XN000022-1995-10-04 — Page 2

Transcript of the Governor's media session

Following is the transcript of the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten's media session after opening the Telecom World today (Wednesday):

Governor: I hope you enjoyed the Telecom World as much as I did. It's very good to see another example of Hong Kong being at the front of the race in Asia and arguably in the world. I'd like to congratulate Hongkong Telecom on everything they've done here. Can I say a word about yesterday. I'm delighted by the agreement reached yesterday in London between Vice Premier Qian Qichen and Secretary of State Malcolm Rifkind. Sometimes international meetings display cordiality and grand sounding communiques. But what's really important particularly when one's dealing with the future of a community as important as Hong Kong is to be able to point to real and solid achievements. That's what both sides were able to do yesterday. As you'll recall in my address to the Legislative Council last October, I said that we put particular emphasis on our relationship with the Preparatory Committee and the team designate and we wanted to structure those in as helpful a way as possible. And I said we also wanted to help the civil service prepare for the transition in a way which reinforced their morale rather than lower or undermine their morale. There've been one or two controversial suggestions made on both those subjects. You'll be aware of them as well as I am. But I'm delighted that we can now put all that behind us. We've put proposals to the Chinese side during the course of the summer and they've accepted those proposals. We can now go ahead in a way which I hope will be encouraging for the civil service and for the community as a whole and in a way which will enable us to deal effectively with the difficult tasks, difficult but not impossible, that we have in the next year of co-operating with the Preparatory Committee and with the team designate of the Special Administrative Region. So all of us in the administration, the Chief Secretary, the Financial Secretary and I, are particularly pleased at the way things went yesterday in London. We'd like to express our gratitude for the way the discussions were handled.

Question: The democrats called it an outrage British government didn't bring up the question of through train for LegCo with Qian Qichen. What's your response to that?