ALMOST a year after its introduction to the Legislative Council as a Bill, the Consumer Goods Safety Ordinance is finally on the statute books. A dedicated 52-person Customs and Excise enforcement team will be created to enforce its provisions and anyone caught supplying unsafe consumer goods will be subject to a fine of $100,000. A second offence will carry a fine up to five times that level. All this is as it should be. The Consumer Council has praised the ordinance as the kind of legislation for which it has spent years campaigning and Hong Kong's reputation as a shoppers' paradise is finally to be salvaged from the scandalous safety standards of the goods on supply.
But not quite 'finally'. The Ordinance may have been gazetted yesterday but it is not to be implemented until October 1995. Despite the long notice industry has been given of the impending changes in the law, the Government has agreed to give it a further year's grace period. For the next 12 months, as the Consumer Council warned a year ago, we may see a flood of sub-standard goods on the market as suppliers unload soon-to-be-banned products. This is an abdication of responsibility by a Government which can only claim to be acting in the consumer's interest. The grace period is unnecessary and puts people at risk. Responsible businesses will have upgraded their products, so the delay helps only the unscrupulous.
Now that industry has been led to expect the grace period, nothing can be done to change it. But if none had been promised at all, the time between the introduction of the Bill and the gazetting of the Ordinance would have been more than enough to flush out the shoddy goods. There is no excuse for the Government to have given in to industry's demand for laxity. In future, it must put the public's interests first.
