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Following is the transcript of remarks by the Chief Secretary for Administration, Mrs Carrie Lam, at a media session after inspecting the scene of a tree failure incident at Park Lane Shoppers' Boulevard, Tsim Sha Tsui, today (July 20):
Reporter: Mrs Lam, two questions. You have said that the LCSD workers have checked the trees here very regularly. How can they fail to detect, how could they fail to prevent this from happening outright? And also I do have a follow-up about the national education, because you mentioned it is not a secret visit by the Education Secretary. Clearly you cannot allay public concern about the trip.
Chief Secretary for Administration: I'll answer the second question and then I'll invite the Head of the Tree Management Office, Lawrence (Chau), to answer your first question, because it is very technical.
As far as the trip made by the Secretary for Education is concerned, I am saying that this is absolutely not a secret thing. It is part of those, what we call, courtesy calls on the counterparts, and the Secretary for Education's counterpart in Beijing is the Ministry of Education. So according to the rule that we have been practising over the years regarding the announcement of official visits of Principal Officials, this sort of visit should also be announced.
The reason that it has not been announced, I understand, is a sort of misunderstanding or confusion between two sets of arrangements. One is about issuing a notice about official visits made by Principal Officials, the other is about making acting arrangements when a Principal Official is away from Hong Kong, where generally, if it is less than 24 hours, there is no need to make such an acting arrangement. Particularly, as you know, there is currently no LegCo sitting, so there is no need for an acting arrangement. But somehow in this particular incident the two sets of arrangements have been mixed up, but I can assure you and all the mass media here that we remain very committed to the principle and the practice, and in future, whenever a Principal Official makes an official visit, regardless of the duration of the visit, there will be a press release to inform people of such a visit.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Friday, July 20, 2012
Issued at HKT 15:45
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