HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL.
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of their 1936 budget and 56 per cent. of their annually recurrent expenditure, I should tell you also that their mounting pensions liability has been a matter of increasing concern to their Legislative Council, and that the ear-marking out of general surplus of a Pensions Reserve Fund has been recently mooted.
While therefore I am not prepared to subscribe to the letter of this motion I have a grateful sympathy with its spirit, and I will say now on behalf of the Government that no vacant post on the establishment will be filled without examining the possibility of its retrenchment and that no officer will be engaged from overseas without first examining the possibility of a local recruitment.
In the latter connection, however, I desire to refer to one passage in the Colonial Secretary's speech, the passage in which he told us that University-trained Chinese expect salaries equal to those drawn by European officers. That, surely, is an unreasonable expectation. European officers have to endure and to finance climatically enforced separations from their families, and it is an accepted and uncriticised principle in Malaya that at least 25 per cent. of their salaries represents an overseas allowance. I feel sure that the principle will prove equally acceptable here when people have had time to think it over.
The Honourable the Senior Unofficial Member who seconded the motion has been given, in answer to his remarks regarding Govern- ment's refusal last autumn to fix exchange forward for its sterling Commitments this year, the very reply that he hoped would not be given. That is because it is the true and only possible reply. I was not here at the time, but I have read the correspondence and from it emerges very plainly the dilemma in which Government found itself. It was on the one hand, as the Honourable Member expressed it, the trustee of the tax-payer; and it was on the other the ke per of the public conscience.
The fact that the advice for fixing exchange forward was tendered unanimously by the Unofficial Members of this Council was proof enough that the proposal was not morally indefensible. But there are matters in which a Government should not allow itself to be placed in a position where a defence of its morality may be even called for. For Government to have fixed exchange forward with an exclusive foreknowledge of relevant future events to be brought about by itself might, I consider, have created a situation in which official scrupulousness could have been questioned; and questionings of that kind might have done the Administration greater injury than it would have reaped financial gain by fixing exchange forward.
That is all I have to say on this motion but before putting it to the vote I would ask the Honourable proposer to consider whether his purpose has not been adequately served by this debate; if it has,
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