 on this seminar on political finance in Thailand. What a pleasure to see this room full on a Friday morning. So clearly this issue matters to all of us. So on behalf of International Idea, thank you very much for giving us your time and contributing to this discussion. My name is Khushbu Agrawal and I work at International Ideas Headquarters in Stockholm. I particularly focus on the issue of money in politics. So it's such a pleasure to be able to be here and talk about the issues that I'm so passionate about. I will be giving a presentation, but before that I would like to invite Ms. Lina Rikila-Tamang, who is the regional director for Asia and the Pacific at International Idea in our regional office in Canberra, Australia. Just before Lina starts, I just want to say we have interpretation. So anybody who wants, please, you can switch on your interpretation. Also, I have been requested by our interpreters for all the speakers to be pleased a bit slow because they're doing simultaneous interpretation. Thank you. Very good morning. Welcome and thank you so much for accepting our invitation to attend this seminar on political finance in Thailand. I know these are very busy days, weeks, months in Thai politics as Thailand is yet again trying to form a new government, which is, as we all know, proving to be challenging given that the current set of rules about decision-making are separating election results from government formation. So we appreciate much that you are taking this day to be with us today. On what it comes to political finance regulations, as we know, over the years, Thailand has made several efforts to reform some key aspects of political finance system, including what it comes to regulations of political funding for political parties and funding for election campaigns. Yet, several challenges remain that require improvements and innovation and appropriate systems and processes to be put in place to ensure enforcement. Inspiration to this report really came about as we gathered that there had not been really a very systematic review of the effectiveness of party finance regulations undertaken in Thailand. And we hope that this report is able to provide such a comprehensive analysis of the current political finance framework and also examining the challenges of implementation. The report focuses on the kind of building blocks of political finance regulations, which are the public funding mechanisms, regulations on private funding, regulations on spending, reporting, and disclosure of income and expenditures, oversight mechanisms and sanctions. And based on these findings, the report provides some very concrete recommendations for consideration by policymakers, political parties, the election commission of Thailand, and anyone really interested in the topic and the public at large. Many of our intended recipients of this report, you are sitting here with us today. And it is those recommendations, really, that we wish to discuss today with you all. We are keen to hear from you which of the suggested recommendations are feasible, desirable, doable in the short or the long run. Like, for example, are the sanctions in proportion to the crime? Should the smaller parties receive more public funding than is the case today? Should the formula be changed? And would increasing the spending limit to electoral campaigns encourage parties to be more transparent in their spending? And is there something missing from the report that should be there? And what needs to happen for the recommendations to be implemented and enforced? So I wish to thank the lead author, Puncada Silimanabut for all the hard work, diligence in writing this report. And also I want to thank my colleagues, Kuspua Graval, who is here, and Yuki Hiko Hamada, who is in Stockholm. They have really developed the global framework for the political finance regulation studies and worked closely with Puncada on this one and two. Kuspua will talk a little bit more about our global work in the next session and about the framework that we have been applying. And I also want to thank my other colleague, Adi Aman from our Asia and the Pacific team, who have really provided all valuable inputs and feedback on this report. And I also wish to thank all the participants who were there in the preceding expert validation workshop that we organized here in Bangkok. And I hope that you can see that your inputs and suggestions are actually reflected in this final version of the report. As mentioned, this report is part of the larger international idea initiative to review political finance systems in selected countries, really to advance evidence-based global policy debate on money in politics. And in Asia and the Pacific region, we have made similar studies from Mongolia and Fiji and are currently thinking through which country in Asia-Pacific we should study next. And then second half of the day is devoted what we often call the weakest link in the political finance, which is to have exchanges, lessons, reflections, addressing the challenges brought about by digitalization, online campaigns, campaigning, and implications and consequences to integrity of political finance. So we're interested really hearing based on Thai experience, understanding the trends in this field, what is happening, identify some effective solutions and perhaps transferable practices. I think Thailand is probably has many lessons that which are emerging and which may be of interest elsewhere as well on what it comes to regulating electoral campaign finance in the digital age. So once again, thank you very much for providing your valuable time and being with us here today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Lina, for your reflections and to do the honors that are requested to please launch the report officially together with our lead author, Panjwara. Just hear it apart, Panjwara. Hear it apart. Thank you very much. Thank you, Panjwara. Thank you, Lina, also for your reflections on the sessions today and setting out the objectives and the pathway. So after Lina, right now, I will be presenting a little bit about our work on the issue