XN000022-1995-10-12 — Page 9

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Miss Emily Lau: Thank you Mr President. I want to follow-up on the question of the provisional legislature raised by Mr Cheung Bing-leung. The Governor referred to the unclear genesis in the Basic Law and the Joint Declaration of the provisional legislature which I agree of course, but I wonder whether he would go even further to say that the setting-up of the provisional legislature would be a breach of the Sino- British Joint Declaration? And also Mr President, I want to ask the Governor whether in co-operating with the preparatory committee next year and in '97, is he also prepared to co-operate in a sense of allowing the Chinese Government to second cadres to work in the Hong Kong Government, just like right now the British Government is seconding people to work in the Hong Kong Government and would that be also seen as a breach of the Joint Declaration?

Thank you Mr President.

Governor: Well, I'm always reluctant, in life before anybody breaks my windows, to rush around blaming them for having done so and before anything is done which maybe in contravention of the Joint Declaration I'm reluctant to point an accusatory finger. But speaking as an interested observer of these things, I do find it difficult to imagine how the establishment of a provisional legislative council, which of course is unnecessary, undesirable and unwelcome, could be within the terms of the Joint Declaration. But, I repeat that I don't want to wag my finger in a minatory way about something that may never happen.

As for the secondment of PRC civil servants to the Hong Kong Government, that hasn't, I don't think, been yet suggested, either for the period before 1997 or the period after 1997. I'm not sure whether, were it to be suggested, it would actually be in breach of the Joint Declaration, but I'm prepared to take counsel on that point. I do think, if I may say so, that one of the, that there are two important considerations which none of us should lose sight of. The first is that civil servants in Hong Kong are going to want to work in an understanding and co-operative way with civil servants in the PRC and that may well mean that just as civil servants in Hong Kong want to know more about the way PRC ministries and bureaucracies work, so the reverse could reasonably be regarded as true as well. Secondly, I would have thought that one of the contributions which Hong Kong, without an excess of institutional vanity, could offer after 1997, was its expertise in running public administration from emergency services to budget planning, right across the board and that too might argue the case for secondments from time to time. I don't see how that process would necessarily infringe the guarantees and the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law, about Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy or about the continuity of the civil service in Hong Kong. So I'm less certain about that issue than I am about the other, not that I think the other should ever need to occur.