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Now, if you're asking me where Britain has occasionally gone wrong - though the economy in Britain is going much better at the moment - if you ask me where things have gone wrong, I may start to sound like a former Chairman of the Conservative Party, so I'd better avoid that temptation. But if you were to ask a completely unbiased, objective witness like, say, Margaret Thatcher, who is a great admirer and supporter of Hong Kong, she would say because for too long during the post-war years Britain forgot about some of those simple truths of market economics: about balancing the books, about not spending money you haven't got, etc, etc. And I think, if I may add a footnote, that she is very largely right.
Question: I'm also one of those English people who have been here for some 12 years, although I don't think I'm perfect either. I address my comment today as the Chairman of the Travel & Tourism Education Programme. This is a programme that I will be addressing the group here about this afternoon that as a corporate community spirit we have brought to Hong Kong with several other market leaders. Today there are some two-and-a-half-thousand students going into a Travel & Tourism Education Programme which lasts for some two years and is being held in some 40 schools. At what point in time does the Government take over the responsibility for funding and running this type of programme and relieve it from private enterprise to move their money on to something else?
Governor: It's obviously not just a question for Hong Kong but a more general question. I've never myself believed that it was necessarily the case that once seed grants from corporate donors or from private individuals produced a successful thriving programme, that the taxpayer should necessarily take over the cost. And I feel that increasingly strongly because I happen to believe that the major problem which is going to be faced by virtually all the OECD economies in the next few years is how to reduce the share of national income taken by the state. I'm not customarily regarded as a very right-wing Tory but I feel that increasingly strongly. Partly, I have to say, as a result of my experiences in Asia. And here in Hong Kong I think that we've long taken the view that if the private sector takes on a responsibility, if you can fund things through the price mechanism or through private donation, there isn't any powerful argument why the state should do it instead. It's not to say that government in Hong Kong doesn't intervene and doesn't intervene with taxpayers' money. If you look at the scale of public housing in Hong Kong and the contribution that that has made to Hong Kong's health and stability, it's plainly the case that this isn't just a capitalist laboratory. So I think, without going into the details of the programme you mention, I don't myself think that it is necessarily the case that as soon as a corporately funded programme achieves lift-off, government should take it over and take over the responsibility for it.
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