Interview: Thai political reform advised to target power granting, supervision, punishment mechanisms

Thailand's political reform should center on ways of people coming to power, checks and balances, and proper punishment for wrongdoings, a Thai reformer has suggested.

Such mechanisms as the electoral system should be designed to get good people into positions of power and shut out the bad ones, Pornchai Trakulwaranont, a member of the National Reform Steering Assembly (NRSA), shared his personal views on Thailand's reforms with Xinhua in a recent interview.

A good mechanism is also needed to monitor the work of government bodies and people in high rank, he said, stressing that those in power should not be left without check.

"If they know they are being watched at every step, it will be very difficult for them to be corrupted," Pornchai said.

Even if all the mechanisms fail, proper punishment should be in place, he added, pointing to a recently adopted amendment to the anti-graft law, which stipulates death sentence as maximum penalty for officials convicted of corruption.

According to Pornchai, the 200-seat NRSA, which was set up in early October to replace the National Reform Council (NRC), has agreed to 11 categories of priority areas in which reforms are urgently needed, such as politics, economy, education, justice system and local government, among others.

Pornchai said he personally believed there should only be three to five crucial reform agendas for each category, with the total not exceeding 50, in comparison to some 300 agendas proposed by the NRC, which was dissolved after voting down a draft constitution in early September.

The NRC had no concentration and came up with too many changes, which were impossible to materialize and would easily encounter opposition, Pornchai noted.

Considering that every particular reform agenda needs new laws, which should be passed by the National Legislative Assembly, a lot of work is awaiting the NRSA while time is limited, the reformer said, adding he deemed it "suitable and practical" if some 40 new laws got passed eventually.

According to the NRSA's 1-1-18 timeframe, it would spend the first month establishing its own mechanism, the second reviewing the NRC's reform agendas and the remaining 18 coming up with reform proposals for the cabinet to consider.

As for economic reform, Pornchai, who is concurrently vice minister of industry, suggested that Thailand step up efforts to boost domestic consumption rather than concentrate on exports alone.

Economic growth driven by increased consumption will also help raise the living standards of the whole lower stratum of the society, he said.

Recent government measures, such as injecting a lot of money into the countryside and housing programs, and shortening the process of bidding for infrastructure projects, are expected to shore up the consumers' confidence in the near future, according to the vice minister.

Meanwhile, he argued that the educational reform should strike balance among three factors, namely, education for all, education for excellence and human resource management.

People should be educated in a way that they can grow into competent labor force as needed by the market and can enjoy life at the same time, commented Pornchai, who is also an associate professor at Thammsat University. "People in every corner of the country should be given equal access to education."

"We (NRSA) hope that we might be able to put forward some crucial changes to better the Thai society," he said. Enditem