HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL — 2nd October 1969.
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young people have an eagerness for learning and an ambition for improvement. I am therefore keenly interested in the possibility of offering part-time degree courses for those matriculants who for one reason or another do not enter the universities or go abroad. The London University offers external degrees for scholars overseas without the requirement of class-room attendance. I fail to see why our universities in Hong Kong cannot do the same, especially the Hong Kong University. Many students in the Hong Kong University, in the Arts Faculty especially, do not actually attend classes after the first year, and rarely if at all, in their final year, since class attendance is not a strict requirement in the Commonwealth system of higher education. The establishment of external degrees in the Hong Kong University is only a matter of organization with very slight involvement of personnel and finance.
Young people working long hours in shops, restaurants and independent trades need some protection by legislation. Long hours of work, long years of training and very little pay have been a way of life in the old system of apprenticeship. Education and an industrial training programme will gradually change this. Therefore we need to speed up our free education system as well as to formulate a crash programme, in the line of the existing vocational training institutes in Kwun Tong and Wong Tai Sin which are less expensive but very practical and popular, in order to fill an immediate need and later to supplement the 4 well-planned, expensively-equipped, multi-million- dollar Technical Schools for 5,000 students to be established in the next few years.
We also need more drastic legislation, to control the bars, the boarding houses, the bath houses, the soft-drink parlours and what have you which are just covers for prostitution. We have been told in this Council that morality cannot be controlled by legislation. As a social worker I can only accept this statement as an excuse for non-action at the time. We legislate against gambling, prostitution, drug addiction and others because we consider them to be causes of degradation of human dignity. Legislation provides a means of deter- rent against exploitation by one human being of another's weaknesses, a code for people's behaviour in a decent society. Adequate legislation is obviously needed for effective law enforcement. The proposed legislation to raise the age limit for employments of young girls in bars is one very good example.
The announcement by the Director of Social Welfare that the public assistance scheme will soon be implemented has received general approval. We will of course also receive expert guidance on the possibilities of further extension of the scheme beyond the present group of families already receiving assistance of dry rations. How- ever, it is perhaps about time that we also examine the possibilities