XN000022-1972-07-31 — Page 7

Monday, July 31, 1972

ASIAN REGIONAL SEMINAR ON SOCIAL WORK OPENS

The Director of Social Welfare, Mr. G.T. Rowe, said today the Government

was spending $30 million a year on payments under the Public Assistance Scheme.

This expenditure was part of the one-third of the current budget

being spent on social services as a whole, underlining the comparative health

of the economy.

And because of this, Mr. Rowe said, it was becoming "at last possible

for the Government to turn its attention increasingly from its previous ad hoe

emergency actions to one of refining and sophisticating the quality of the

services now being made available."

He was speaking at the opening of the four-day Asian Regional Seminar

of the International Federation of Social Workers, being held for the first

time in Hong Kong.

He told about 150 delegates, including many from overseas,

that Hong

Kong's Public Assistance Scheme was a good example of how the emphasis on social

welfare in Hong Kong was changing.

It used to be the norm that relief efforts were concentrated on seeing

that the starving, the homeless, and victims of fire and natural disasters were

given food, shelter, clothing, and other immediate assistance in kind.

In the

But a significant step was taken in 1971 when the Government introduced

the public assistance programme by which residents and families whose incomes

fell below a prescribed level received help in cash on a monthly basis.

short time since the scheme's implementation, it had become "the most generous

non-contributory income-maintenance programme in Southeast Asia."

/Speaking