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On the elderly - the honourable member will I am sure recall what the Director of Health said about the cold-snap and the elderly last year. I would add that since 1992 we have increased spending on the elderly - housing, health, welfare - by 55 per cent in real terms. We have increased CSSA payments to single elderly people by 32 per cent in real terms. Those are the sort of figures which have led some to accuse me of welfarism. I don't think that is a fair charge. I do think we owe a particular responsibility to the elderly, just as we owe a particular responsibility to try to help anyone who wants to work to do so.
Mr Ngan Kam-chuen (in Chinese): Mr Governor, the Government has pledged that by 2001 the Western Railway will be completed but it seems that there may be problems with completion now. Yesterday the policy address did not mention the reasons or the situation about the completion of the Western Rail and there are no proposals for the relevant future development, so the residents in the north-west NT are very disappointed. Mr Governor, we want to ease the traffic congestion in the north-west NT and you encourage people in Tuen Mun to take ferries in order to take the pressure off traffic. It seems that you are avoiding the crux of the matter; you want to shirk off your responsibility and pass it on to the citizens. Is it a responsible government? Isn't that another of your frustrations apart from the one you mentioned yesterday?
Governor: Speaking for myself I am delighted that the pressure on the Administration now is to get on with the Western Corridor Railway and related infrastructure developments rather than not to get on with it until we have talked endlessly about it with other people. It does seem to me that the argument seems to have shifted somewhat in recent months. What we are doing is conducting as expeditiously as we possibly can the surveys which need to be carried out in order to allow us to reach a conclusion about the Western Corridor Railway - about alignment, about engineering problems, about financing and so on. I hope that we will be in a position by the end of the year, or soon after, to arrive at some decisions and when we do we will obviously have to share our views with the Chief Executive Designate and with the Chinese members of the Joint Liaison Group and others.
This is going to be one of the biggest capital programmes undertaken by the SAR Government after 1997. I want to do everything we can as rapidly as possible to get on with that project but obviously it is going to be one- and I am not shuffling off responsibility, I am stating what is an obvious fact it is going to be one which is largely built during the early years of the SAR Government rather than started or built before.
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I want to underline my agreement with the honourable member about the importance of this project to the communities who live in the north-west New Territories. It was for precisely that reason that I pressed, myself, very energetically, for the extension of the Western Corridor Railway from Tuen Mun North to Tuen Mun Central and I do recognise that those honourable members who represent the north- west New Territories, who live in the north-west New Territories, will continue properly to press the government to get on with this project as soon as possible.