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Governor: I'm not so naive as to suggest that there is no relationship between the overall level of unemployment in Hong Kong and the importation of workers to Hong Kong, but nor am I so naive as to believe that there is a precise relationship between the importation of labour and the level of unemployment. In the early 80s when unemployment was far higher in Hong Kong than it is today, there was no importation of labour scheme, which is one example out of many of the fact that there are other reasons for the recent unwelcome increase in unemployment in Hong Kong and that we need to take, if I may say so, a rather more comprehensive view of the issue than is being suggested by the Honourable Member. Because if we were merely to follow his prescription I think we could finish up seeing unemployment continue to rise. We wouldn't be addressing some of the real issues.
Why is unemployment going up at the moment? I think there are two principal reasons and the one aggravates the other. First of all, there's been a slow down in consumer spending for a variety of reasons, into which we can go later if Honourable Members would like, and that has had an impact on employment in retailing, in interior decoration, in the catering industry and similar activities. Secondly, that has happened while there continues to be industrial restructuring in Hong Kong with some firms, particularly in the manufacturing sector but also in the service sector today, moving jobs to mainland China or elsewhere. Those two factors are, I believe, the main reasons for the level of unemployment in Hong Kong. There's also of course a mismatch between the jobless and the job vacancies. We have jobless figures of about 80,000, job vacancy figures of about 60,000 but we're not moving the jobless to the vacancies as adroitly and swiftly as any of us would like.
There are a range of issues that we have got to look at therefore in the areas of illegal immigration, in the area of abuse by foreign domestic helpers of their employment in Hong Kong. We've got to look at job placement, we've got to look at retraining and training and we've also, as I've made clear to the Honourable Member, we've also got to look at the importation of labour as well. We've proposed two measures. First of all we were previously under an obligation to review the general importation scheme by the end of the year. We've brought that review forward by three months, if we can do it more rapidly than that we will and we'll of course be discussing the outcome with the LegCo Manpower Panel and with the LAB in due course. Secondly, we've said that until that review is complete, they'll be no new quota allocated and that we've made abundantly clear, both to employers and to unions as well. I don't think that it would be sensible to suspend the general importation scheme before we've completed that review and I don't think it would be sensible to break what amount to contractual agreements already made with employers who are bringing in labour under the last quota.