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Transcript of Governor's media session
Following is the transcript of the media session by the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten, after visiting the Life Education Activity Programme Centre today (Tuesday).
Governor: Good afternoon. I think there is a great commitment right across the community to do more to beat drugs and to reduce the amount of drug abuse in the community. We had a very successful summit the other day at which we in Government launch a new programme committing extra resources both in terms of people and ideas and in terms of cash to the fight against drug abuse. Throughout the coming months I'll be trying to take a particularly close interest in the way that our campaign develops. One of the earliest things that we'll be doing is reviewing the ideas that came up during the summit and reporting on which of those ideas we intend to carry forward and to translate into action and into policy. I think that there is general agreement that education has a particularly crucial role to play in preventing and reducing drug abuse. I was therefore keen to start my series of visit with a visit to Life Education to see what LEAP are doing because I have heard from the Chief Secretary and from others what an excellent job is being done. It's being done as you know with the help of private sponsorship. There is a terrific waiting list for this great Life Education facility and we obviously got to look in Government at what more we can do to assist the development of Life Education.
So those of you who follow me around will found over the next few months that there are quite a few visits similar to this that we'll be making. As I've said before, one of the statistics in Hong Kong which is going the wrong way is the figure that we see month after month, year after year, for drug abuse and drug-related crimes. We've got to tackle it, we've got to tackle it energetically. We've got to tackle it at every level and that's what we intend to do, giving a lead from Government, but working with the private sector, and working with educationists, and social workers, and non-governmental organisations to develop a really first rate programme here in Hong Kong so we can avoid some of problems that happen in other communities.
Question: Governor, do you think the request of Peter So Lai-yin, his request for an early retirement will affect the confidence of the Police force?