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So I would also like to take this opportunity to wish you all the best.
Governor: I am grateful for that characteristically terse question. It will, of course, be a particular sadness for me not to see the honourable gentleman in the future as regularly as I have over the last few years beginning on the picket-line and ending up in the Legislative Council, part of the process of democratisation which one sees in Hong Kong and elsewhere. It is an even greater sadness to hear that I am not going to be able to say farewell to the honourable gentleman but perhaps we will be able to say so and to make it au revoir rather than goodbye.
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The honourable gentleman and I won't take him up on the allegation about broken-promises; actually, we have kept very precisely the promises that we made on Temporary Housing Areas, as I will be happy to point out to the honourable gentleman. When I arrived in Hong Kong there were 55; now there will be 12 or 13 when I leave; and all the promises that we made on THAS will have been kept. There would, of course, have been far fewer, perhaps none at all, if it hadn't been for the continuing steady immigration into Hong Kong.
But the important point which the honourable member made is again about the way in which the quota is implemented. And the honourable gentleman is right to underline the extent to which we are in the hands of those who run the system on the other side of the border. One of the reasons why we have been pressing for greater transparency, for example for a points system, is to try to ensure that the sort of problems to which the honourable gentleman alluded can't actually distort the policy. The more transparency, the more openness, the more parents can see how long they are likely to have to wait; the more they can see that the policy is being implemented fairly so that people are not being allowed to jump the queue. The more that can be done, the more effective will the policy be and the less likely will it be that snakeheads will be able to operate in the disgraceful and dangerous way in which they have in the past.
So I hope before June 30 we will have made some progress in that area. I know that it is an area to which the Chief Executive (designate) and his team also attach priority. And I hope, in the interests of Hong Kong and in the interests of a lot of families who will have rights to be here in Hong Kong, I hope the policy can be made to work more effectively in the future.
career.
And I would like to wish the honourable gentleman well in his future political
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