There has been no closure on what happened to Fernando Poe, Jr.’s votes in 2004, as well as on the “Hello Garci” tapes. Do you expect a repeat of these scenarios in the next elections?

Two things:

First, we hope it won’t happen again because if we felt really that there was no more credibility in the election process, then one of the options for the opposition would have been to boycott. And there were calls, really, to boycott the elections. So our participation shows that we still believe in the process, that’s number one.

Number two, this is not the same opposition as in 2004. We have learned from our mistakes and also from the cheating methods that they undertook in 2004, and we’re more prepared for that and we’re taking the necessary steps to protect the votes and to ensure that “Hello Garci” doesn’t happen again.

Because we really believe that the country is not ready and cannot take another “Hello Garci” scandal.

Now, going to the legislative agenda of the Genuine Opposition…

We have 10 agenda points. They’re pretty broad, but you can see common threads. Our advocacies – one common theme in all of them is that we are not promising to do something we cannot do. At the start of the campaign period, there were some discussions on, “How about we promise to give a P200 wage increase?” or “Why don’t we promise that we’ll scrap the EVAT (Expanded Value-Added Tax) Law?” but we felt that as an organization, we would lose our credibility. Even if we win on that platform and we don’t deliver, we would lose our credibility… In the long term, our credibility, we give it more importance than the short-term gain of promising so many things. I think the common thread in our legislative agenda is that it’s doable. For example, we want a moratorium on new taxes. That is doable. So we do not promise anything we cannot achieve, we want that to be one of the hallmarks of the Genuine Opposition, which is that we promise to do only that which we can do.

In the Genuine Opposition’s legislative agenda, there is an item which says something about instituting reforms “to make the economy more dynamic, efficient and equitable and make the Filipino workers and enterprises more globally competitive.” Would it be reasonable to expect then that these reforms would be taking place within the framework of the globalization program?

Yes, it’s reasonable to… Well, globalization, that is a tie that we cannot really go against. It’s here. We don’t have to create a program for that: it’s here. It’s a reality that we face, and…

One of the things also that you’ll notice in our legislative agenda is we did not make it too specific. Because we want to give our opposition senators the leeway to make investigations and to decide which way they’re going to go. So for example, to institute the necessary reforms to make us more globally competitive, I cannot give you a very specific answer to what specifically we would do, because we really want to also have the flexibility.

But underlying that is the idea that we feel that there must be not just economic growth, but an equitable distribution of that growth. Because we feel that you can have 5 percent GNP (Gross National Product) growth and even 10 percent GNP growth, but if poverty still remains at about 53 percent, then you don’t really call that a success. In fact, one of our primary beliefs is that one of the first freedoms is freedom from poverty, and until we achieve that, we’re not going to have a free society.

One of the items in the agenda that I noticed as being more specific is that on increased budgetary allocation for education.

Yes, under the Constitution, education should be given the top budgetary priority. Unfortunately now, under the current dispensation, the number one budgetary priority is debt servicing. Now, of course that’s a complicated issue, there are a lot of pros and cons to that, but for us, we want to give life to the letter and spirit of the Constitution. In fact, if you take a look at the 2007 budget, even the ranking – number one is of course, debt servicing, while education is not even at numbers two, three and four – it’s number five, if I’m not mistaken. Ahead of that are the allocations for the military, infrastructure – education is not as high on the priority list for this administration, and in fact on a per capita basis, expenditure for education has gone down by about P200 per student, and that shows you that we really have a long way to go.

Another thing is the generation of jobs “through labor-intensive infrastructure projects in the rural areas.”

We feel the big projects, capital-intensive projects do not take full advantage, or do not take full account of our competitive advantage. Our competitive advantage is labor. We have cheap labor, we have plentiful labor, and our labor is actually skilled.

And yet we’re focusing on mega-buck projects. The focus on mega-buck projects is because it is easy to get cuts and kickbacks from these, as opposed to a project that is labor-intensive. So we feel that there should be a shift of emphasis, we feel that we should make the most use of our comparative advantage.

And that’s why we’re pushing for more labor-intensive industries, technologies, etc.

Just for clarification: aren’t the jobs to be generated from these projects more short-term in nature, or are they also long-term?

Of course, whenever you make a plan for job generation, you have to look at the short-term, the medium-term, and the long-term. Now these labor-intensive projects are varied – again, I cannot really specify, like what specific project we’re going to implement, because you have to see what the needs are.

The principle is sound that instead of more on the capital-intensive, focus on the labor-intensive.

So whether it’s short-term, medium-term or long-term – at least you are able to address the issues of unemployment, underemployment. Of course we want…

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