8
REVIEW
now their home; and this realisation may have been given added definition by the need to decide just how they stood in the events of 1967.
The administration for its part has taken positive steps to en- courage this trend and to bridge the so-called gap between the Government and the people. There has been a striking increase in the number of advisory and consultative committees, from 64 in 1961 to 132 in 1971; the great majority of these, of which the Execu- tive and Legislative Councils are the most important, have unofficial members, even when supported by officials, and their development provides one means of increasing public participation in the process of Government. In many instances, the time given by the unofficials to the work is quite phenomenal. A White Paper on the future of the Urban Council, proposing to give the elected and appointed coun- cillors a wide measure of financial autonomy within legally defined powers, was published late in 1971 and received some public com- ment before debate in the Legislative Council in the year following. Increased publicity has been given to the policy and indeed the performance of government departments. The more personal system of Government that has always been in force in the New Territories has been applied in modified form to the urban areas, providing since 1968 a network of City District Offices ready to explain the workings of the Government and to advise on the many personal problems that arise from day to day. An equally valuable service is provided by the Unofficial Members of the Urban Council attending at their Ward Offices. At a higher level the Unofficial Members of the Executive and Legislative Councils are ready to act on any complaint that is made against government procedure or policy and to intervene whenever they consider that a complaint is justified.
To turn to more specific matters, although the initial census returns have given a broad indication of the general increase in prosperity over the last decade, the most specific indications of this are provided by the statistics of wages. The records kept show that average wages in Hong Kong have roughly doubled over the past 10 years. In some sectors of employment, notably in industry, the increases have been even greater, while everyone concerned with craftsmen and artisans has his exceptional stories of workers whose special remuneration and unpublicised fringe-benefits put them on a level with their Western European counterparts. Although Hong Kong has certainly not been untouched by the tide of inflation which has affected many other economies so severely, price rises recorded by the Consumer Price Index have remained within reasonable