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Question: How much is the Government going to spend on the promotion for disabled ...?
Governor: It's difficult to put a global figure. There's a figure for the amount of public education that we're carrying forward. There's a figure for training programmes and rehabilitation services. And I suppose you could ... there would be slightly unfair put a figure on the employment costs except that we regard these as benefits, not as costs. But we can certainly let you have those figures later on if you like.
Question: Governor, the Rehabilitation Alliance has a comment that the 4,000 disabled people being employed by the Government departments cover about 1,000 of them who are colour blind people, and they are generally not categorised as disabled people. So the target has not actually been achieved. do you agree?
Governor: No, I don't. And we had an interesting discussion about that upstairs. There are I think about 70 grades in the civil service which require people to have perfect sight and not to be colour blind. If you reduce that the people in those grades numbering about 50,000, they include for example people like the Fire Service, and if you also reduce the number of those with a disability in the civil service by those who are colour blind, you find that the percentage of the overall civil service with a disability that we employ slightly increases. But because of the concerns that have been expressed on this issue, the Secretary for the Civil Service is going to look at a way of presenting the figures excluding on both sides of the account those who are colour blind so as to set ourselves a new and different target, though I'm sure people will still want to look at the aggregate target as well,
Question: Will the Government be going to establish an independent department to organise all those in order to enforce the policies?
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Governor: I don't think we need an independent department. We've got a number of departments involved, principally of course the three that were sharing the platform with me this afternoon Education and Manpower, Civil Service and Health and Welfare and I think there's pretty good co-ordination between the secretaries involved and between all the various branches including those that provide in the Labour Department training and those that provide other support. I don't think we need just one department because it's an issue which goes right across the board.
Question: Governor, two questions. Would you please comment on President Wong. He said yesterday that he's kicking the ball to you. Would you please comment on that? And secondly, will you put forward the reform package if you have read the seven confidential letters between the British Government and the Chinese Government?