Opinion
The Thaiger Opinion Columns
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Managing medical expenses in Thailand is important as healthcare costs continue to rise. The country’s healthcare system includes both public and private options, but even with the Universal Coverage Scheme (UCS) for citizens, many still face high out-of-pocket medical expenses....
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Phuket Opinion: Get on the bus
PHUKET: There is only one way that breakthrough projects such as Phuket’s first airport-to-beaches bus service get up and running, and that is if everyone in the community gets behind it and supports it. That means: use it. Get on the bus and go to work, to the beach, to see a friend, a movie or even spend a night…
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Phuket Opinion: Tough love for Phuket stray dogs
PHUKET: For the past 10 months, Weerasit Puthipairoj, 58, has been the chief of the Phuket Provincial Livestock Office. Originally from Narathiwat, Mr Weerasit has a master’s degree in Agricultural Development from the Prince of Songkla University Haad Yai campus in Songkhla. Here, he talks about stray dogs in Phuket, the best way to deal with them and what to…
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Phuket Opinion: Drivers – Charming, to the last
PHUKET: At first I was charmed by Thai driving idiosyncrasies, like motorcycles puttering along on the wrong side of the road. To all those who said “There are no rules”, I said “But there are!” For example, that wrong-way driving motorcyclist knows he had better stay well to the side and go slowly.When someone said, “Drivers in Phuket don’t get…
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Phuket Opinion: Dumping drugs for scouts’ honor
PHUKET: Rapin Nichanon, 58, has been the Provincial Prison Chief since 2011. Originally from Nakhon Sri Thammarat, he served as the director of Krabi Provincial Prison before moving to Phuket. Here, he talks about how successful the prison’s “scout training courses” (story here) are in helping drug users become valuable citizens: We have been holding our “scout training” courses for…
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Phuket Opinion: Playing by all the rules
PHUKET: Saphan Hin’s 4,000-seat Indoor Sports Complex is where Phuket United play their Thai Futsal Premier league home games in front of a vocal crowd of around 1,000 supporters. In addition to being the home of the Andaman Pearl, the stadium was also used for several different sporting events over the past few months, including Thailand’s most significant international basketball…
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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: Stem the growing tide of gun crimes in Phuket
PHUKET: The recent surge in the number of violent crimes involving firearms needs to be addressed by authorities immediately, otherwise Phuket’s self-designated sobriquet “Pearl of the Andaman” risks being inadvertently changed to “Arsenal of the Andaman”. Few regular readers of the Phuket Gazette will have failed to notice an apparent upsurge in gun crime this high season. This is perhaps…
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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: Trash the past for the New Year
PHUKET: A new 960-million-baht incinerator went into operation in the middle of last year, yet Phuket still faces a solid waste crisis – one that requires a better solution than simply building a third incinerator at Saphan Hin. (See also tomorrow morning’s Web review of ‘Phuket 2012: Feeling the pinch from growing pains’.) When the new plant went into operation,…
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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: Wake up and shed the shirts
PHUKET: Island residents and expats alike breathed a collective sigh of relief late last month when a dreaded showdown between the Pitak Siam (“Defenders of Siam”), the latest incarnation of the anti-Thaksin People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), and government security forces fizzled out on the streets of Bangkok due to lack of popular support and other factors. As events unfolded…
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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: Let crime take center stage
PHUKET: Having an apprehended bank robber give advice on how to keep banks safe from similar armed felons was just one of the interesting developments regarding “financial security” in Phuket this week. Confessed bank robber Anusit Kaewmookda suggested that each bank branch have a security guard on duty to deter robbers. Despite Mr Anusit’s good intentions with such advice, the…
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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: Public transportation should take a dive
PHUKET: For all the bandying about of the term “sustainable tourism”, Phuket might just have had the victory it needed in the Go Eco Phuket reef cleanup staged last weekend. That single record-breaking feat has provided a model to follow in breaking the mold of inaction and setting island development off in the right direction.(See story, page 5, current issue…
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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: There’s no place like home
PHUKET: The low turnout for the Phuket Provincial Administration Organization (PPAO) council election last weekend highlighted yet again the problems the island faces due to the fact that so many migrant workers who live here continue to maintain house registrations in their “home” provinces, in some cases despite having lived and worked on the island for over a decade. The…
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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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