XN000022-1996-10-04 — Page 7

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The first is that part of Hong Kong's vitality is that people in Hong Kong still believe in progress. They still believe that you can make things better by your own efforts, week by week, month by month, year by year. People in Hong Kong don't, to borrow a rather crude English word, don't whinge. Over the years people have had plenty that they could whinge about but they've actually got on with life and created this astonishing success story and I think the first lesson I take back is that in Europe and perhaps the same is true in parts of North America, we should whinge less and get on with things rather more.

Secondly, while I think that there is still plenty of scope in Hong Kong for us to develop our welfare programmes and there will be people in this audience who will have 101 ideas of what we could do in addition to what we're doing already. I think I will go back from Hong Kong with a very strong view that public spending should form a smaller proportion of a community's income and the taxes should be lower if you want to encourage greater economic growth and greater economic dynamism.

When I started to say things like that in speeches outside Hong Kong some people thought it was rather controversial. I notice that it seems to be becoming a rather conventional piece of wisdom these days.

Thirdly, I take from Hong Kong the very clear view that it's possible to be an open community, it's possible to be an international-minded community while retaining a sense of identity and that's a point which perhaps has particular relevance to the debate in the United Kingdom about Britain's role in the European community.

So those will be three lessons, among others, that I'll take back with me. Oh, and there's one other and that is that there is a very close relationship in politics between principle and public administration.

Question (in Chinese): Mr Governor, now we are against changing public housing to HOS. We have a concerned group. We don't think public housing is a burden to tax payers, we have paid tax. Now you say 60 per cent of the people should own their own homes, so how do you arrive at the 60 per cent proportion? Do you want to make money by providing HOS? And also, for redeveloped public housing, now you make us move to older public housing because you want to redevelop public housing, so how are you looking after the interests of the lower sector?

Governor: In Hong Kong, at the moment, we put large numbers of resources into our public housing programmes, into housing as a whole and we have done for some years. But we still have housing problems. We have a situation in which, very often, you can find better-off people paying a lower proportion of their household income living in Housing Authority accommodation, while others are waiting five, six, seven years in less good, private rented accommodation, sometimes poorer, sometimes paying a higher proportion of their household income. And I think for everybody that raises substantial questions about whether we're running our housing programmes in the most effective and socially equitable way.