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Question (in Chinese): Good morning Mr Governor, I have three questions, two questions on the Vietnamese refugees or Vietnamese boat people rather. And then you keep moving them around and you are not moving them back to Vietnam; because it is a lot of money spent when you want to move them to a different centre - and there might be riots and then we have spent a lot of money on the Vietnamese boat people issue. When are we going to get the 1.1 billion for our taxpayers back from the UN.
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And then coming back to the education issue. In the tertiary institutes their library is not well stocked when we compare them with overseas universities. Now apart from the universities, the tertiary institutions do not have a well stocked library. And then they go overseas and they may achieve very good results. And there are also tertiary institutions that have degree courses and yet they are not universities yet. Shouldn't you actually give them the status? Because in Lingnan for instance they do have degree courses and therefore they should be treated as universities and recognised as these.
Governor: Let me deal with those two separate important questions. First of all on the Vietnamese - I think I am right in remembering the figures that when I was first addressing the Legislative Council and answering questions like this in 1992 there were 50,000 Vietnamese migrants in the camps. Now there are 12,000 and the figure would be a great deal lower if we hadn't run into difficulties, not least because of things done and said by the American Congress in 1994-95. We are at present repatriating, sending people home at the rate of about 1,400 a month. I very much hope we can keep that up and deal with the problem as rapidly as possible because people in Hong Kong have been very long-suffering and are well aware of the amount of money it has cost us. We are going to go on pressing the UNHCR to pay back the 1:1 billion that we are owed and I can assure you we don't lose any opportunity for making that point to them.
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Secondly, I absolutely agree with you about the need to make sure that all our tertiary institutions which now have university status with the exception of the OLI, the Open Learning Institute - though that is, I am sure, well on the way to university status all the others should be treated properly and should be funded properly. Lingnan is a marvellous university and I think the campus there is absolutely terrific. It has got an extremely distinguished vice-chancellor, very good staff, and I am sure that they would agree with you about the importance of library facilities. Now I have seen their library and I don't know about the quantity of books and IT material but it looked pretty good to me.
The library I have seen rather more of is the one at the University of Science and Technology which is, I would guess, as modern a library facility as you could find anywhere in the world, run by one of the world's most distinguished academic librarians. I was immensely impressed by the amount of information which students could bring up on the screen there and I would doubt whether there were many better equipped libraries anywhere.