Opinion
The Thaiger Opinion Columns
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Sponsored Do foreigners get free healthcare in Thailand?
Thailand’s healthcare system is well-regarded across Southeast Asia, with options ranging from public hospitals to world-class private facilities. But when it comes to foreign residents or tourists, healthcare access isn’t as straightforward. So, do foreigners get free healthcare in Thailand?...
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Phuket Opinion: Praise for the little ‘Heroes’ of Phuket
PHUKET: Although accorded little, if any, attention in the local media, the recent winning of a national championship in the “To Be Number One Teen Dancercise 2013” competition by a team of young dancers from the Baan Bangneaw Municipal School in Phuket Town deserves a great deal of recognition and praise. It was a considerable achievement, the first ever by…
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Phuket Opinion: Drivers’ carelessness causes traffic jams
PHUKET: Phuket City traffic policeman Pol Sen Sgt Maj Boonliang Maneewong, 53, is from Sisaket province in the Northeast. He graduated from the Provincial Police Training Center Region 2 in Chon Buri province in 1984 and has been working with the Thalang Police since 1985. He has been a traffic officer for 20 years, and for the last three years…
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Phuket Opinion: Time to rein in rogue cops
PHUKET: Provincial Police Commander Choti Chavalviwat should be applauded for getting personally involved in the investigation into the attack on a teenage couple who claim to have been assaulted by two sons of a Thalang Police officer on St Valentine’s Day (story here). Reports of assault involving minors are all too common in Thalang, which has a history of teenage…
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Phuket Opinion: Change is natural for Chinese traditions
PHUKET: Teeravut Sritularak, 65, was born and raised in Phuket. He is the president of the Jui Tui Shrine and on the management team of Pud Jor and Kiew Tian Shrines. Here he talks about changes in the way Chinese New Year is celebrated in Phuket. Change is natural, the important thing is understanding the traditions’ true meanings and celebrating…
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Phuket Opinion: Stateless visitors need more than hospitality
PHUKET: The plight of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar’s Rakhine State during the current sailing season clearly shows the need for Asean and other international bodies to come together to help solve, or at least alleviate, the root causes of the problem inside Myanmar as soon as possible. This will of course be no easy task. Few international humanitarian issues on…
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Phuket Opinion: Curing the festering sores of “public’ transport
PHUKET: Efforts by the international diplomatic community to pressure authorities in Bangkok to tackle the festering crime in the Phuket public transport sector and improve Phuket’s reputation as a tourist destination are laudable and have the full support of the Phuket Gazette. No subject has been the topic of more futile editorializing in this space than Phuket’s bizarre patchwork of…
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Phuket Opinion: Taxis – a decade of blocking progress
PHUKET: The recent police-ordered closure of tour counters run by Russian nationals in Kata-Karon is just the latest in a long series of protest-related events in Phuket that undermine the rule of law by rewarding law-breakers and punishing those who play by the rules.The closure of the counters followed a blockade of the Karon beachfront by members of a so-called…
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Phuket Opinion: Losing Patong’s beauty to the dust of progress
PHUKET: Wichan Sawatdirak, now in his 80s, was the Kamnan for Patong for more than 20 years, long before Patong became a municipality.Born in Baan Mon village, he has lived in Patong his entire life. Respected by Patong locals, he was instrumental in the development of Patong’s transport infrastructure by providing vital roads around Patong City and links to Kathu…
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Phuket Opinion: Santa says a smile is the best Christmas gift of all
ON DECEMBER 25, Santa Claus will be attending a plethora of activities being held across Phuket, among them will be the annual Christmas celebrations at Bangkok Hospital Phuket. Here, the jolly “Hospital Santa” explains what Christmas in Phuket truly means to him.There are many foreigners living in and visiting Phuket, and I am sure that they are going to celebrate…
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Phuket Opinion: Family, the best defense against technology risks
PHUKET: With the holiday season upon us, we would like to encourage all of our readers to take a few moments to pause and reflect on how lucky we are to live in this incredible age of technology. Technology is perhaps the most notorious of double-edged swords. Shakespeare wrote famously in Hamlet that “…there is nothing either good or bad,…
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Phuket Opinion: Just slow down
PHUKET: Samak Luedwonghad, 45, has been trying to make Thailand’s roads safer for 23 years, and is currently the Phuket Highways Office Director. Before he moved to Phuket in February, he had worked for the Department of Rural Roads’ Bureau of Bridge Construction for 10 years, and then for more than five years as the head project engineer of the…
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Phuket Opinion: Parking management not “The Impossible’
PHUKET: Rising property prices, poor public planning and a dire lack of public transport options have combined to leave Phuket with a lack of public parking in some of its most densely-settled areas.In few places is the problem more acute than in shopping center parking garages. While some are better than others, the traffic nightmare that persists in some, during…
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Letter from the Phuket Governor: Safety first, with urban growth a close second
Maitri Inthusut arrived on the island to take up the position of Governor of Phuket on October 8. With a master’s degree in political science from Thammasat University, he joined the National Security Council, rising to the position of NSC Secretary-General, before taking up the position of Chief Secretary for the Secretariat of the Cabinet. He has also served as…
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Phuket Opinion: Motoring Misery
PHUKET: As work on the 600-million-baht underpass at the Central Festival Phuket intersection gets underway, mounting concern among commuters now turns to seeking ways to cope with what promises to be a whole new level of motoring misery.Government agencies, including traffic police, have freely admitted that work on the project, scheduled for completion in mid-October 2014, is expected to cause…
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Phuket Opinion: Deep South needs more than trading big stick for carrots
