OPINION

Property hurdles

Re: "Selling the family silver", (Editorial, Sept 27).

How many of these one million foreigners are even going to be able to find a property in Thailand that conforms to those prescribed rules? It stands to reason that those foreigners will therefore have to rent property so I fail to see how the government will reach its one trillion baht income from VAT over the first five years of operation. Bear in mind all those foreigners would each need to spend about 54,000 baht every week if they haven't bought property and are instead renting in order to achieve the government's VAT income target.

Personally I think foreigners should be wary of purchasing property worth a minimum of 10 million baht under the proposed rules. Given the current average wage and salary in Thailand it appears there would be limited opportunities to sell such a property other than to another foreigner willing to reside in Thailand.

I fully understand Thai people being wary of this government's proposal to allow foreigners to own property. I know from my own experience the unprecedented immigration from China into New Zealand over the last 20 years resulted in massive property price increases. I benefitted but New Zealanders can no longer afford to buy a home in their own country.

Frankly, I think the government should show a bit more compassion to the foreigners already resident in Thailand rather than enticing one million rich folks for the sole purpose of extracting one trillion baht from them over five years.

So the TAT is yelling and screaming about getting locals to travel because foreigners are still not able to come here for a myriad of reasons. Well, let me tell you this.

After two years, my wife is finally able to travel to Chiang Rai to see her mother -- or so she thought. She made reservations with Nok Air for a round trip ticket. That lasted every bit of two days. Yesterday, Nok informed her that her return flight has been cancelled, with no reason given for the cancellation.

As a result, Chiang Rai is losing at least 30,000 baht that she would have spent in her village. So TAT, what are you going to do about it? How about demanding that airlines honour posted flight schedules and not cancel without good reason or be fined heavily for game playing? How about compensation being paid to the passengers?

Re: "Decisive action vital", (PostBag, Sept 27).

Once again you publish yet more Covid misinformation by allowing Michael Setter to make the assertion that:

"We [are] not allowed to treat Covid-19 cases using harmless drugs that have been shown to be far more effective than the vaccines".

Setter is one of the many people who continue to push the theory that Ivermectin is effective against Covid, despite all of the reliable and significant data suggesting otherwise.

In fact there are already repurposed, safe drugs in circulation that have been approved for use against Covid.

In the meantime, both the PRINCIPLE and ACTIV-6 trials underway, which include Ivermectin, will shortly settle this argument once and for all.

One hopes Mr Setter will listen to its results and not start screaming about government or "big pharma" or "MSM" conspiracies.