XN000022-1995-06-01 — Page 13

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Now in your policy address in the coming October, I hope you will consider some points. Can the Government take the lead to employ certain retrained workers, because the Government is the biggest employer in Hong Kong? If you can take that lead you can encourage more people to follow suit. That is to employ retrained workers. Can you consider that?

Secondly, financial support. Can you relax the eligibility criterion for CSSA and can you also increase the CSSA amount? So can you consider moving in those two directions?

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Governor: I gave quite a long, conceivably excessively long, answer unemployment and the importation of labour earlier, so I don't want to repeat any of those points that I made. But while I know from looking at the press, from what people say to me, from the anecdotes I hear from Honourable Members and others, while I know that there is a gut feeling in the community that the rise in unemployment has something to do with the level of importation of labour, I do beg this Chamber not to take quite such a simplistic view. I don't believe there is a precise mechanistic relationship between the importation of labour and the level of unemployment. If

If you look at the figures for the importation of labour, I think you will find that under the general scheme there's actually been a fall in the number of workers in Hong Kong at the same time as unemployment itself has been rising. I don't seek to argue that there is no relationship between import of labour and unemployment but I don't think the relationship is quite as precise as some of the political arguments suggest.

The Honourable Member is entirely correct to draw attention to the importance of retraining and I think, if I may say so, that it's a particular challenge and particularly important for female employment in the labour market. If the Government were to particularly prioritise in taking on one group of workers or another, I don't quite understand how it would increase the total number who were employed. There's only a finite number of people who can be employed by Government and this Council would rightly criticise the Government if we took on more than were needed to discharge public services. If we prioritise one particular group it doesn't create more jobs. It merely redistributes jobs around the community. But we should give as much encouragement as possible to retraining and the best way of encouraging retraining is to make sure that we're retraining people for real jobs rather than retraining them for jobs that alas don't exist. That's why we want to try to tailor-make retraining and relate it much more closely to job vacancies and I think we have to work with unions and employers to accomplish that objective.