XN000022-1997-03-07 — Page 2

Transcript of remarks by Financial Secretary

Following is the remarks made by the Financial Secretary, Mr Donald Tsang, at a media session after attending a lunch of the International Monetary Fund/Hong Kong Monetary Authority Conference on Financial Integration in Asia and the role of Hong Kong this afternoon(Friday):

Financial Secretary: Well, do you want me to say something in English. I just want to echo the points made by my colleague, my very competent colleague, Mr K C Kwong, I have also read the newspaper reports on the public reaction, particularly, the reactions of our Legislative Council to our proposals of spending next year. We must remember that we are now proposing a public expenditure programme nearly as much as $250 billion dollars and even government expenditure alone would be in excess of $200 billion dollars. Mr Kwong had very carefully explained that we are now spending to the heel, the five per cent growth that we have allowed ourselves in accordance with our economic underlined growth rate, so in other words, in formulating our expenditure programine we had not been overly influence, we had not been affected by whatever they called political pressure of other kind. We had been planning as we had been planning to spend all these years. There are some positive comments on the expenditure programme, I am very grateful for that. There are also some concem about the level of spending on social welfare, in particular. Let me say these, over the last five years social welfare spending has increased 86 per cent in real terms and this is no small sum, in the coming year we are proposing to spend over nine per cent in real term together with inflation adjustment it will be near the 15 per cent growth in spending on welfare generally. And within the whole government expenditure programme, welfare spending now exceeds 10 pre cent, so in planning our expenditure programme, we have to ask ourselves, what sort of resources we should devote in this particular area of our social programme. We of course attach great importance looking after our elderly, and for elderly provisions, there had been some generous provision last year. But I am not saying that will be enough. But I do believe our elderly need affection and care, not only in terms of dollar but in terms of direct services. So for this reason this year we had concentrated in providing direct services to our elderly. My colleague, Mrs Fok will give details on these to you when she issue and explain what provisions had we proposed for elderly in the coming year. So the important thing for us to consider as a community, in considering the Budget is the total resources we had given to welfare generally and what sort of balance we should strike between our social welfare programme and our programmes of education, for law and order and for housing, for other programme as well. So and I'll have other things to say I'll say a bit more later on after the Budget Speech in the context of our revenue proposal as well. Thank you very much indeed.

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