XN000022-1995-10-11 — Page 15

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Governor: I put it in my speech because I wanted to make it absolutely clear that every buck stops with me and that I have to make the decision at the end of every day or every week whether what we're doing is in the interests of the people of Hong Kong. I have powers as Governor, not, it has to be said, powers as extensive as those which customarily reside in colonial mansions. If you look back on the history of British colonial administration, I've got rather fewer powers than most and some of those that I had, I've made sure, like the one you've just alluded to, no longer exist. But the political and constitutional situation has evolved in Hong Kong and that means that it's conceivable that I may have to use such powers as I have in a way which I wouldn't choose to use in the future. But you've heard legislators talking, you've heard leaders of political parties, you've heard my senior officials and now you've heard, at considerable length, the Governor of Hong Kong and what all of us are saying is that we want to have as co-operative, consensual relationship as we can possibly manage. But it would have been totally wrong for me not to have mentioned what the constitutional parameters in Hong Kong remain, trying to make, in an accountable and competent way, executive-led government work with a wholly elected legislature when you have an appointed Chief Executive. I mean I'm even more aware of the constitutional curiosities in Hong Kong than anybody else.

Question: (Eastern Express) It's about this constitutional curiosity that I feel that quite a few of my colleagues would like to pin you down on and that is, and I think the second questioner introduced this, that a lot of people will see it as a constitutional curiosity and even a contradiction that a Governor who having widened the enfranchise seems to be sounding a warning to the beneficiaries of that widened enfranchise, the elected members of LegCo, that they shouldn't overstep the mark in what they plan to do during the coming sessions. It sounded very much like a warning. Would you agree that it was?

Governor: Well, what I'm reluctant to do is to be drawn in questions after a speech, the wording of which I thought about very carefully, into saying things that I didn't spend the afternoon saying. And I don't think I've got anything to add to what I've said in response to a number of previous questions.

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In Hong Kong people don't yet elect an executive. They elect a legislature, the whole of a legislature. They're not electing a government, they're electing a legislature to which the government is accountable and it's a legislature with clear and specific powers. Just as the executive has those powers. I don't seek to change that in any way. I made it perfectly plain this afternoon that while the mandate of the legislature hasn't changed, while it's role hasn't changed, it's credibility, it's legitimacy if you like, has been broadened by the fact that all its members are elected and fairly elected so that obliges all of us to try to work constructively with the legislature. But we rapidly, in Hong Kong, fall into our favourite habit of imagining the difficulties at the furthest ends of constitutional hypotheses. Other people may think the job of governing Hong Kong's a pushover. I find it difficult enough without thinking about life surrounded by the constitutional barbed wire.