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President: But by that time the Governor will no longer be the boss of the civil service.
Governor: It is true, by the time that happens the Governor will have taken up gardening as his career.
Mr Mok Ying-fan (in Chinese): Thank you Mr President. In your yesterday's policy address, Mr Governor, you mentioned that the Hong Kong Government is now sitting on a huge surplus and the reserves are getting larger and larger, and GDP is getting higher and higher. And have you noticed that all this time the unemployment rate is also climbing and the disparity between low-income and high-income groups is getting wider and wider and the real wages enjoyed by our people are also dropping. And what is even more serious is that last year some elderly people actually died of cold in a cold-spell. And so, Mr Governor, I would like to know how do you look at our people's livelihood; how can you ensure that our huge surplus and reserves would improve the livelihood of our people?
Governor: It will be for the Chief Executive and his team, in discussion I am sure with this Legislative Council, to decide how best to use the spectacular reserves which will belong to Hong Kong in the interests of the further development of the Hong Kong economy. I would only add that I think that the iron rule that we have followed in the last few years of not allowing public spending to grow more rapidly than the trend growth rate in the economy, whatever the scale of the reserves, is a very sensible principle to follow, though I totally accept that there is a serious argument and a serious debate to be had within the community about that proposition and the right place to have that debate is in this Legislative Council chamber, where I think that quite a few honourable members who would disagree about other subjects would find themselves on the same side on that basic issue of political economy.
Let me touch on the other two points that the honourable member made. First of all employment the unemployed rate has come down since it peaked last November, it has come down from 3.6 per cent to 2.8 per cent. It is at its lowest level for 15 months. We have seen a fall in the absolute numbers of unemployed from 110,000 to 90,000. That is no room for complacency, it reflects the fact that once again the number of people joining our workforce has been more or less in line with the extra number of jobs that we are creating rather than the number of jobs we are creating lagging slightly behind the increase in the workforce.
I think that it is fair to say that the concerns about unemployment last year sharpened up our determination in government to improve our own local employment services and our labour market mechanisms. In the first half of this year more than 12,000 people were helped into work by our local employment services, 80 per cent of the 4,000 registered applicants under the job-matching programme were offered jobs in the first half of 1996, so I think that the Labour Department's machinery is working better and more effectively. But we must do even better than that and obviously, the present reviews that we are undertaking of the work of vocational training and the work being done in retraining, those reviews are very important to the future employment pattern in Hong Kong.
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