Macau wins improved social security, says CE

Edmund Ho with reporters from Hong Kong, Taiwan (top) and from mainland China.

Chief Executive Edmund Ho Hau Wah said the most notable achievement over the past decade was having improved social security in Macau.
Mr Ho met with reporters from Hong Kong, Taiwan and abroad and also from mainland China in two separate sessions at Santa Sancha yesterday.
The Chief Executive said that in the last 10 years of governance, a relatively obvious result was the improved social security, “only when society is stable could the economy greatly develop and people’s living standards be enhanced”.
He attributed the success to the support from the Chinese central government, the Macau people as well as the civil servants.

Anti-corruption

Mr Ho said that the integrity level of the government and civil servants had significantly upgraded over the past decade, and civilians were also more aware of the importance of integrity.
According to the Chief Executive, corruption cases involving officials must have had an impact on the government’s image and prestige, “especially in a small society like Macau where facts, rumours or speculations will continue to spread around during the trials”.
Yet, he said that “people may feel better if we cover up the truth, but it’s not a good thing. In contrast, if we pay the price and handle the incidents properly, and from there we learn from the lesson, eventually the advantage must be bigger than the disadvantage”.
Mr Ho pointed out that the (Ao Man Long) case caused psychological burden to some public works personnel even though they were not involved in the case.
“Some officials are concerned about dealing with relatively sensitive work that requires their own judgement. As a government we have to take care of civil servants’ problem but cannot halt public construction which could slow down social development,” Mr Ho said.
However, he deemed that such process would become a “valuable experience” benefiting the implementation of “Macau people ruling Macau” eventually.

Land concession

The Chief Executive admitted that Macau’s Land Law did not go with the pace of society “in certain aspects”. He said that the SAR government had been keeping close cooperation with the Legislative Assembly in recent years in order to revise the law and make it meet the needs of Macau’s development.
Mr Ho reiterated that the existing Land Law was enacted during the Portuguese administration. No matter it was through auctions or a land grant by the government, he said that if the development period was not long enough and the economy encountered tough times, it was impossible for developers to make any investment and thus the deadline for land development must be “appropriate and reasonable”.
He explained that during the Portuguese administration, the main source of public revenue was from granting land in exchange for resources, and therefore a large number of land parcels were granted to developers before the 1999 handover.
Despite Macau has very limited land resources, the Chief Executive said that if all the undeveloped land was recalled immediately, a large number of litigations would be resulted which affected not only investors’ confidence but was also harmful to Macau’s development as a whole.
Mr Ho said he hoped that the problem could be resolved gradually after the land resources are expanded in the future.

Political affairs

As for the development in Macau’s political system, Mr Ho said it must have to be based on the Basic Law and pushed forward step by step.
“If society keeps arguing over a problem, it won’t benefit the development; but it doesn’t mean that Macau must be healthy if none of the people speaks up. It all depends on what the majority of Macau people want,” the Chief Executive added.
On the other hand, Mr Ho said that Macau and Hong Kong had always been maintaining positive cooperation in all aspects, adding “following the return to the motherland the two places have become China’s two special administrative regions, hence the bilateral relationship is even more intimate”.
In terms of the bonds with Taiwan, Mr Ho said the foundation was strong over the last 10 years mainly in the areas of business and trade, culture and tourism.
Through the support from the Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry Mr Ho said Macau had also established friendly relationship with a lot of foreign countries.
In regard to the issue of imported labour, the Chief Executive said based on the overall economic development scale, Macau could not only rely on the support from the local labour force. Hence, he said that the problem needed to be treated with an “objective and proper attitude”, so that a balance could be obtained between protecting local workers’ employment and maintaining Macau’s competitiveness.