XN000022-1996-10-02 — Page 15

Question: Your ideas about Hong Kong?

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Governor. Well I think it is reasonable to say that if you look at the opinion polls that were produced through '92,'93,'94, when this argument was at its most vigorous, we regularly were able to point to substantial majorities of public support. We have, I think we can point today to the recent survey produced by the academically extremely respectable transition project at Baptist University which has two findings which I felt particularly interesting. The first is that the Government has an approval rating of 67 per cent which on balance I'm happy to settle for and secondly, that while I think only about 7 per cent of the sample were worried that 1997 might affect their economic well-being, 57/58 per cent of the sample were worried about their civil liberties, about corruption, about their way of life. I think that is a reflection as well of the fact that we've been talking about the most important and crucial issues. I also think that it would be hard to deny that whenever there had been a reasonably fair electoral test in Hong Kong there'd been majority support for arguments in favour of a little more democracy rather than a little less. Though I think the community had always recognised that that has to be a cautious process and I think the community has always hoped for that process to be within the framework of as good as possible a relationship with China. It's sometimes been difficult to stand up for Hong Kong while retaining as good a relationship with China as one would like.

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Question: (inaudible)... the polls say one thing we know what they say - but you said it was your frustration that you couldn't put it to the ballot. Why didn't you put it to the ballot, because constitutionally you were not restricted from doing so?

Governor: I was restricted from doing so by a very large number of considerations, some of them political, some of them constitutional. What I was actually thinking about as an elected politician - elected sometimes, defeated sometimes as well - was that it is a frustration if one is a democrat in the marrow of one's bones, that when challenged intellectually and politically you are not in a position to go out on the hustings and put your arguments to the test. I am sure anyone with my background from Europe or North America would have found the same sort of frustration: endlessly being interviewed by people who would ask whether what one was saying was really supported by people in Hong Kong and only being able to talk about opinion polls rather than real votes and real bodies.

Question: Governor, you have always said the pointers of democracy and human rights - but you have ten key elements that you have stated in your policy speech about the CE's programme; you mentioned nothing about democracy and human rights and those ten key elements, can I know the reason why?

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