· 10 -
Mr President, the aim of our film censorship policy is to maintain a balance between the need to protect public morals on the one hand, whilst safeguarding freedom of expression and artistic creation as well as the rights of the individual to information on the other. I believe that our proposal to require advertising materials for Cat III films to be approved before publication is a necessary measure to achieve this fine balance. I hope that this, together with other proposals in the Bill, will gain the support of Members.
Mr President, I beg to move.
End/Wednesday, January 18, 1995
Occupational Retirement Schemes (Amendment) Bill
Following is the speech by the Secretary for Financial Services, Mr Michael Cartland, on the Occupational Retirement Schemes (Amendment) Bill 1995 in Legislative Council today (Wednesday):
Mr President,
The Occupational Retirement Schemes (Amendment) Bill 1995 before the Council today seeks to amend the principal Ordinance so as to enable the Registrar of Occupational Retirement Schemes to regulate and monitor private retirement schemes more effectively. The proposals would allow greater flexibility in the investment of scheme assets without compromising the safeguards. This is in line with our overall objective of ensuring that private occupational retirement schemes are properly managed and funded, thus providing greater certainty that retirement benefits will be paid to scheme members when they fall due.
The Bill's primary proposal seeks to resolve practical difficulties encountered by trustee administrators of pooled schemes in complying with the statutory requirement to separate the assets of each participating scheme in a pooling agreement. Pooled schemes account for the majority of all private occupational retirement schemes. In practice pool administrators combine not only the administrative duties but also the assets of each participating scheme. Strict separation of assets between each of the participating schemes is costly to administer, inhibits diversification of investment and results in lower returns for scheme members. Inevitably this in turn discourages the small-scale employers from establishing a scheme within a pool. To overcome these problems, pooling of assets will be permitted. There will be two safeguards. Firstly, the assets of each scheme will have to be kept separate from those of the employer and remain under trust. Secondly, the annual accounts of each scheme maintained by the trustee administrator of a pooling agreement will be required to conform to a common accounting year, and be audited by the same auditor.