XN000022-1995-11-09 — Page 7

- 6 -

I would now like to ask, in the first place, my officials to report on the progress that we have made since June, and then I will ask the Chairman of the ERB, whom I would like to congratulate on his recent appointment, to address us. Then I would like to ask the panellists representing employers and employees respectively and then we will have a general discussion, inviting you to comment from the floor. First of all, the Financial Secretary.

End/Thursday, November 9, 1995

Governor's closing remarks at Summit Meeting

*

Following is the closing remarks of the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten, at the Governor's Summit Meeting on Employment today (Thursday):

Thank you all very much indeed. I wonder if I can briefly try to summarise and suggest one or two ways forward. First of all I would like to thank everybody for contributing both from the panel and from the body of the meeting. I think it has been a very useful discussion, several good ideas have come forward, and I think that there is a general agreement on at least the basics that what we all want is the highest possible employment in Hong Kong. We want good well-paid jobs that will last, we want our businesses to thrive, and we want Hong Kong to stay competitive and sustain our remarkable decades of economic growth well into the next century.

What are we committed to doing and what do we need to look at rather more thoroughly as a result of this discussion? Well, first of all, we are committed to clamping down firmly on illegal employment and to dealing with abuse of imported workers. And we were given some evidence of that sort of abuse during the discussion. Mr Lau Chin-shek said that we needed to make sure that heftier fines did represent a real deterrent and that our fines were not just taking account of inflation year on year. I won't go into a discussion about fees and charges at this point but we will stick to penalties.