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27.
Presenter (in Chinese): Mr Patten, now we are in the latter half of the transitional period and the economy of Hong Kong has suffered some problems, for example the high unemployment rate. While 3.5% unemployment rate is quite acceptable on the international scale, well, it is quite unfortunate that over the past two years we seem to have a downturn in our economy.
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Governor: I think we want to keep these things in proportion. We are still looking to growth this year of about 5%. That is on top of growth over the last three years of 18%. And the small increase in unemployment, while small overall, very worrying for anybody who has actually lost their job- let's be clear about that that increase in unemployment is, I think, partly a result of the downturn in consumer spending, the fact that that has gone very slack. I hope that our job-matching scheme, that the work we are doing on retraining, and the fact that our economy is fundamentally strong with very good export performance this year with a strong overall fiscal position, I hope that those things will enable us to pick up again over the next year or two. But a lot will obviously depend on the amount of confidence that people have in the future.
I just repeat the point I was making a bit earlier that what we have got is a workforce which has, for a number of reasons, increased very rapidly. We've been increasing our number of jobs but the two haven't quite matched. Over the last year, we have had, I think, the biggest increase in the size of our workforce for about a decade; it went up by just over 4%. And if you are still only creating extra jobs at between 2% 3%, the difference between those things is unemployment, unfortunately.
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Question: I was just wondering it wasn't particularly recent but I saw some information in the papers a while back that the Government has been studying some ways to reduce the amount of garbage and packaging produced in Hong Kong. And the reports indicated that, as you might expect, some of the things they were trying to do would require manufacturers for instance to reduce the amount of materials they used in a particular package or something like that. And I'm just wondering, given sort of the historical laissez faire kind of a place Hong Kong is, is the Government really going to be able to do this or have enough sort of gumption to do this?
Governor: Well, no proposals along those lines have yet come into the Governor's in- tray. I have seen proposals from some parts of the Government but perhaps we shouldn't all send one another so many Christmas cards this year, on the grounds that that isn't quite as green and environmentally friendly as some would like. But I certainly haven't seen, yet, any proposals on packaging.