NEVER let it be said that the Government wants to stifle our freedom of speech.
It has taken a long, hard look at what goes on in Canada - a country, which any clear-thinking libertarian would immediately recognise as a slough of political oppression and heavy-handed censorship - and decided that Hong Kong people should not suffer the same curbs on their right to self-expression.
It is to that campaigner for the public's right to know, acting Secretary for Recreation and Culture Fred Ting Fook-cheung, that we owe this remarkable insight into the Government's priorities and the care it takes to protect us from the muzzle.
Remember that stipulation, a few years back, that whoever won the cable TV franchise should reserve three channels for public access television? Well, Big Brother has had second thoughts.
After all, Mr Ting explained, the Government would not have wanted to impose a public access channel upon those of us couch-potatoish enough to want to subscribe to cable television and thus to have the choice to switch it off, without ensuring there were ways to stop unacceptable programming reaching our screens before we'd had time to reach for the remote.
Convoluted? That's nothing. Try this for size.
