XN000022-1997-04-24 — Page 18

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The one good thing which seems to me to have come out of it whether talking about donations to political parties or whatever, is it has given the community the chance of speaking out and the community has spoken out extremely eloquently within a few weeks of the transition. Our legal profession has spoken out with considerable intellectual vigour. I get a transcript of the phone-in programmes on radio every morning. Ordinary people have spoken out. People have spoken out in the streets. A lot of people have spoken out in the newspapers. So I think that is a good sign that it's shown for once and for all how much people in Hong Kong are concerned about their freedoms.

Now the question of fund raising and contributions to political parties. Of course many societies have limits which they apply to the amount of money that can be donated for election campaigns and of course it's true that many countries have laws about the transparency of political donations but I think trying to prevent any contribution at all would cause very considerable difficulties. Difficulties of definition and difficulties of implementation in practice and for what purpose? There's a sort of implication of threats in the shadows which none of us are at present aware of but may exist unless these rather illiberal measures are taken. I don't think that there are any threats in the shadows unless people find it threatening that the ordinary men and women of Hong Kong want to go on living in a free and democratic society. If that's a threat then heaven help all of us.

Mr Andrew Cheng Kar-foo (in Chinese): A short follow-up question. We criticised Mr Tung for not letting people do what he did. Now is it that for that donation there was no political transaction behind that donation, is that the case? Because the policy that political donations are very sensitive and if we in future have to legislate so that local political organisations and bodies cannot get donations from aliens then I think what we need to do in fact is to prevent any political transactions behind political donations or donations to political organisations. There should not be a ban across the board. I hope that Mr Governor you can give some advice and I hope that you will not sort of deviate from this question.

Governor: Well, let me answer that question in the particular and in the general. I think it would be a grotesque and wholly unwarranted attack on Mr Tung's integrity to suggest that there was any political transaction as a result of a donation that he made to the Conservative Party. I saw a suggestion in one British newspaper the other day, it had obviously been heavily crawled over by the libel lawyers in order to make sure that it didn't quite transgress, the suggestion that because Mr Tung had made a donation to the Conservative Party the Governor of Hong Kong had put him on the Executive Council. I mean anybody who knows anything about Hong Kong, whose mind isn't entirely distorted by conspiracy theories, would know precisely what nonsense that was. So the particular point I'd want to make is that I don't think that this controversy should be used by anybody to cast wholly unwarranted slurs on the I think unquestioned integrity of the Chief Executive designate.