Governor: I'm not entirely sure that I accept an analogy between the behaviour in the gallery, which seemed to me to give quite a good argument a bad name, and the position in which civil servants find themselves. While we occasionally have vigorous arguments within the Administration before we come to our unanimous wisdom, the argument is rarely associated with that sort of behaviour. But the Honourable Member raises what I think the whole community regards as a hugely important issue because the community recognises that one of the main reasons for Hong Kong's prosperity and decency as a community is the quality of public service in Hong Kong and all of us, therefore, want to retain good civil servants and want to do everything we can to I think morale is a slightly intangible boost the morale of our civil servants.
commodity but I suspect that there are two aspects to it.
First of all, we want to ensure that civil servants can go on doing a first class job; that they go on delivering government in an efficient and cost-effective way. I think our civil service have been doing that. They've been delivering more extensive programmes from health and education to housing and others; they've been doing that in a way which meets the performance pledges that we've set out and they've been doing it in a way which is more open and more accountable and not least to this Legislative Council. People sometimes talk about the challenges which the public service has faced in the last few years because of the growth of representative democracy in Hong Kong. I happen to think that the civil service has coped extremely well and that if you look back on the last four years for example, since this Legislative Council became elected at least in the majority, I think since then you see no dilution in the quality of public service and I would argue, improvements in the quality of the ways services are delivered. So the first thing I want to say is that morale is about delivering high quality services, it's about taking decisions, it's about getting things done and I just want to make it clear that so far as I am concerned the best way in which we can secure the morale of the civil service is by continuing to take decisions and continuing to govern in the interests of Hong Kong and that we intend to do until the 30th June 1997 and I'm sure the Chief Executive of the SAR will have the same ambition thereafter. So, nowhere sitting on our hands, nowhere sitting back and letting things coast along until the transfer of sovereignty.
Secondly, morale is also about a state of mind. There are anxieties. I don't think that they are anxieties focused on anything that I or we do before the 30th June 1997 but inevitably, there are concerns about what comes after that date. Concerns about pensions, that is why we've proposed to set aside seven billion, just in case that should ever be required - not that I believe that it will be. We've proposed common terms for the civil service which I hope will be agreed. We've also proposed better housing support for civil servants which I hope will deal with some of their longer term worries. We've also been implementing far more extensive training, not least in written and spoken Putonghua and so on, so that we will have in due course, I hope, a properly - let me get it right - trilingual and bi-literate civil service.