HIS EXCELLENCY
HE. THE PRESIDENT:
Good afternoon. The Council
will now resume and we will continue with the debate on the APPROPRIATIONS BILL 1988. MẸ. PANG Chun hon.
MR. PANG ( in Cantonese). Budget Debate 1988
Sir,
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First of all, I would like to acknowledge the change that has been made in the presentation of the draft Estimates for 1988789 by our Financial Secretary to this Council. With the new format, this year's draft Estimates gives us a clearer picture of the objectives of each department and how the funds to be allocated will
achieve be used to achieving the set targets. This is indeed an improvement. Take the previous expenditure analysis of the Labour Department for instance, they only briefly outlined the work of the department without listing out its planned objectives for the fiscal year concerned. However, in this year's estimates, the objectives have been explicitly described, which include maintaining harmonious relations between employers and employees, providing a free employment service, protecting the interests of workers in Hong Kong and workers employed locally for work outside Hong Kong, the setting 2 up of the proposed Occupational Safety and Health Council and
ensuring the safe use of explosives. Henceforth, we shall be able to use these objectives as our reference in measuring and assessing the performance of the Labour Department. In the past year, Hong Kong witnessed an upturn of its labour accident figures and a drop le in the number of serving Labour Inspectors during the concurrent
period. The Labour Department has requested additional allocation
and I. this year is my hope that the Administration will continue to make endeavours and give greater publicity to the prevention of
industrial accidents.
The Labour Tribunal was originally established with the intention to streamline the procedures for employees to claim outstanding payments. As reflected by the statistics provided in the Estimates, the number of cases handled by the Labour Tribunal in
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