PHUKET: While facing the current unrest on the streets of Bangkok this weekend, the time has also come for the Pheu Thai government of Yingluck Shinawatra to devote more effort to addressing the ever-mounting problems facing Phuket and the rest of the South – and re-examining its erratic strategy in dealing with the ongoing unrest in the Deep South. It…
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Phuket Opinion: Elephants in the room
PHUKET: Finally the DNA tests for the three baby elephants seized in Phuket in February are being released, with one toddler being returned to its natural mother, another being returned to the tour park operator (as the elephant was actually deemed legal), and the third yet to be determined. This ‘dance of the baby elephants’ stands in stark contrast to…
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Phuket Opinion: Electric smile
PHUKET: Every now and then, Phuket takes a small step that can make all the difference. The small news story noting that Phuket has a new power substation to manage more effectively its array of step-down transformers foreshadows the likelihood of greater amplitude and reliability in the island’s supply of electricity. The Koh Kaew power station is one of only…
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Phuket Opinion: Forgetting children in island development
PHUKET: This week’s news story of the healthy newborn girl being abandoned by her mother at Thalang Hospital raised again the bleak specter of what the future holds for such children. One comment in the Phuket Gazette online forum rightly pointed out that with most adults on the island focusing on boosting tourism numbers and generating income through any and…
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Phuket Opinion: When healthcare becomes a social insecurity
PHUKET: The in-depth report of local hospitals charging foreigners more than Thais for all forms of healthcare (click here) should not come as a surprise to any long-term expats living in Phuket. The practice of two-tier pricing is so deeply entrenched into the local social fabric that the national parks have established it as a formal policy. Even the Phuket…
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Phuket Opinion: Of MICE and mangroves
PHUKET: With more than 50 injured turtles and a dolphin recovering amid news of an “extinct” crab resurfacing in Phuket, one cannot help but reflect upon the state of our island’s current fight for ecological survival. The breathtaking increase in development’s toll on the island’s natural resources has been reported by the Phuket Gazette for well over a decade. The…
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Phuket Opinion: Being negative can positively save lives
Pornthip Rattajak, 35, is now the acting director at the Phuket Regional Blood Center. She graduated with a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Medical Technology from Mahidol University. She first started her work in the field as medical laboratory technician at the National Blood Center of the Thai Red Cross Society in Bangkok before joining the Phuket Regional Blood Center…
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Phuket Opinion: Setting standards for everything
PHUKET: The mantra of government officials regurgitating their need to preserve “Phuket’s tourism image” and to “restore tourist confidence” in what is promoted as a world-class international tourism destination, took an interesting twist last week. (See page 7 story, current issue of the Phuket Gazette. Digital subscribers click here to download the full newspaper.) One would think that local officials…
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Phuket Opinion: Through the revolving door
PHUKET: After eight months serving as Phuket’s top-ranking police officer, Chonasit Wattanvrangkul will be transferred out of the province to continue his career elsewhere. At the same, at the end of this month, Phuket Governor Tri Augkaradacha will retire. While Col Chonasit’s replacement will be Narathiwat Provincial Police Commander Maj Gen Chote Chawanwiwat, a replacement for Governor Tri has yet…
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Phuket Opinion: Time to roll on traffic law enforcement
PHUKET: Any serious effort to improve road safety in Phuket will need a major shift away from the existing “police checkpoint” method of enforcing traffic law and instead move towards catching violators in the act. Results of a recent Phuket Gazette online poll revealed that three-quarters of those taking part had never been fined for a moving violation of traffic…
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Phuket Opinion: More disasters guaranteed
PHUKET: The Tiger Discotheque tragedy on August 17 demonstrates yet again that when it comes to “disaster preparedness” Phuket seems to be battling invisible demons, continually hit in the back of the head by obvious threats we had somehow managed to either ignore or even identify as a possibility. The latter is of course best exemplified by the 2004 tsunami.…
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Phuket Opinion: ‘Unframe’ your vision of the world
PHUKET: In this week’s hard-copy edition of the Phuket Gazette, we are proud to carry the Phuket launch issue of the China Daily’s Asia Weekly newspaper. The journal offers Gazette readers a long-awaited – and much-needed – fresh perspective on the economic giant at our doorstep, and her relationship with Asia and the world. More than a million Chinese tourists…
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PHUKET OPINION: Football thugs lose face in the name of the game
PHUKET: The recent threat of violence against Phuket FC fans who made the journey to Krabi Provincial Stadium should serve as a wake-up call to the Thai Premier League (TPL) to ensure that better security measures are in place for future matches in Krabi, especially those involving southern rivals. [See page 47, current issue of the Phuket Gazette. Digital subscribers…
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PHUKET OPINION: Football hooligans score own goal
PHUKET: The recent threat of violence against Phuket FC fans who made the journey to Krabi Provincial Stadium should serve as a wake-up call to the Thai Premier League (TPL) Co Ltd to ensure that better security measures are in place for future matches in Krabi, especially those involving southern rivals. The TPL leagues have been an undisputed boon to…
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Phuket Opinion: New ‘guide-lines’ needed for tourism
PHUKET: One chronic tourism-related problem that periodically bubbles to the surface of the local media here in Phuket is that of illegal foreign guides conducting tours for fellow countrymen. While the problem was originally mainly centered around illegal Korean guides, its scope has expanded over the past decade due to robust growth in the inbound markets from both Russia and…
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Phuket Opinion: A caveat for Toh Seh Hill, and a hint for politicians
PHUKET: A project by the Phuket Provincial Administration Organization (OrBorJor) to develop Toh Seh Hill as a recreational site is well-intentioned, and the Gazette hopes that the current OrBorJor – as well as the administrations that follow it – are prepared to commit sufficient resources to ensure that the hill’s natural charm is not despoiled by garbage, traffic snarls, gang…
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