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Mr Donald Tsang (in Chinese): You are talking about administrative steps in order to increase production and to interfere a little bit more with the market. Actually, the Secretary for Housing keeps thinking about this and if necessary, I am sure he is going to put together more effort.
Reporter (in Chinese): Mr Tsang, several short questions for you. First, was it that at the outset in your Budget Speech you devoted a lot of attention to say that your Budget follows absolutely the guidelines of the Basic Law; does it mean that you are facing pressure from the provisional legislature or the Chinese side?
Mr Donald Tsang (in Chinese): Now concerning the Budget, I really took the trouble to point out what is the key of the success of Hong Kong. First of all we have to keep developing Hong Kong as an international business centre and secondly, we have to have a high degree of financial autonomy and economic autonomy, and thirdly we have to manage our finances prudently. And these are all guiding principles and the guiding principles are not applying only now but also are reflected in the Basic Law and so are to be applicable in future as well. And so it does not mean that I am facing pressure from the Basic Law. I have made it very clear that concerning expenditure we have pushed it to the limit as allowed under our guidelines. It is not because of the Basic Law. The reason why I quoted so many provisions of the Basic Law is because the Basic Law can ensure that we can keep following these fiscal guiding principles and so it is a guarantee to the international community and the economic community.
Reporter (in Chinese): The Basic Law says that deficit should be avoided and we can see that for the reserves, by next year they will reach $360 billion and so the reserves keep growing and you are awash with money and you cannot return wealth to the community.
Mr Donald Tsang (in Chinese): But you are talking only about expenditure. We can work on revenue from tax. You have to read the Basic Law with flexibility but the bottom-line is that we have to strike a balance.
Reporter (in Chinese); Mr Tsang, about the surpluses, I have done some calculations and we have $360 billion, it is 1.7 times of the public expenditure this year. Don't you think that is too high in terms of the reserves? You say that in the next few years we will have surpluses but we have to cater for the railway development strategy. You always say this but you can have more and more surpluses. We can only have more and more surpluses. What should be the right level of surpluses so that we can take some money out for capital projects which won't be inflationary? What is the right level of surpluses?