OPINION

Plundered budget

Since the start of the coup and Thailand's dictatorial control, the national budget has been plundered by the military. With so many social pressures supposedly causing the need for a coup, the dictator and his underlings have seen it fit to purchase submarines, tanks, military aircraft, and now Stryker armoured vehicles. How do these expenditures truly serve the people?

Does this mean health care, flood control, air pollution mitigation, education, and wage issues are fully funded and resolved? Maybe I missed something here.

When I arrived in Thailand I was 36, taking on legal tour work with decent pay. At 41 I was married to a girl I met here, had spent my wages buying land and building a house, and looking after two children.

I was well aware of potential problems -- they exist for anyone getting married, even at home, but I was quite willing to accept that I now had a family in a foreign land and would do my best to support them. Not long after that my tour work became illegal and my other skill as a trained coach driver was just as useless. Since then I have worked as far afield as Tibet and Papua in search of an income, which has totalled little more than any middle class Thai family. I have spent all of that income here in Thailand -- some of it on my extended Thai family when they had housing and health problems.

To them, I am an important part of the family, the provider of our children's university degrees, the grandfather who looks after his grandchildren and the driver on trips to distant temples. After 30 years they consider me a permanent addition, something I dearly wish was true.

But to immigration I am a foreigner on a one-year extended visa, dependent on 400,000 baht in the bank and nothing more. Just how fragile this situation is became obvious to me when my son was knocked off his motorbike, rushed to a hospital and placed in the intensive care unit in a coma. The fees were reasonable. We paid them and would have paid more if asked. In fact, I would have emptied my bank account, and there lies the problem. I would be "sent back" to a place I haven't lived for 35 years because I care for my family.

I live with Thais, among Thai villagers and share the same problems with health, education, housing and transport, but unlike them I will be told to leave if my bank account isn't sufficiently large. And it never ends. Until the day I die I will be forced to visit offices, provide documents and maintain that bank deposit to get a permit for just one more year. Can anyone really suggest this is right and fair?

So Jurin Laksanavisit wins the Democrat leadership contest in a landslide. So what? It's still SOS, (not meaning "save our ship"). It will be business as usual, regardless of who heads up which party. It is all promises, wine and roses, until reality sets in. The reality is what people want, not what party leaders think they want.

One of the learned gentlemen looking into road safety suggested we follow the Japanese way of working, deducting points, fines etc. This is all well and good, but half the country does not have a licence, and there are many underage drivers with no road skills and no registration.

Van drivers work at all hours and often fall asleep at the wheel. Put tachographs in the vehicles so you can see how many times the driver has done Rayong to Bangkok in a day.

Before you start a point system, let's get on a level playing field. Everyone should get licences. How are you going to deduct points from a 12-year-old kid and get him to pay a 2,000-baht fine?