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We have strengthened our efforts in clamping down firmly on illegal employment and have stepped up enforcement actions against abuses of labour importation schemes.

We have completed a comprehensive review of the General Labour Importation Scheme and yesterday announced the termination of the Scheme and its replacement by a Supplementary Labour Scheme as from 1.2.96. Our policy objective is to ensure that local workers have priority in employment and that their salaries and benefits are safeguarded, employers must accord priority to fill available job vacancies with local workers. If employers have genuine difficulties in finding suitable staff locally, they can import workers to fill such vacancies.

We have enhanced the scope of our statistical surveys so as to obtain more detailed information about the profile of the unemployed and the job vacancies.

We are finalising the arrangements for the appointment of a consultant to conduct a fact finding study on the alleged problem of age discrimination in employment. We will also visit Australia and New Zealand later this month to find out how their legislation work in practice. The public will be consulted on the way ahead.

We will continue to work closely with employers and employees representatives and members of this Council to work out solutions on the unemployment problem in the days to come.

Since the last summit, we have also introduced several new initiatives to strengthen the effectiveness of the various measures taken to help the unemployed to rejoin the labour market and to enhance their employment opportunities.

First, computerisation of the operation of the Job Matching Programme(JMP) of the Labour Department. As the JMP has proved to be very effective in helping the unemployed to enter the job market, we have computerised the operation of the JMP to further enhance the efficiency of job-matching. Steps are also being taken to computerise the operation of the Local Employment Service of the Labour Department.