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the most
Sir, one of
of the
important tasks which the
Government will have to undertake in the next few months is
to decide what steps we should take next year in the further
development of our system of representative government. We
have Just completed a public consultation
consultation exercise of
unprecedented proportions and the community has responded on
a correspondingly massive scale. This is most encouraging.
All the views which were sent in to the Survey Office, in
one form or another, have been carefully and comprehensively
recorded and presented in the Survey Office report. The
Government will be studying all these views with great care.
The release of the Survey Office report has
rekindled the public debate on whether direct elections to
this Council should be introduced next year. As the report
itself indicates, this is an issue on which views within the
community remain divided. In a free and sophisticated
society such as Hong Kong, it is not surprising that there
are differences of view on the pace of political
development, or that these differences are aired forcefully
in public. Even within a family, and on far more mundane
matters than the system of government, there are often
differences of opinion. But the way to resolve these
differences lies in careful analysis and rational
discussion, not in pretending that a view which is different
from one's own either does not exist or has been fabricated