4.
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Governor: I think, first of all, I must welcome the Honourable Member to the Council. We have met in all sorts of places in the past street corners, trade union meetings. but this is the first time we have met in the Council and I welcome him to this body where I am sure he will make an important contribution.
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I think, if I may say so, and one must of course be extremely polite to people in any legislature when one addresses them the first time, and I hope, subsequently - I think, with respect to the Honourable Member, he is pointing up some of the problems that I mentioned earlier. He was prepared to endorse our pension scheme provided we did things that we thought would be wholly imprudent and wholly wrong. We were actually proposing a pension scheme under which the Government would make a substantial contribution. In the early years, if you rounded all the figures up, we were, I think, contributing over 30 per cent. But whatever the Government proposed in that scheme, Honourable Members said, was not enough. We kept on being pressed to do more, to put in more, to add more to that scheme in a way which I think would have been wholly unreasonable and would have actually produced some of the difficulties and some of the problems which people anyway were accusing us of doing things which made no financial sense in order to try to help elderly people.
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Dashing hopes; well, I think that fewer hopes would have been dashed if some of those who now tell us that they were in favour of the pension scheme had argued for it and worked for it, without any of those massive nuclear qualifications, when we actually introduced it. If I was to be able to say, looking back on the Legislative Council's Debate in November: 'It was wonderful, there was only one person who spoke against it', I would be in a rather better position, because I do think that that scheme represented a prudent and generous and immediate way of dealing with the problem which we all recognise exists.
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Unless we bring forward a scheme which has community support and I mean by that which has the, at least, implicit endorsement of business, of the future sovereign - and the explicit endorsement of this Council, which enjoys support outside the Council too unless we can do that, we are not going to be able to work for the elderly in a way which will last. I hope that we can get a scheme in place, because I think the elderly deserve it.
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