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Governor's public meeting
The following is the transcript of the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten's public meeting held at the City Hall today (Friday):
Governor: This is the fourth time that I've given my Governor's address to the Legislative Council here in Hong Kong and after each of those speeches I've had a public meeting or a number of public meetings, at which you, the people of Hong Kong, have had the opportunity of coming along and asking me questions, either about the Legislative Council speech that I've given or about any other matters that may concern you. For me it's an important part of the openness and accountability of your Government in Hong Kong.
I don't want to make a long speech this evening because this is very much an occasion for you. I want to give as many as possible of you, the chance of asking questions and all I want to do at the outset is to remind you all of the established ground rules. What I'll do in a moment is to ask for a show of hands and then I'll choose three or four people from the audience near the microphones which are round about. I'll give you the order in which I'd like you to ask your question and then I very much hope that when you ask your question you can do so as briefly as possible. Now I say that every year, but sometimes people are a bit long-winded but if you take a long time to ask a question or if you make a speech rather than ask a question, it's just being unfair to everybody else because fewer people can actually get their question asked. I'll try to be brief in giving my answers, if you're brief in asking your questions.
So, can we have agreement at the outset that everybody will be as brief as possible in asking their questions. Thank you very much indeed. All right, that's a promise.
Now the most questions we've ever got in was I think in Sha Tin a couple of years ago, when we got through about 12 or 13 questions in just over an hour, about an hour and ten minutes and I'd like to see if we can get at least that many today.
The one other thing I'd ask is, if somebody has already asked a question about your subject, there isn't very much point in asking a question on the same subject. I mean, I don't mind giving you the same answer but we should try to cover as many subjects as possible, O K.