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lay them on the table again and make some amendments before putting them away to wait for the next chance of exposure. In my speech last year, I said that they were very vague statements without setting any priority and so could not serve as indicators for assessing the results achieved. The biggest shortfall is that they are not pegged to any financial commitments, and what is most ironic is that the Finance Select Committee does not need them at all. In fact, every year the Government makes a concrete report on their new policy commitments and commitments behind schedule in the previous year. Could we at least have similar reports?
Mr. Chairman, yesterday you presented a numerical report on our work last year. You said that we put forward 26 motions and 37 questions, that seven projects were completed and that we had a busy year. However, you did not mention the number of questions we followed up and the number of questions we didn't. I believe that there is quite a number of questions that were not followed up. Let me cite some examples off-hand. Did we carry out the motion on the Department's review of its establishment? Not all of the Council's venues can be used by the handicapped, for only some of the venues are equipped with facilities for the disabled. Do we have concrete plans to go about it? Did we ask the Architectural Services Department to punish contractors with unsatisfactory performance? How did we implement the Capital Works Select Committee's 10-year plan on land use? Many of the questions raised by me or other Councillors were not taken up by the Committees concerned. For instance, how did the Board of Governors of the Hong Kong Stadium set up a mechanism to monitor and review the operation of the Wembley Ltd.? Would the Board of Governors carry out technical improvements and consider the construction of a roof over the Hong Kong Stadium? Could we consider placing our $3 billion surplus in low-risk investments other than as a bank deposit?
I feel that failure to take follow-up action is our Achilles heel. Precisely because I like to get to the bottom of things, I can see that certain major decisions in the 80s, like the timetable for the performing companies to become independent, were unilaterally shelved by the Department. How many of us would remember that? Mr. Chairman, you said yesterday that seven Committees had commenced work on the five-year plans. However, I spent a lot of time last night counting, and I only found six, for the Public Health Select Committee has yet to start formulating its five-year plan, and some five-year plans, like that of the Markets and Street Traders Select Committee which had not been discussed for nearly half a year, have indeed vanished. I wonder if they will ever survive the embryonic stage. There are also some plans on which public consultations will be delayed until mid or late 1997. It is already 18 months since I put forward the five-year-plan motion in July 1995, but there is not a single five-year plan that has been successfully completed. Only two Select Committees have prepared consultation papers for the plans, and some of the Select Committees, like the Public Health Select Committee, the
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