MANILA, 30 July — Stripped of its “war against poverty” component and the proposed strategies to win the “war,” President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s first State of the Nation (SONA) address is an unadulterated pro-business proposal. Her pledge to strive for high moral standards in government also earned plaudits for the president. As expected, her speech before a joint session of Congress drew the loudest applause from the business community.
While the president laid out a development plan that is biased toward the poor, promising jobs, education, poverty alleviation and housing, she made it clear that government could only create jobs for the people if it could attract investments.
“To attract investments, we will attend to macro measures and concerns. We will focus on long-term structural issues. We started with the reform of the power sector. Now, we will focus on infrastructure, productivity and the saving rate. In providing infrastructure we will harness the private sector via the build-operate-and transfer law. Our priorities include telecommunications facilities for high-speed connectivity at low cost. Roads, infrastructure for the modernization of agriculture, and light rail mass transit to address the traffic problem and decongest Metro Manila,” she said.
The president vowed that government would minimize bottlenecks to productivity such as the high cost of power, red tape in government, and other deterrents to investments. “To reduce red tape in the national government, within 12 months, all government agencies will implement measures to cut in half the number of signatures required for their services,” she said.
“We will design innovative policies to develop our capital market. We will set up a secondary housing mortgage market by the end of 2002, an asset management company, and a provident fund for overseas Filipinos, we will simplify and clarify the system of incentives, we will interpret investment laws in favor of the investor,” she said.
Declaring that technology is the foundation of future economic development, Arroyo asked Congress to enact laws to address Internet privacy and security, and allow for multimedia convergence. She also asked the lawmakers to create a Department of Telecommunications and Information Technology to promote rather than regulate information technology. The president likewise urged them to create a Department of Housing that will build homes for the poor and energize the housing industry to create jobs. She said about 20 billion pesos in housing funds could now be drawn from government financial institutions.
Arroyo said her administration would harness the country’s competitive edge in tourism by providing road networks to the natural wonders of the Philippines. “To promote the tourism industry, we will continue liberalizing the airline industry,” she said.
To ensure the success of the Agricultural and Fisheries Modernization Act (AFMA) the president said government would allocate an annual budget of 20 billion pesos. The money will be spent for irrigation projects, post-harvest facilities, infrastructure projects, research and development, and financial assistance to farmers. “There is money and there will be money, and the Department of Agriculture shall demonstrate its capacity to use these funds,” she said.
For the government’s mass transit projects, Arroyo promised that her administration will finish three mass transit lines in 2004, one in 2005 and another one in 2006. These five mass transit systems will add 119 of railway projects to existing networks.