President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in the speech of her life.
Speaker: The Question is, That this House has no Confidence in the present Government.
[pointing to President GMA] Madam President!
President GMA:
Mr. Speaker, Sir, it is of course the right and duty of the loyal Opposition to challenge the position of the Government of the day. It is also their right to test the Confidence of this House in the Government, if they think the circumstances warrant it. I make no complaint about that.
But when our critics’ windy rhetoric has blown away, what are their real reasons for bringing this motion before the House, because there were no alternative policies, only a lot of disjointed, opaque words.
They can’t be complaining about the Philippines’ political standing, for that is deservedly high, not least because of the recently concluded, successful automated elections—the first for this country, and achieved only with the determined support of this Administration. They can’t be complaining about the country’s finances. We are a net creditor to the world in 2009, something which has not happened since the start of the Third Republic. And they can’t be complaining about this Government’s consistent economic policies—whose achievements were demonstrated during the recent financial crisis, when the Philippines became one of the highest-growing countries in Asia while our neighbors suffered through a recession.
The critics’ real reason is the perception of corruption and incompetence that pervades all media coverage over the Administration, a perception which is not based on fact but on opinion, based not on dispassionate analysis but on hateful emotion. It is a perception which is not in contrast to the record of the winning candidates in the last election for President and Vice President: one who has no record to speak of, the other, while in office, has simply stayed too long and earned too much—precious little competence and integrity there.
The real issue to be decided, by Members of this House, is how best to build on the achievements of this decade—how to carry this Government’s policies through to the next—how to prevent the fall of our political leadership unto the lap of a certain television personality.
Mr. Speaker, nine years ago, we rescued the Philippines from the parlous state to which our predecessor had brought it. I remind this House, that under President Estrada, this country had come to such a pass, that the exchange rate had gone to 55 Pesos to the Dollar, interest rates went through the roof, and the hope of Philippines 2000 had been extinguished; where a fragile political environment and a bankrupt government had resulted in the ouster of a corrupt President. The Arroyo Administration has changed all that.
Once again, the Filipino people can turn their hopes to a country that is admired for its economic performance compared to the rest of the world, and to a government that has brought unparalleled prosperity to our citizens at home.
We have done it by improving our infrastructure: increasing farm-to-market roads by 6 times to nearly 18,000 kilometers, building one-and-a-half-times the length of roads built during the three previous Administrations combined, building the roll-on-roll-off nautical highway, and extending electrification from 80.1% to 99.39% of rural barangays.
We’ve done it by investing in education: 100,000 new classrooms built in this Administration, improving classroom-to-students ratio from 1:60 to 1:39 in primary school, and textbook-to-student ratio going up from 1:5 to 1:1 in many subjects in elementary and high school.
And we’ve done it by caring for social development: 11 million beneficiaries of food-for-school program, which offers incentives for young students to stay in school; and 1 million household beneficiaries of the conditional cash transfer program, which provide additional incentives for educating poor children.
Mr. Speaker, our stewardship of the public finances has been better than that of any Government for over fifty years. It has enabled us to repay debt and improve infrastructure, and the resulting success of the entire economy can be talked about for years to come: the doubling of GDP per capita from the year 2000 to 2009, the halving of inflation and foreign debt-to-GDP ratio, and the tripling of Gross International Reserves. There have been fourteen million more jobs since 2000, and PhilHealth membership has been widened from 30 million to nearly 84 million people, or almost the entire population of the Philippines.
That is the record of nine-and-a-half years of the Arroyo Administration, and Arroyo policies. Mr. Speaker, all these are grounds for congratulation, not censure, least of all from the Members of the Opposition, who have no alternative policies.
Mr. Speaker, over the past nine years, this Government has had a clear and unwavering vision of the future of our democracy, and of the Filipino people’s role in it. It is a vision which stems from our own deep-seated attachment to Constitutional democracy, and this Government’s commitment to economic liberty, to enterprise, to competition, and to the free-market economy.
