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Governor: I am comfortable with any sort of vote as long as it is a majority. As somebody once said: a majority is the best repartee. What we need to be able to do is to be reasonably confident that we can carry the Legislative Council with the overall thrust of our policy and put the main legislation and the subsidiary legislation in place thereafter. We are not hung up on any particular figure, though I have to concede to the Honourable gentleman that 58-1 sounds like a pretty good figure to me. I'm not sure who the one -- No, the one I think will be on the Honourable gentleman's left.

So, as far as we are concerned we want to take the Council's mind, we want to explore with the Council and with others in the community, whether there is a way, at last, that we can nail this issue down for once and for all. People have accused us of doing a U-turn on our policy. That is, strictly speaking, untrue; we have done two U- turns. We brought forward proposals in 1992 with good intentions - it is not part of some cynical exercise to put off reaching a decision, we are actually trying to crack a problem; that is what government should be about. We were told that that approach was no good, so we brought forward another set of proposals which we thought met the criticisms of the first set of proposals and then we were told that was no good. Now we have brought forward yet a third set and some of the people, even some of the media organisations which were denouncing us for what we said over the second set of proposals are denouncing the third set of proposals on the grounds that they don't meet the sort of objectives which the second set of proposals were trying to meet. When you lead, you do have to be able to look over your shoulder from time to time and see people behind you, and that is what I hope that we can do this time.

We are accused as well, and this is what I want to come to, the Honourable Member's first point - we are accused as well, of not having met every problem, having worked out every detail. We haven't. We wanted to get a broad steer from this Council and then go away with our consultants and try to hammer out all the detail afterwards, including the sort of points which the Honourable Member made in his first question. We have seen the clear necessity to get involved in helping to establish a scheme to deal with the problems of some of the smaller employers, some of the smaller groups of employees, who I think will need some sort of reserve scheme which the Government helps to establish. Whether we need to go beyond that is a matter that we will be very happy to discuss with the Honourable Member and other Honourable Members. I repeat, we can't make this work unless we can get support right across the community. And to follow what the other Honourable Member was saying a moment or two ago, there are expectations, there are hopes which we don't want to dash but which we want to meet in as sensible and generous and prudent a way as possible.