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Governor: I think I spoke generally in mentioning those key elements, about Hong Kong remaining a free society, and I think I spoke about the rule of law. But I thought that by the time I got to those ten points people would have actually given me the credit of knowing that I am in favour of accountability and representative government and democracy and adequate protection of civil liberties. Nobody is worse placed to conduct exegesis on a speech than the person who wrote it but I think that I can reasonably claim that overall, including in my advice to a chief executive, my views on what constitutes an open society are pretty clear.
Question (Apple Daily): There are only nine months before we are going to handover to China and it seems to us that you yourself do not have confidence that Hong Kong can succeed because you are leaving us with one anxiety and one frustration. So can you tell us how much chance that Hong Kong can be one country, two systems, highly autonomous can be achieved and compare especially when you first arrived here in 1992?
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Governor: You leave out what I then went on to say which is paragraph 95 and following, namely the reasons why I am confident about Hong Kong's future. I spelt out in some detail why I am confident that Hong Kong represents the wave of the future in Asia rather than as it were a throw back to the past. And overall, I was able to sketch out a record of a community which since I became Governor in 1992, since I first spoke to the Legislative Council, can point to inflation at a ten-year low, can point to crime figures which are lower than they were ten years ago, can point to substantial increases in welfare programmes - for example, a 55 per cent increase in the amount of money that we have spent in real terms on the elderly, can point to cuts in taxation, can point to continuing economic growth, can point to an exchange rate which is still at the strong end of the link with the dollar, can point to spectacular increases in its reserves, can point to all sorts of other social and educational improvements. I don't think it is a bad record and if it weren't for the constraints which Mr Hutchins drew out of me, it is not a record that I would mind going on the hustings about.
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Question (HK Standard): In the benchmark - you listed out like 15 benchmarks by which Hong Kong will be judged by the world are they your own benchmarks; are they negotiable as well? And are there any priorities by which you would?
Governor: No, they are not a subject for negotiation. They are, I hope, a reasonably intelligent indication of the sort of things which the rest of the world, and people in Hong Kong, are going to be looking at in the years ahead. They are not an exclusive list, they were merely a departing governor's view of the sort of things which the rest of the world would be looking for and looking to in Hong Kong. Some of them, of course, speak for themselves and if one goes and talks to trade negotiators in other parts of the world they want to be confident that Hong Kong is going to have retained its autonomy in commercial matters. If you go and talk to Finance Ministry officials elsewhere in the world, or bankers, they want to be sure that Hong Kong will continue to be responsible for its own exchange fund and its own reserves. Those are fairly straightforward questions.