21
-
Secondly, you talk about the LegCo Panel and what our Security Branch were saying the other day. I think the argument wasn't about whether we need a clearer view about the numbers involved. I don't think there's any more very much dispute about those and I think there's a recognition that only just over half the numbers are South Asian. There are a lot of others from Portugal and other places. I think the argument was whether a complicated registration of everybody involved would actually take us forward very far and I think there's a real doubt about that and I think there's also a feeling that it would take a very long time and not achieve very much.
Thirdly, I didn't mention everything in my speech yesterday, as I said earlier. Had I done so I'd still have been speaking. But we do intend to go on pressing the British Government to change its position on this issue. I'm sure that it will be an issue which will be prominent in many of the speeches, in the debate which the House of Commons will be holding in the autumn. I'll bet that you'll make sure it is and I certainly will too, but I'll be pressing Ministers about it again when I return later in the
autumn.
Question (in Chinese): Good morning Mr Governor. In your Policy Address, you talk about welfare spending and it is only 18 per cent of GDP. But I can't agree because if you talk about medical services and education, in fact it far exceeds that percentage. So under such circumstances we have a lot of families and when they talk about taking care of the elderly, taking care of the young, they are shirking their responsibility and putting the responsibility on the Administration. Now our economy is suffering a downturn; if we talk about a four member household and if we are talking about CSSA, from CSSA, from medical care, from housing, from education, they get more than $10,000 and the $10,000 in fact far exceeds what an average worker is earning. So under such circumstances Mr Governor, how can you prevent Hong Kong from following the steps of the UK and say when people do not want to work?
Governor: Well, can I first of all put the figures in context. It is the case that our total public spending, total public spending on everything, education, transport, welfare and so on, in Hong Kong, represents about 18 per cent of our GDP, what we're worth as a community. And it's also true that that figure is lower at the moment than the figure was in the early 1980's. So even though we've been improving our welfare programmes and our education spending and our care for the elderly, because our economy has been growing as well, we haven't got into the sort of problem which many European countries have got to, where they have an excessively burdensome cost for welfare expenditure.