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Following is the transcript of the press briefing by the Director of the Chief Executive's Office, Mr W K Lam, on the Leadership Retreat at the Gold Coast Hotel this (July 27) afternoon:

Reporter: Mr Lam, what are the aims of the brainstorming session? The second point was Professor Lau gave you a briefing on public opinion today, what are the contents of that? How will the Government respond to the lack of public confidence in the Government so far?

Mr Lam: The aim of the retreat is to foster a better team-building, so that the new team under the Accountability System can better take forward the Chief Executive's agenda in his second term. We have a very lively and participative discussion this morning with Professor Lau starting off by introducing to us the feedbacks from a series of polls and focusing the discussions on what the public think of the new team. The views are very comprehensive and of great reference value to us. People are happy to see that our new team is on the whole responsive, forthcoming and outreaching and also have new ideas. People do expect us to have a clearer policy agenda soon and to be able to gain the trust of the community so that we can better do our job in the future. We still have another day to go, we have only had half a day, and the programme is very tight. We aim to finish at 10 pm tonight, I think we are going to overrun, I'm sure we are going to overrun. We'll start at 8 am tomorrow and finishing at lunch time. We look forward to further lively and positive discussion this afternoon and tomorrow.

(Note: Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)

End/Saturday, July 27, 2002

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