Below is the keynote speech delivered by Sen. Benigno S. Aquino III during the January 21, 2010 general membership meeting of the Makati Business Club. Aquino spoke to a full house at the Manila Peninsula’s Rigodon Ballroom.Officers and members of the Makati Business Club, Your Excellencies of the diplomatic corps, ladies and gentlemen, my friends and countrymen. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to address you.
But what we have now is an opportunity for you to get to know me, to find out the advocacies that I champion, the perspective and philosophies I bring to the equation and some of my proposed solutions to give an insight into my inner persona. We must now become a government committed to accountability; a government that works with the people in achieving long-term change.
Given that I only announced my decision to seek the presidency on September 9, and I only came to that decision the day before, I have not had material time comparable to our opponents. We want to repair the damage that has been wrought on our democratic institutions by those who have sought to manipulate them for their own selfish ends. We want to improve the situation of our people, who have suffered years of neglect because of a self-absorbed leadership obsessed with political survival.
To my mind, the crucial, lacking element in all these is a government committed to a transformation: from a society overwhelmingly poor to one overwhelmingly middle class. In every developed, progressive, prosperous democracy, it is the middle class that is the biggest class. In fact, I do not believe that we suffer from the problem of too few laws. One of my proposed measures was the re-codification of laws, in response to an appeal from the legal community to put some order into our laws, their amendments and those that have been repealed, because even our lawyers are at times confused.
Woodrow Wilson once wrote that oversight is always preferable to investigation, which is like putting out a fire instead of preventing one. We proposed that if the Executive wants orderly transactions, at least a few members of Congress should be privy to all of the details to determine if they were spent properly.
Projects of this scale normally require 2 years to complete. Furthermore, when SCTEx finally became operational, it was found that the central hub, which was Clark, did not have an exit, excluding Clark from the Subic-Clark-Tarlac expressway itself. Going back on the issue of appointing a Chief Justice prior to the forthcoming elections, if we are to transform the country, it begins with doing what we can, now, to limit the damage and give our people a fighting chance to rebuild our damaged institutions.
We will transform our systems to foster service to the public instead of making citizens jump through hoops. We will streamline the approval process, not only for setting up new businesses but also in the regular day-to-day transactions with government, such as the payment of taxes. We will do this on a national as well as the local level.In 2010, our next President will inherit a continually bloating deficit. As of November 2009, the deficit of the national government already reached P272.
My vision is to transform our country into one where we have lower tax rates enjoyed by all, rather than have some enjoy absolute tax exemptions while we burden the rest of the economy with very high tax rates. My budget team estimates that for 2009 alone, around P280 billion of our national budget was lost to corruption. If we take the years 2002 to 2009 the total estimates exceed one trillion.
Initially we want our infrastructure program to transform from being the means to enrich a few, to being labor-intensive and biased for employment as a means to pump-prime the economy.When I read about countries that have invested in their agriculture sectors and succeeded, it always pains me to find that these countries - Vietnam and Thailand, to name just a couple - had started by sending their experts to be educated in the Philippines.
Rest in peace Pnoy,
Naalala ko nakatabi namin ang puting Land Cruiser na plaka “1” patungong Malacanang; tumigil ang convoy sa stop light. Walang wang-wang. Walang entitlement mentality. On the overall, ang problema kasi yung ibang mga buwayang nakapaligid sa kanya.
Rest in heaven PNOY🙏🙏🙏
Time ni Pnoy, pinakulong ang mandarambong. Time ni Duterte, pinakawalan ang mga mandarambong. RIPPnoy
And he failed miserably on that promise