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Question: Moving on to autonomy post-1997, if there is a breach as the outcome of some people maybe not aware selling our birthright or extending intervention, how can you walk us down the road as you have already pledged in June this year, and also the Foreign Minister and also the Prime Minister?
Governor: What they both made clear and I am only repeating what they have said - there is sometimes an attempt by the Xinhua News Agency to suggest that there is somehow a difference of position between the British Governor and the British Government; there isn't of course and nor could there be - what the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have said is if there are the problems that you mentioned, they would want to mobilise as much international support as possible to persuade China to keep its word under the Joint Declaration.
Now nobody wants, I think, to go into detail about exactly what would happen if there was a breach. We all very much hope - and I want to underline this - that there won't be, we all very much hope that things will go smoothly after July 1. Maybe Chinese officials will be more relaxed about Hong Kong after July 1. I would certainly hope that they would learn to trust Hong Kong a little more.
Question (in Chinese): Good morning Mr Governor. I've read your Policy Address. Mr Governor, it's actually more political than on the peoples' livelihood, particularly with pre-primary education. Exclusively it has been neglected for years. I hope that there will be some improvement here. Previously there has not been any significant improvement in that area. When we talk about nine year compulsory education, well that's primary and secondary. I hope that you can pay some attention to pre-primary education and extend the compulsory education to pre-primary level.
Governor: Can I first of all just say that my Policy Address was a little different from usual, but that doesn't mean that we don't have an extensive range of policy commitments right across the board, including education and I've got in my hand a 269 page policy commitments address which is full of the sort of things that Government will be doing over the coming year but it would have taken rather a long time to read it out to the Legislative Council.
Secondly, you are entirely right to stress the importance of education. We're spending about 19 billion at the moment on schools, on primary and secondary schools and so on. We've improved teacher/pupil ratios, we've increased the number of teachers and the number of graduate teachers and we've spent more on things like computers and improving classrooms. Now you quite rightly point to the importance of pre-primary education, of kindergarten education and of child care centres. About 80 per cent of children from three to five are now attending kindergartens. There's a lot more alternative child care centres available as well. We've reviewed and improved the subsidy scheme. We're giving more money to the Hong Kong Institute of Education to train kindergarten teachers and we're requiring 40 per cent of teachers in each kindergarten to complete a qualified teacher course by September next year. So I think we are doing a good deal but I know that people would like us to do more because the foundations of education are so terribly important.
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