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Financial Secretary's transcript

Following is the remarks by the Financial Secretary, Mr Donald Tsang at the media session at the Legislative Council today (Friday):

Tsang: May be I'll say a few words in English. I'm just following the tradition. I, immediate following the delivery of the Budget Speech, I met members of the public, I also met Legislative Council, and I also tried to talk as much as possible with members of the public. And today is the function where I met members of Legislative Council. And I reported to members that I was most grateful to them for various suggestions they made to me on the preparation of this year's Budget. And indeed, of the 158 proposals they put to me during the preparation stage, we have accepted 119 of them, 119 of them. I'm sure that the reponse that we have received so far is due to no small measure to the suggestions made by members on this. We've discussed, on a whole, three subjects this morning. Members raised the question of CSSA payment for the elderly. I have tried to explain to members that this year the welfare spending would be increased by over nine percent in real terms as compared with 1996-97 and indeed on welfare spending we have increased quite rapidly, substantially above the average growth rate of public services as a whole. But members still felt that we should do more for the elderly CSSA payment. And I agreed with them we should apply our resources and join forces and consider what is the appropriate level of improvement in that regard and we can consider in the context of preparation of the next year's Budget. We also talked about the question of speculation of property market. On that question, I assured members my colleagues and I in the Administration will pay particular attention to this area and if there are signs that speculations going rampant in any particular sector, we will have no reservation in taking necessary measure to counter it. The third area we discussed is our general principle of financial management. I explained clearly our principle of not allowing public expenditure to grow beyond the growth rate of the economy as a whole. We explained that it was very important to the Hong Kong's prosperity all our growth forecast is based on this principle. We must be very careful not to undermine it in any particular way. I think generally members agreed to it. It's only actual application of this principle that they believe that we should have greater flexibility. But this is an area from our point of view is fundamentally important. It also establishes Hong Kong's credibility as 201 international financial market. Well, thank you very much.

End