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Governor: I think the best place to explore ideas is with the political groups themselves.
Question: But what have you got to offer to the parties, especially at a time when there is such a high rate of unemployment and the Government insists that the importation of labour scheme won't be stopped.
Governor: We got a record of success over the last decades which has produced one of the best growth rates in the region and one of the most satisfactory economic performances. We do have some problems today. The ones which I think most concern people are continuing high degree, high rate of inflation, though inflation has come down from the 13 and a half per cent in the year before I came to Hong Kong. And we have unemployment which has gone up to, what is for Hong Kong, an unfortunately high level, though internationally it wouldn't be regarded as that. We have already taken a number of measures directed towards labour market problems, improving the jobmatching scheme, improving retraining, no new quota under the importation of labour scheme, and we have undertaken to review that scheme and obviously we'll be discussing the outcome with legislators and with the community. What I don't think anybody would want us to do is to change any of the fundamentals which have made for Hong Kong's success in the past, like low taxes and proper control over public spending. But we have got an excellent Financial Secretary, who I am sure will have just as good a record as his predecessor.
Question: On retraining, isn't it time to review the retraining board, given that there is a falling number of applicants to this retraining board?
Governor: I think we have been open-minded about how we can improve our retraining and how we can try to ensure that more of those who are retrained get jobs which last. That obviously is the fundamental objective. Retraining should help our economy to be more competitive and it's got to be, we got to ensure that it meets the needs which employers actually have. There is one point which has been brought up by the Government Economist and others and that is that the total number of people in the labour market over the last year has risen by the highest amount in our recent economic history and the problems we've had on the unemployment front have been because the total number in the labour market has risen faster than the number of jobs which has become available. The number who has risen is partly of course a result of people coming back to Hong Kong. It's partly a result of demographic factors, partly a result of immigrants from China. There are a number of reasons for it. But I don't think that anybody seriously supposes that the only issue that we have to look at is the importation of labour scheme. That's one of the issues but not the only one.
Question: Governor, are you going to offer sort of alternatives concerning co- operation between the Government and also LegCo. Say, appointing LegCo members to ExCo.
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