1
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4
20.5
6
7
8
209
10
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15
16
2c 17
18
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2 2 2 2 2 8
This high
34 per cent compared to all of 1986 to 1987. turnover has to have an impact on Administrative efficiency. Strangely enough, at a time when the Administration cannot keep the people it has, the Budget
That is 1.5 sets Civil Service growth at 4 per cent. percentage point higher than the rate earlier estimated by the Administration and 2.6 percentage points greater than the projected expansion of Hong Kong's total work force. A bigger Civil Service will aggravate an already acute labour shortage. Even in the short term, it will have negative impact on the economy by driving up salaries and thus fuelling inflation as it pits the public and private sectors against each other in a fierce competition for a limited pool of eligible job candidates.
d
•
Right now we have one of the best and probably the most
If we cannot be underrated Civil Services in the world. sure of recruiting the best possible staff for Government service, we do not want them. Hong Kong cannot afford to lower its standards. If this means cutting back on what we ask of the Government, if it means looking even more to the private sector, if it means actually getting on with privatisation instead of merely talking about it, then that is what we must do.
26 Sir, the Financial Secretary's Budget speech closed with a quotation from T.S. Eliot, who was a banker as well as
*What we
S27
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a poet. That quotation is worth repeating:
call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from." Sir, if our Budget policy does not make the most effective use of our fiscal resources for the coming year, then another quotation from T.S. Eliot may be more appropriate: "This is the way the world ends not with a bang but a
whimper. "
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1
Sir, with these remarks I support the motion.
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