XN000022-1995-04-27 — Page 13

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Governor: Those are always the difficult ones.

Mr James Tien: . . . regarding infrastructure co-ordination with China, and this time not about CT9 or the Container Port but rather with the Lo Wu crossing every morning. You are aware that the KCR trains going through Lo Wu every morning, they go every two or three minutes, and right now you might not be aware that every morning between like 8.00 - 10.00 on Hong Kong side and between 5.00 - 7.00 on the China side there's a long queue. They have to wait roughly between 30 minutes to one hour. Immigration Department may tell you the queue is only five minutes, which is probably true, but what they might not have told you is that when you get off the train in Lo Wu you have to queue up half an hour before you go through the turnstile to put in your train ticket. So to get out of that section first before you queue up for immigration. As you well know management have to pay for our employees time, even queuing up in the morning. From businesses' view it will probably cost us a lot. of manpower and financially because of all these people waiting and queuing up. So Governor, what do you think could be improved to make some co-ordinated improvement between KCRC, the Hong Kong Government and the Chinese Government regarding this?

Governor: It won't surprise the Honourable Member that the problems of Lo Wu and the connections, the rail connections between Hong Kong and PRC are one of the liveliest subjects on the agenda of the Infrastructure Co-ordinating Committee and indeed are one of the reasons why it's important to have a co-ordinating committee on infrastructure projects. One of the four panels which have been set up under the ICC is one dealing with rail links and rail connections and I know that this subject has been discussed in the panel and I'm sure that when we come to some decisions that will be welcome to the Honourable Member and welcome to those who as he says are queuing for rather more than five minutes. It's a very, very busy crossing and will get, I guess, even busier. So we need to ensure that there are adequate resources to expedite the passage of people through.

Mr Steven Poon: Thank you Mr President. Recently, the Government announced the unemployment rate as being 2.8 per cent. By world standards this is not a terribly high figure but by Hong Kong standards this is really quite high, as Hong Kong has not experienced such a record figure for some time and being a very small place, congested, and people haven't got very many places to go, and the very fact that we haven't got a very good, or a very sophisticated social security system, the worries are justified in my opinion and the public has raised a lot of concerns on this number. Governor, would you be able to tell us whether you expect this figure to go up in the next 12 months? And is there anything the Government or you yourself and your secretaries are doing in terms of identifying where this figure happens most; I mean more frequently; I mean where the unemployment is actually concentrated in terms of industry centres or services or restaurants and what-have-you and whether there are any means and measures that you are now planning to lower the figure in the foreseeable future?