►
1 -
Governor's public meeting
The following is a transcript of the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten's public meeting held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre today (Friday):
Governor: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I think I am a bit of an anti-climax after that music - if you're expecting Rocky to arrive. As long as it wasn't the theme tune for Mission Impossible.
As you know, after my policy address each year I have held public meetings and done phone-in programmes and so on, as well as answering questions in the Legislative Council, so that people in Hong Kong from every walk of life can have the opportunity of asking me questions about the government's programme, telling me where we are going wrong, telling me what more you'd like to do.
We have produced, this week, about as much information as you would find in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. We have produced not only my policy speech in the Legislative Council but also the progress report in which we try to set out how much we have done to achieve the agenda which I spelt out four years ago, and we set out some of our commitments for developing policy in the coming year.
Now we think in the government that it is not a bad record. We've cut crime, cut taxes, managed to keep our economy strong, expanded many of our welfare programmes, cut inflation, cut unemployment from the peak of last year. But we recognise and recognise very clearly, that you should never be complacent in government, that the only motto you should have is to try to do better, and that there are a lot of things which you think we should be doing more efficiently or we should be doing in greater numbers.
It is of course the case this year that I can't spell out the sort of agenda which the Chief Executive of the Special Administrative Region will set for himself or herself. It would be entirely wrong of me to try to do that but I do obviously have some views about what I hope will keep Hong Kong strong and successful in the coming years, and we might explore some of those during this evening's question and
answer.
Now perhaps I can just mention one or two ground rules. Things go a bit faster these days with this simultaneous interpretation but nevertheless, we've got a limited time we've got about an hour, an hour and a bit - and we want to try to get in as many questions as possible during that period. So the first thing I would like everybody to agree with me about is that questions should be short and people should ask questions rather than to make long statements about their views on the world. Now does everybody agree we have short questions? Yes? All right, I take that as enthusiastic endorsement.