II -
-
What really went wrong was the purpose of the reduction to encourage those people who are on transit to come out of the airport and do more shopping so that they are going to buy more things from our market and at the same time will not cause congestion in the airport terminal itself. But unfortunately, that reduction did not achieve that objective and we still have lots of people wandering around in the airport terminal in transit. And at the same time, we have now discovered that the level of Air Passenger Departure Tax has almost no correlation with the passenger throughput at the airport. Then having regard to what other places have been collecting, I thought I can make use of that $50 more and translate it in terms of tax concessions for other people.
Question (SCMP) (in Cantonese): This year you have two new tax concessions for salaries tax, one is for siblings and another one is in relation to training courses at approved institutions and it is as high as $12,000. Now every year we have been asking for concessions with salaries tax and we have been told that we want a very simple tax system. When you talk about concessions for training courses, what are the factors that you take into consideration and are you afraid of a dangerous precedent?
FS (in Cantonese): Whatever we do we have to balance the factors. When we talk about an allowance for siblings I feel that this is very worthwhile and we hope to be able to enhance family values. There are people in Hong Kong, a lot of them, who will have to pay for the education of their brothers and sisters and so we should encourage them to continue to do so and to put their brothers and sisters through university as well. And so this is something that is worthwhile.
And when we talk about a deduction in relation to fees for training courses, actually this again is in response to suggestions from the Legislative Council. Our economy is undergoing transformation and there are people who will have to try and improve their skills in order to improve their standard of living. And how can we help them? I feel that therefore a deduction of $12,000 per year is worthwhile.
Question (TVB) (in Cantonese): You have a lot of measures trying to promote business and promoting social services, promoting the financial sector, and does that mean that you are no longer going away from the non-intervention policy?
FS: In my Budget Speech I mentioned at least four times, i.e. we will minimise intervention and we will give them maximum support. We will not take the lead. Now if you look at the Addendum on social services you should be aware of our main direction but of course we need to get a positive response from the business sector first. Now, the principle is definitely that. And yet somehow we need to be proactive - the Government needs to be proactive - we have to be forward looking. And we will look at what the business sector is doing and we will give them whatever support we
can.