Governor: When the Secretary concerned worked as a key member of my administration, he worked extremely hard and competently and professionally in the interests of Hong Kong. He has a considerable reputation in our public service and I think that I can say without any reservation that I received from him great support which also displayed at every time considerable integrity. I would never seek to put a public official like him in a position which could be awkward or embarrassing for him as a civil servant and I hope that those with whom he is now working will behave in the same way.
I think it is important that we avoid putting our excellent civil service in positions which can cause difficulty for them as public servants. The civil service in Hong Kong -independent, meritocratic, politically neutral is one of the main reasons for Hong Kong's success and I think we should all be very careful not to do anything which affects the civil service adversely.
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It is in the nature of, I suppose, our attempts to help an incoming administration at this stage in the transition, that there may from time to time be difficulties, that individuals will find themselves in difficult positions. We should try to minimise those difficulties and those difficult positions. I hope that that will be borne in mind by some of those who have, in my view, wrong-headedly pressed us to help with the work of the provisional legislature something, for the reasons which I mentioned earlier - our concern about the rule of law we would not of course do. But were we to do so, it would create far more of the sort of problems which the honourable gentleman has alluded to.
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Mr Leung Yiu-chung (in Chinese): Mr President, of course we don't want to see the current situation but what is unfortunate is that situations are already in existence and of course we don't want to see that civil servants are regarded as having two faces, and they say one thing to someone and say another thing to another one, because it would deal a blow to the civil service. But this is an unfortunate fact, this is an unfortunate situation, that is right there in front of us. If this particular official in future is indeed to brief the provisional legislature on the consultative document, how are you going to deal with that? Are you going to withdraw the secondment?
Governor: I very much hope that some of the concerns expressed by the Honourable gentleman and elsewhere will be borne in mind by the SAR government designate and those who lead it. It's important that the integrity and professionalism of the Hong Kong civil service remains unquestioned after July 1. as they are unquestioned today.