2024 national budget fails to address urgent problems or prioritise, says Pita

In his attack on Saturday, Pita said the budget bill failed to answer people’s problems, address the country’s urgent problems or set priorities. He said the budget bill only reflected the government’s “directionless” rule.

“They miss necessary funds, and have unnecessary budgets,” the MP said.

On Friday, the lower House voted 298:166 to pass the 2024 fiscal Budget Bill after three days of debate in its final reading. During the debate, opposition MPs grilled the government and sought to slash funding proposed by many state agencies.

Pita, whose MP status was restored in January, said the bill failed to answer people’s problems as over 2.5 trillion baht of the 3.48 trillion baht budget would go to remunerating state agencies, and that only 980 billion would be left for development projects.

He said that because the budget was badly designed, no requests had been made for additional funding. Instead, he said, funds necessary to tackle urgent issues were cut.

“For instance, funds for fighting forest fires were slashed from 1.7 billion baht to just 50 million baht, which is not enough to deal with the current situation,” Pita said.

The politician was recently in Chiang Mai to join efforts to fight PM2.5 pollution, which has been blamed on the burning of farm waste widely practised by farmers in the North and neighbouring countries.

Pita added that the government’s request for remunerations and regular expenses for certain agencies was too low in the first reading, so it needed to seek additional allocation in the second reading.

“These are regular expenses that the government should have known about in advance,” he said, pointing to what he described as the government’s failure to set priorities.

Owing to this failure, he said, the budget for many projects that are beneficial to the public or necessary to tackle existing problems was cut. These included funding to deal with wildfires, flooding and drought as well as to purchase military equipment like a frigate.

“A budget that does not meet real needs can be a waste of opportunities for the country and the people. This is a waste of the taxpayers’ money,” he said.

Pita was formerly the Move Forward leader and a leading candidate to become prime minister after the party won the largest number of MP seats in last year's general election.

He was suspended as MP in July last year while being tried in the Constitutional Court for allegedly holding media shares and violating the charter. Pita stepped down as party leader last September to pave the way for Chaithawat Tulathon to take over. The court cleared Pita in January, in effect reinstating him as a lawmaker. He now serves as chief adviser to Chaithawat.