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Following is the English portion of the transcript of the media session by the Chief Executive, Mr Tung Chee Hwa, after visiting Kowloon City this (Wednesday) afternoon.

Reporter : Mr Tung, what do you think about Mr Donald Tsang's saying that he really want to see the Pope coming to Hong Kong?

Mr Tung : Well, let me tell you this first. Religious freedom is very important to Hong Kong, and I think you and I all agreed there is abundance of evidence of religious freedom. The fact that, unfortunately, the Pope is not here or cannot come relates to foreign policy, because the Vatican has diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and this is the issue that needs to be resolved. And I think the Hong Kong SAR Government and myself, all my senior colleagues including Donald, we all see this together, we all see this clearly, with the same view.

Reporter : Mr Tung, what will be the Government doing about these residential buildings to improve the safety for the people of Hong Kong?

Mr Tung : Yes I guess I answered this in Chinese a couple of times. Firstly the most important thing for us to move forward is urban renewal, because there are, for instance, over 10,000 buildings which are over 30 years old already. They were all built in the 60s' and we are concerned about their structural safety and fire safety. So urban renewal is a long term way of solving fundamentally this particular problem. The other issue is to organise owners' corporations because it is up to the owners' corporations to be responsible for the safety and for the maintenance of their buildings. This has not been done sufficiently before and needs to be done quickly and a lot of work has been done by my colleagues. So that is our view. We need to accelerate this process. But these are all rather longer terms. In shorter term, I can only appeal to all the owners of buildings to please take another look to make sure that their buildings are safe, if in doubt, talk to the Government. You know, we have set aside a $500 million fund for loans to those people who for the time being cannot afford repairs and maintenance. We have a fund here, but unfortunately only about half a million dollars have been spent. And I want to remind everybody there is a $500 million dollars there available. And finally, obviously the Government would do more, try to do as much as we can in inspections and so on so forth to ensure that this would not happen again.

Chief Executive's transcript ( Chinese Part)

Photo: Photograph shows Mr Tung meeting some youngsters in Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups Farm Road Youth Centre.

End/Wednesday, August 11, 1999

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