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GOVERNOR Chris Patten will pay a high-profile visit to Australia starting on St Valentine's Day to ''spread the Hong Kong message''.

  Mr Patten is expected to visit Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra between February 14 and 19.

   Dignitaries he is expected to meet both publicly and in private include Prime Minister Paul Keating, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and New South Wales premier John Fahey.

  The trip is thought to be at the invitation of the Australian Foreign Ministry.

  It will be Mr Patten's first visit to Australia as Governor. His predecessor, then Sir David Wilson, became the first governor to visit the country in 1991.

  Although the visit is being seen in political circles as a normal overseas trip, it is no secret that Australia sees Hong Kong as the gateway to China's markets. Australians already represent one of the fastest-growing expatriate groups in the territory.

  Mr Patten is expected to justify the territory's stance in the Sino-British row in a speech he has been invited to give at the National Press Club in Canberra.

  Meanwhile, Mr Patten has had a letter published in an Australian newspaper defending his handling of the 1997 handover against criticism by a former Australian leader.

  ''It is wholly inaccurate to suggest that I am trying to tell China how to govern itself,'' Mr Patten wrote to the editor of The Australian.

  Mr Patten's letter responded to an article on January 5 titled ''Britain's Asian blind spot'', in which Australian former prime minister Malcolm Fraser said Mr Patten's conduct reflected Britain's traditional incapacity to understand Asia.

  Mr Fraser said Mr Patten was attempting to establish elements of democracy in Hong Kong that were unacceptable to China and that would not survive the changeover.

  The Governor said at issue between Britain and China was the mechanics of Hong Kong elections, not the establishment of democracy in the British territory.

  He said both countries agreed in their 1984 Joint Declaration on Hong Kong that the legislature of the future Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China should be elected.

  China's Basic Law for Hong Kong, which takes effect in 2007, stipulated that one-third of the first SAR legislature would be elected, followed by 40 per cent of the second and 50 per cent of the third, he said.

  He rejected Mr Fraser's charge that he was trying to tell China how to govern.

  ''Our proposals relate only to the conduct of elections in Hong Kong,'' he wrote. ''But just as we must let the one billion people of China decide how they wish to be governed, so we must have full respect for the wishes of the people of Hong Kong.

      ''And the fact is that our proposals on electoral arrangements are very widely supported in Hong Kong.

  ''Whether or not Britain understands Asia . . . it cannot be disputed that Hong Kong people do understand Hong Kong,'' Mr Patten said.



Patten to woo foreign friends