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Mr Howard Young: Governor, will your difference in view regarding the Provisional Legislature prevent you from fully co-operating with the Chief Executive Designate which you have pledged to do, or will it water-down that co-operation?
Governor: I hope the Chief Executive Designate will be operating in the sort of way which implicitly was described by Vice Premier Qian Qichen when he saw Mr Rifkind in the Hague in April. That is, a Chief Executive Designate will not have any quasi- legislative body working alongside him because such an organisation, such an institution, would be unconstitutional and would have no basis, would be built on very questionable foundations. So I very much hope that a Chief Executive Designate, though he or she will need to do a great deal of preparation for June 30, 1997, will be able to do so without Chinese officials seeking to oblige him or her to work alongside a body which would inevitably post-1997 raise question-marks about appointments and laws.
Miss Christine Loh: Thank you Mr President. Mr Governor, I would like to ask you a question about what you said in relation to the Joint Liaison Group. You mention in paragraph 50 that a significant amount of work still needs to be done in the short time, then you go through some of these issues which includes transfer of government legal matters, localisation of laws etc., etc., and then you say that with determination and energy on both sides, I am sure we can finish most of this work and that it would be inconvenient and worse if that were not done.
Does it seem to indicate that you are not confident that all the work can be finished and which are the sort of categories of work that you think may not have a chance of being finished and what consequences would that cause for Hong Kong?
Governor: Let me clarify. I hope that all the things that are really important for Hong Kong can be sorted out by June 30. The Joint Liaison Group of course continues after June 30, but most of the issues I talk about here, I talked about yesterday, need to be sorted out in advance. It's possible to cope if, for example, not all the air service agreements are sorted out. It's possible to work out interim arrangements but it's far from ideal. I think that we have made, and I pay a tribute to the not often thanked members of both teams, we have made a lot more progress in the last year or so on the JLG subjects. Some mundane and prosaic, some extremely important. If they can keep up that striking rate I'm sure they'll be able to get through all the important jobs by 1997.
I think the community is becoming a little anxious, understandably about one or two issues. For example, the whole nexus of right of abode and immigration issues and I'd very much hoped that recent helpful discussions we'd had on those subjects could conclude with an acceptable solution as soon as possible.