- 12.
The other point that I would like to make is this; Hong Kong is in an extremely strong and healthy position economically and fiscally. Where other communities very often fight over deficits, we find ourselves sometimes it appears embarrassed by our surpluses. But because you've got a surplus as a Government, as a community, if you have a surplus as a family, it doesn't mean that the sensible thing to do is to spend it all. I think that whatever the size of our surplus may be and the honourable gentleman will know that when you add the land fund to our aggregate surplus, we're extremely well off. Whatever the size of those figures, I don't think that anything would justify breaking the link that we've welded over the years between the growth in our overall economy and the growth in public spending. One of the reasons why we've got so much to spend today on areas like health and welfare and education is precisely because we've been sensible about relating spending to the growth in the economy in the past. So I hope the community and this Council will continue to be mature about the responsibilities of handling a surplus sensibly. It's on the whole a rather nicer problem to have to face than dealing with deficits.
Mr Lee Wing-tat (in Chinese): Mr Governor, recently from the newspaper it is said that Mr Tung Chee Hwa was hoped to be public opinion leader. I hope that when you solve problems you also act as public opinion leader. I have done a survey. Ever since you reported to this post and there were two issues at the top of the list of matters of concern of members of the public. First Hong Kong's future political matters, the other issue is housing and for the housing issue, in the past six months actually it has topped the other issue on the list. I would like to know whether in your dream you have felt that the housing issue is no longer on the top of the list but actually has dropped to say seventh of eighth so that you are happy in your dream? Now we really don't have too many opportunities left to ask you questions about housing because there are only several other months to go. So you have been here for five years, so what do you think is really the root of the housing problem. It seems that it is not a very difficult problem to solve but after five years we still don't see any light at the end of the tunnel in the near term and we cannot say certainly that in the coming ten years housing problem will cease to be at the top of the list of concerns of members of the public.
Governor: First of all I very much agree with what the honourable gentleman said about the priority which the public give to housing. And I must say that it's not only in this community. When I was myself a member of parliament, I think the issue that more than any other dominated my post bag as a MP was housing. And it's understandable. It's related to people's sense of their own family security, it's related very much to people's financial position. It's related to their concerns about bringing up their children. It's very often related to their health as well and not surprisingly here in Hong Kong, because of increasing immigration still, because of the increase in household formation, because of the very substantial size still of the queue of people on the waiting list for housing, housing is a dominant feature.