TNAG-2769-FCO40-3986-Hong-Kong-and-the-media-interviews--press-briefings-and-the--1994 — Page 23

the District

package limited only to the elections in 1994

Board and Municipal Council elections. To deal with all the

more urgent issues, an interim package needs to include the

voting age and the voting method for all three sets of

elections, including the Legislative Council, and the

abolition of appointed membership in the District Boards and Municipal Councils.

The Chinese side evidently had no difficulty of principle with an interim package covering some of the 1995 LegCo issues.

The Chinese accepted our proposal that the voting age should

be lowered to 18 for all elections. They also seem to have had no difficulty of principle with our proposal that the voting method should be single seat single vote. They

accepted that this should apply to the District Board and

Municipal Council elections. But they refused to accept as part of an interim package that the single seat, single vote method should apply to the Legislative Council.

We and the Governor consider that there are compelling reasons for including this proposal on the voting method in the interim package. In practical terms it would otherwise be necessary to legislate twice on the voting system, using up legislative time which will be in short supply next year.

The single seat single vote system enjoys widespread support in the Legislative Council. If we had accepted the Chinese position and introduced legislation to apply this voting method to the District Boards and Municipal Councils only, the Council might have extended the measure to apply to the elections to their own body, since we know that it is in favour of that. That would have led straight back to further difficulties with the Chinese Government. We would not have

saved time: we would have wasted it.

Despite our best efforts, it has not been possible to reach

oralstatement25.11/BRIEFS/NJH