesel users, and maybe the fiscal incentives that we were offering were not large enough. I think that we have put forward a very sensible package of proposals and I hope that they can be implemented as soon as possible, because you're not the only person who has respiratory problems.

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