The fact is that, more than any previous Government, we have fought for charter change as the most basic way to enhance our competitiveness compared to other countries, which allow for the free competition of foreign entities with local businesses. For us, part of the purpose of the Constitution is to demolish trade barriers so we can all benefit from trade both within Asia and with the outside world, especially those small businesses which we have assiduously promoted. It wouldn’t help them for our economy to continue to be dominated by Spanish-era conglomerates, headed by Spanish families, linked by a colonial old boys’ network; or for the bureaucracy to be concentrated in the capital city, far removed from the life of the rural peasantry. Our people deserve a country where there’s room for their growing sense of nationhood, and a place to decide their own destiny after a lifetime of deprivation.
Are we then to be censured for standing up for a free and open society through a free and open economy? No, Mr. Speaker, our policies are in tune with the deepest instincts of the Filipino people, and we shall not be censured for what is thoroughly right.
Despite the failure of our initiative, Mr. Speaker, we have never hesitated to fight for development and for the Constitution in other ways, particularly in the area of peace and security. This Government has received no thanks for its imposition of martial law in the aftermath of the event known as the Maguindanao massacre. Yet it was our swift action which enabled the Army and the Marines to arrest the Ampatuan family members responsible for the massacre, and which allowed the Commission on Human Rights to collect evidence without being disturbed by lawless elements.
Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, our critics have been quicker to point out the definition of civil war and rebellion which should, they said, have guided the imposition of military rule. Yet at the same time they called for the writ of habeas corpus to be suspended and the Ampatuans to be arrested first and then charged later. The only difference between our action and their proposed action was that theirs was not called martial law—it was just martial law in all but name.
Clearly our critics want to prevent a replay of the events of the 1970s, when most of them came of age and and came to political maturity. But such is our forward-looking view of our society, of which 75 percent were born after martial law, that we do not believe it is right to take revenge upon the past by compromising our future. The previous generation might have failed in stopping the institution of a dictatorship, but it does not mean that this generation must fail as well.
Not for us this blind replaying of our past, this jaundiced reading of our history. Ours is a larger vision of our democracy, where Filipinos cooperate more and more closely to the defense of the Constitution.
Should we be censured for our strength, or the critics for their weakness? Surely the vigor of our Constitution has been displayed more vividly by our action than by the second-guessing of our critics. I have no doubt that the people of this country will willingly entrust their security in the future to a strong government that protects them rather than to socialists and academicians who put little faith in our Constitution and ascribe little hope to our Nation.
And we realize our hope, Mr. Speaker, in the conduct of future elections in this country. Since time immemorial, we as a Nation have desired automation for our elections, variously to improve the process of vote-counting and canvassing, and to minimize the incidence of cheating. Many attempts have been made to automate nation-wide elections, but none has succeeded until this year.
Despite the obvious success, a lot of voices, mostly of those who lost, have been raised to question the validity of the results. We have been here before, when the candidate who was leading the official count was also the one who had been leading in the pre-election surveys, in the exit polls, in NAMFREL counts, in the tallies by media organizations, and in the predictions of fortune-tellers. Independent foreign observers also said that while there had been irregularities, they were sufficiently few in number to have affected the results of the elections. Back then, the losing candidate made the same claims of “trending,” a term so completely wanting in intellectual foundation it has never been uttered in polite conversation.
Nobody believed that candidate, who later died an unhappy man, yet the following year someone let out a digital recording of a conversation between me and a Comelec Commissioner, ostensibly proving the existence of cheating. Never mind the evidence of all those surveys and independent observations, never mind that you could have given all the votes of Maguindanao to the losing candidate and he would hardly have made a dent in the one-million-vote lead: the allegation was believed nonetheless.
Twice in my time as President, we have leaned upon the loyalty of soldiers to the chain of command to discipline rouge elements who had staged a coup d’état to overthrow the legitimate government—both in the Oakwood mutiny and in February 2006. Street rallies have also been led and paid for by those who, too cowardly to suffer the heat of the noonday sun in support of their politics, or to share the stench of their people on the ground, perverted the meaning of the people power revolution.
To those who have never had to face such personal and professional terror, may I say to them, that they are faced with a heavy heart, in the knowledge of the manifold dangers, but with tremendous pride in the professionalism and courage of our Armed Forces. But there is something else which one feels as well, Mr. Speaker. That is a sense of this country’s destiny, from nearly a century of history and experience, which ensure that the Filipino will always fight for his Christian, constitutional and democratic way of life.
It is because we in this Administration have never flinched from difficult decisions, that this House, and this country, can have Confidence in this Government today.
