I am honored to have been elected Chairman of the Chamber for 2003-4 at HKGCC's Annual General Meeting on April 24. First, I wish to extend my heart-felt thanks to my predecessor, Christopher Cheng, one of the hardest working Chairmen of recent years. Under Christopher's leadership, the Chamber stepped to the front of a host of issues from civil service pay to Pearl River Delta integration, CEPA, and managing our public finances. We still have lots of work to do on these and other issues, but first we need to defeat SARS.

This is a challenging time for us all. The sudden rise of atypical pneumonia has tested our health care system, confidence and resilience. In the next few months we will be concentrating on short-term measures to help our members, and working with government and the community on coming through this epidemic. While I am convinced that Hong Kong will weather this storm, as we have so many others, we need to take the proper steps, now, to ensure that threats to our health and our economy are met effectively.

As we became aware of the epidemic's spread in April, the Chamber went into over-drive, soliciting opinions from members, compiling long lists of suggested policy remedies and presenting the most useful recommendations to the General Committee for its consideration. In this process, we received hundreds of e-mails, faxes and phone calls from members with practical ideas, concerns, stories of the effects on business and comments as to what we should do. Your input gave us a sobering look at the difficulties you all are facing, and we thank you for taking the time to write to us.

A critical part of the exercise was letting people well versed in various disciplines work on the subjects they knew best. Chamber committees gathered on short notice to discuss aspects of the crisis. A joint meeting of the Travel and Tourism and Economic Policy committees brought out the very specific areas where public funds might best be targeted, where a slight shift in policy emphasis could yield substantial results and where companies were hurting the most. The SME and Shipping and Transport committees updated us on issues specific to their needs.

These and other suggestions were then discussed at length in the General Committee. Top of the Chamber's list -- a thought included in nearly all comments forwarded to us -- was the need to step up the quality and delivery of daily reports by the government, so as to counter rumors and speculation, present facts and analysis, and to issue policy announcements.

Next, the Chamber made a decision to temporarily step back from our long argued position that re-balancing the budget through reductions in recurrent spending is the most pressing macroeconomic challenging facing Hong Kong. We did this with a clear understanding that the revenue projections that seemed reasonable less than a month earlier were no longer valid, and the deficit would likely rise. We need to restore our public finances to good health, but there is a time to save, and a time to spend.

Rather than press government for tax cuts, which would have very severe repercussions for the budget deficit and only benefit profitable companies, we looked at a rethink of the fees and charges that all businesses pay, which can bring immediate relief. We next looked at medium-term issues that need to be thought through and planned now, for implementation -- at the proper time -- when the crisis is clearly over. To ensure we can minimize the lag time between the "all clear" signal and the return to normal travel patterns, a coordinated campaign is needed to splash the good news across the world's media and encourage visitors to return to Hong Kong.

We also need to look closer to home, to the management of our urban environment, our health care infrastructure and our public information systems. We need to clean up this city, to show ourselves and our visitors that we are doing our best to reduce threats to health. We need to ensure that our crisis management skills are worthy of our claim to be the most international city on earth.

You can read the results of this Chamber-wide exercise on page 18 of this issue of The Bulletin, and I am pleased to say that government adopted several of our recommendations recently. Much work has to be done, and with your support we can beat back this historic challenge.

In playing our part in a small way to help our members in these difficult times, the Chamber has reduced fees for various events and services and expanded benefits to members while offering better use of our Web site for members' product promotion efforts.