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Governor's Employment Summit closing statement
Following is the transcript of the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten's closing statement at the third Summit on Employment held today (Thursday):
Perhaps I can just try to summarise what was becoming, I think, an agreeably more lively discussion as we went on.
As in previous meetings we have heard the concerns of employers and employees put forward very clearly and cogently. I think to be fair and to respond to Mr Lee Cheuk-yan, maybe today it was employers who were talking more about the importation of labour, but certainly at previous meetings it has been the representatives of employees who have spoken cogently and eloquently about the importation of labour, so I don't think it is fair to, as it were, turn the tables on the employers in that way.
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What we are trying to find and I am sorry if the attempt to find a consensus is regarded by some people as irredeemably wet - but what we are trying to find is an approach to the importation of labour which meets our requirements as a modern developed economy and which can carry the support of both employers and employees. Now if we have got it wrong, if we have moved too far in a particular direction, if there are improvements in our bureaucratic arrangements that we could make, then we will want to do that and we will want to do it with as much support as possible, using the admirable institutional machinery of the LAB.
But I must say I do think that sometimes we get these figures, or some of these figures, slightly out of context. I would like to see the figures for the total increase in labour coming from abroad compared with the sort of figures we have been talking about, even at maximum, through the Supplementary Labour Scheme. We have about a net return of former Hong Kong citizens back to Hong Kong of twenty or thirty thousand a year. We have got all those with professional skills who fall quite outside these arrangements, these schemes. So we are not talking about these very small numbers joining the Hong Kong labour force, we are talking about much larger numbers. And maybe the reason why we don't acknowledge that sufficiently is we are not quite sure that we like the political consequences of doing so. But the fact of the matter is that there are quite a lot of people joining our labour market from other countries every year.
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