XN000022-1995-06-15 — Page 3

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Baroness Dunn has made a decision that she will be leaving Hong Kong for business and personal reasons which I'm sure she'll be explaining when she makes her own statement later on this afternoon. I'm only commenting because it's already been widely reported in the newspapers. It must, I imagine, have been a difficult decision for her to make. She's made a tremendous contribution to the community. She's been one of my closes advisers just as she was one of my predecessor's closest advisers, so I will miss her loyal advice because she has been involved in all the big decisions that I've taken since I've been in Hong Kong, and has contributed to them and supported them very loyally. I'm sure that she will continue to be a champion of Hong Kong in the House of Lords. She has already made a considerable mark there and I'm she will continue to do so.

Question: So have you decided who will take her place? Present ExCo members or new ExCo members?

Governor: No, I haven't. I won't be taking any decisions about the Executive Council and its membership until the autumn. And we've got an extremely good Executive Council, full of very talented people representing, I think, all shades of opinion in Hong Kong, so I have a genuine and general cross-section of advice about the difficult issues that the Government has to consider.

Question: So the Senior ExCo Member will leave until the coming autumn?

Governor: I won't make any decisions about ExCo until late September early October.

Question: Mr Patten, there is a report saying that unemployment rates have... to 2.9 per cent... How do you interpret that?

Governor: I think that it's very dangerous for people to make generalisations about one month's figures, either when the figures look better or when the figures look worst. So just as I would think it was unwise to make great claims if the figures had moved in the other direction, I don't think we should read too much into one month's figures which show very small improvement. The truth of the matter is, we do have difficulties in the labour market in Hong Kong, we do have employment problems, even if this month's figures are a bit better than last month's, and we have to tackle those problems by the sort of measures that we've already announced and by others that we will bring forward, not least as a result of our review of the Labour Importation Scheme.

ہوا۔

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