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A lot of people got terribly excited with your visit to the temporary housing area last week. There were so excited because they really want public housing. Can the Government really not do something for them? For people who have property who are living in public housing, I don't know, maybe you can try asking them for double rent or even triple rent, but something must be done Mr Patten.
Question (in Chinese): Mr Patten, able leader, we do not agree with what Mr Suen Ming-yueng says about voting down the NLCDP and cutting social workers. I hope Mr Patten you will really try and fight for our rights and welfare. We are absolutely against the cutting of the NLCDP.
Governor: I was waiting for that. Well you've got a few supporters here today. Let me answer that last question and I think, if I may say so, you're more likely to get and retain support if you let other people have the meeting that they came for rather than trying to dominate it.
So the issue is, the issue which the Executive Council has to decide is whether or not social workers should continue to work in neighbourhood projects, even when the neighbourhoods have changed, or whether they should be concentrated on other forms of social care, working with the elderly, working with children and so on.
The gentleman who asked a question, imported labour. I don't think anybody argues seriously that there should be no workers from elsewhere at all, allowed to come into Hong Kong. I think everybody knows that there are particular skills that we need in our very sophisticated economy and that those skills can't always be found here. At the same time, people do argue that when there are fewer vacancies, and when unemployment is going up, you shouldn't allow so many people to come in to do jobs in Hong Kong, particularly for example when those jobs are unskilled or where there are clearly people in Hong Kong who could do them if they had the chance. And the survey which we carried out and which was shared with the Legislative Council yesterday, made it absolutely clear that there are a number of areas, there are a number of areas of commercial activity where we're bringing in people, even when there are local people available to do the work. And I don't think anybody seriously supposes that that makes very great sense.
So we've proposed scrapping the present labour importation Scheme and introducing a new scheme which would allow in far fewer people and would be better targeted so that employers would have to demonstrate that there really wasn't a local to do the job.