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But, that doesn't mean that there won't be difficult decisions for the Governor to make, that there won't be occasions when the Governor has to act as a buffer or a lightning-conductor in order to make it possible for other people to do their jobs, that it won't be necessary from time to time for the Governor to draw a line in the sand and say how far the Administration is prepared to go and where it isn't prepared to go. I think that is a role which I sketched out for myself publicly at least 18 months ago, though some people were rather surprised when I did so.

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I am fortunate in having a sufficiently talented team of senior officials to enable me to delegate more with complete confidence in the ability of my colleagues to carry and declining from the out and implement their decisions. So with reservations Honourable Gentleman the offer, not this time of a comfortable chair but of a throne - with reservations, I sympathise with much of what the Honourable Gentleman has said.

Dr K C Lam: Mr President, I wish to change the subject to the third topic listed for today, that is the fight against drugs. In this area there is general agreement that the key to the fundamental solution lies in adequate preventive education. The bulk of this work in Hong Kong is done by non-government organisations and the main difficulty encountered by these organisations is the perpetual lack of funds. Because of this, organisations are losing staff fast, as they are unable to offer long term contracts. And the main reason for this difficulty seems to be that funds for non- government organisation work against drugs are allotted as a low priority item in the Security Branch. And my question is, what does Government plan to do to boost funding for preventive education against drugs? Will it, for example, agree to setting up a trust fund to generate a predictable, dependable source of financial resource for this purpose?

Governor: I'm sure that the Honourable Gentleman who knows so much about this subject, would concede that it is not only Security Branch which is the donor of funds for work in the preventive education field. There are also, of course, resources from other parts of Government, from the Education Department, from Social Welfare Department and so on.

But nevertheless, I have a good deal of sympathy with the main thrust of his question and that is why, as I indicated earlier, we are during the discussions on public spending this summer, looking with some urgency at the arguments for the establishment of a trust fund to deal with drug abuse, funding, among other things, educational programmes, and I hope that we will have some announcements to make about that after the summer break if there is for all the Members of the Council a summer break - certainly in the autumn we will make a clear announcement about that and I hope it will satisfy the Honourable Gentleman.

End/Thursday, July 13, 1995

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