XN000022-1995-07-06 — Page 5

Governor's speech

Following is the speech by the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten, at the Hong Kong Exporters' Association Luncheon today (Thursday):

Mr Wong, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you very much indeed for today's invitation. I am greatly honoured to have been invited to join you for this special lunch today, 21⁄2 years on from a most enjoyable pre-Christmas lunch that I shared with you in 1992. Now I'd better confess that this isn't my first lunch since then, as you can probably tell from my shape, but the lunches with you have been most pleasant occasions. Sometimes at these lunches with business groups, I recall the words of Adam Smith - who's invisible hand you, Mr Chairman, wished to exchange for something more tangible. Adam Smith wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Can't think who he was writing about.

He should have been here just now, Mr Chairman, to hear you not contriving to raise prices, but giving voice to the deep concerns felt throughout Hong Kong, by business, by the man and woman in the street, and by Government, about rising costs. A point which you, Mr Chairman, have put very vigorously in my Business Council.

In most respects Hong Kong's economy has been doing very well. We are now into our 35th year of uninterrupted economic growth. If you said that back in the United Kingdom, they wouldn't believe you. Thirty-five years. When I joined you last time, I joined you not just in celebrating Christmas, but in celebrating a year in which Hong Kong's exports your business had increased by 21%. No bad Christmas present.

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What has there been to celebrate since then? One will always find some congenital gloom and doom merchants who will say, "not much", but where lies the weight of the evidence? Does double digit growth in exports in both 1993 and 1994 give you grounds for gloom? Does 25% growth in exports in May this year compared with May last year give you reason to worry? Does the 13% growth in domestic exports since May last year mud in the eye for the myth that manufacturing's days are numbered in Hong Kong - does that make you feel depressed?

T

Hong Kong's fiscal position is substantially stronger now than it was then. It comes as a great shock I have to say, to a public official who has spent most of his life trying to explain why predicted surpluses turned out to be deficits, to find himself in a position in which he has to explain year after year why predicted deficits turned out to be substantial surpluses. I prefer the latter. We were seriously worried when I last lunched with you, seriously worried about the renewal of China's MFN status by the United States. The hurdles we saw then were overcome. Of course concern remains, though more distant and for different reasons, but I continue to have faith in the ability of good sense and goodwill to resolve those difficulties.

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