I
· 5-
Party on the Care and Education of Children below Primary School Age
were considered in the Board of Education and the Social Welfare Advisory
Committee as appropriate, and a number of recommendations arising from
this consultation were subsequently incorporated in the resulting green
paper (the 1980 Green Paper on Primary Education and Pre-primary Services).
After due deliberation of such reports, the Secretary for Social Services
(assisted where necessary for this purpose by a steering committee) will
normally appoint a small drafting group of officials usually closely
associated with the original working party, to prepare a green paper.
Until recently green papers tended to be comparatively brief summaries
of the original confidential reports, outlining proposals without dwelling
in any detail on alternative or rejected courses of action. The 1980
Green Paper departed radically from this tradition by recounting the
thinking of the two working parties in some detail and explaining the
underlying rationale of the options explored and the decisions reached.
The approval of the Governor in Council is normally required
for the publication of a green paper and such approval may be withheld
until modifications of the proposals are carried out.
Green papers,
which are normally published in separate Chinese and English language
versions, are nothing more than proposals to which no commitment has been
made and are intended to serve as a basis for wider consultation before
4.6
final decisions are taken. They represent a largely official viewpoint,
offered as the starting-point for public debate. Individual and group
comments are actively encouraged and a consultative period of at least
three months is normally allowed for comments to be sent to the Secretary
for Social Services. This consultative process can be exemplified by the
extensive and thorough discussions which followed the publication of
the 1977 Green Paper (on senior secondary and tertiary education). On
that occasion senior officers of the Education Department participated
in a series of meetings arranged by the Home Affairs Department with