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Governor: I've had a number of meetings with businessmen over the last three-and-a- half years. I have spoken to most of the chambers of commerce, some of them several times. Sometimes on the record, sometimes off the record. And I was answering questions today about issues like Hong Kong's competitiveness, about the economic prospects, about the prospects for Hong Kong's autonomy beyond 1997 and setting out a number of arguments with which I think the former Legislative Councillor and all of you would be familiar, because they're all arguments that I've put before. My main argument, in reply to questions, was that we do have to be concerned to keep up our international competitiveness. There have been admittedly some encouraging reports recently, the World Economic Forum report, saying that we were the third most competitive economy in the world, the business magazine which said we were the most business-friendly, and the Heritage Foundation are about to produce a report saying that we are the freest economy in the world. But that doesn't that mean we can be complacent. We still got problems to tackle, problems of cost. We've got to ensure that our services develop as rapidly as possible and Donald Tsang, the new Financial Secretary is determined what to do what he can to provide support there, and we've got to hang on to the fundamentals which have given us years of growth, sound public finances, a low taxation, minimal intervention in the economy. So those were the sort of messages that I was spelling out.
Question: What sort of assurances could you give them about the two major problems in Hong Kong, inflation and unemployment?
Governor: I pointed out to them that inflation in the year before I came to Hong Kong, had been running at 13.5 per cent, it's now somewhere between 8.5 and 9.5 per cent. Still too high. It still means that we've got to all we can to bear down on our costs. But certainly some improvements. I think it reflects some of the special nature of our position not least in relation to land and to labour supply. On unemployment, I pointed out that the labour supply in Hong Kong has increased by 4.1 per cent over the last year which is the biggest increase that we've seen for the last decade I think. At the same time, the number of people in employment has increased by 2.7 per cent, but the gap between those two has contributed to the rise in unemployment. There have been a lot of people coming back to Hong Kong, having been away before. And I think that has been one of contributory factor to the increase in the labour supply. What we're trying to do through labour market measures like the increase in the provision for our job placing scheme, like the improvements in the retraining, what we are trying is to make the labour market more flexible and to get people back into work as quickly as possible. But we're also reviewing the Labour Importation Scheme and we'll have the results of that in the course of the autumn. One last question.
Question: Many people will say: Why is Mr Patten meeting British businessmen six days or seven days before the elections? Is there sometime going on?