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One of my regular experiences in life is to go to a hospital or a clinic or a housing estate, looking forward to talking to all my friends from the press afterwards on the health service, or housing, or transport, and after I've made a few remarks on that subject, while their pencils have stayed about 18 inches away from the notebook, they then say to me, what about the airport Mr Patten, or what about the Legislative Council elections Mr Patten. So, I think sometimes it's the media which can be one issue rather, with respect, than the Governor.
Let me deal with your questions in reverse order. You mentioned controlling inflation. Yes, we do need to control inflation. Inflation has come down from 13.9% at its peak the year before I arrived in Hong Kong, to about 8.5% on the latest count. Still too high but we've been moving it in the right direction. I don't agree with you that simply putting a freeze, putting a ceiling on utility charges is at all the same thing as dealing with inflation. All that happens in those circumstances is somebody has to pick up the bill for that and the costs bubble up somewhere else in the system. They don't actually bring inflation down in the long-term. Sewage charges are a good case in point. The average monthly cost of our sewage disposal scheme for people in the community, the average monthly cost is HK$8.00. That's not, with great respect as barristers say, that's not a huge household contribution to having a decent drainage and sewage system, particularly when you compare that sort of cost with what people in other communities pay. But that's helping to give us a HK$9 billion modern sewage treatment system which will clean up about 70% of the pollution in our surrounding
waters.
I think I dealt with importation of labour earlier and don't want to add to what I said. I notice that you referred to not importing unskilled workers, so maybe there isn't as much difference between us as your question initially suggested because I don't think that you would argue that we should never allow any worker, even one with skills that we needed, into the community.
On the IPCC, we'll be legislating in the coming session, I hope, to put the IPCC on a statutory basis under its very distinguished chairman who's a member of my Executive Council. They have actually been developing new techniques like the videoing and recording of interviews which I think have been a help in building up the confidence which people have in the whole process.
And finally, we did in the last Legislative Council look in a comprehensive way at police powers, to make sure that our police powers are in line with the Bill of Rights and I think that the general view was that we got the balance about right. Of course we want to protect peoples' civil liberties but we also want to make sure that our police can do their job as well as possible.