of money in politics in general, but also focus a little bit on why do we do these assessments, what the purpose is, and what do we intend to achieve in the short and the long run by doing these assessments. I would like to request that my presentation be projected on the screen. I don't need to give an introduction of idea, I think almost everybody here knows about our work, but very briefly, we work on the issues of democracy and electoral assistance broadly, but also our main thematic expertise lies on the issues of electoral processes, political participation and representation, assessment of democracy, constitution building, et cetera. We do this work from our headquarters in Stockholm, but also our regional and country offices across the world. We have more than 17 physical offices in the world, but we also work on many other countries where we don't have offices. And very, very grateful for some of our member states who are presented here today. We, our members are the one who give us the zeal and the courage to do the work that we do. Technology. So money in politics program, we are a small team of three people, full time two people who we focus our work on basically larger political finance reforms all across the world. We talk about regulations of political finance, digital reporting and disclosure, transparency of funding of political parties, et cetera. And we do this work through three areas. First is the knowledge production. We run a database, and if I may say so, it's the most exhaustive database on political finance regulations in the world where we provide information on political finance regulations in 180 countries on the four pillars of political finance, basically income expenditures, reporting and oversight of political finance. We also produce knowledge, what you are seeing today, our reports, but this is also just a drop in the bigger pond that we work on. And we are continuously thinking about issues that are important for the regulations of political finance and the issue of campaign finance, for instance, later in the day, you will hear a little bit about our work in that area as well. So always striving to make sure that we are up to date and we are providing cutting-edge knowledge to our boundary partners through this kind of research work. I can continue. We also provide advisory services to our boundary partners. It could be parliaments, oversight agencies, political parties, civil society organizations on any political finance reform issues. So what Lena was mentioning, that we are looking at what country we can move to next, but it's not just our agenda of where to move next. We are always looking at where the demand is, which country is initiating the process of reform and how can we bring our knowledge to inspire any possible change in the country concerned. And we do this also through creating forums and bringing together oversight agencies, political parties together and creating dialogues. And we do also this through bringing together different oversight agents from across the world and exchanging those knowledge and learning from each other. And finally, the global agenda setting. As an intergovernmental organization, which with the permanent representative status at the UN and also affiliation with various EU agencies, we are part of global network of oversight agencies where we have been able to set agenda on the standards, best practices, what should political finance regulation look like, what is workable, what is achievable, what is doable. So we have also been able to create that kind of network with our partners. Political finance challenges. So I must tell you that of the 180 countries that we maintain on our database, almost every country has some sort of political finance regulation. Some are more robust than others, but even in the most advanced societies where political finance is very well regulated, there remains number of challenges, including regulatory loopholes. And those loopholes can be in terms of the permissible sources of income for political parties or the limits that are being placed or spending limits are not clearly outlined, et cetera. So despite the progress that is being made, the challenges continue to impact. Then there's the issue of weak implementation and monitoring. No matter how robust the regulations are, the real essence lies in their enforcement as it applies to any kind of regulation. And our political finance assessment is actually a step towards ensuring that implementation of those regulations is in line with how it should be. And finally, changing landscape and evolving conditions. The other challenge is that the field of political finance is everything but static. And again, we will see later in the day about online campaign finance, 10 years back, we did not think about how the world of campaigning will change so dramatically where political parties and candidates will and other third parties would rely so much more on digital spaces to reach out to voters. Or if cryptocurrencies will be used to donate money to political parties and candidates, et cetera. So they continue to be persistent challenges and there is a need to continue to innovate, to research, to update ourselves and figure out what the solutions could be to these challenges. There's no problem with this. Anyways, my next slide was about political finance assessment itself. And why do we do it? Like Lena mentioned, we have conducted these assessments in several countries in the Asia Pacific, including in Mongolia and Fiji. So what is the purpose of this assessment? So it is in tune with the challenges I was mentioning. There are implementation challenges, there are regulatory loopholes which can be abused by people who want to take advantage of the loopholes or the dynamics are constantly changing. So the idea of this assessment is to use the framework that idea has developed and really see how the entire framework is working. It's not just about the implementation of the regulations but also about the issues of capacity in the oversight agencies, the issues of capacity of political parties, but also the willingness of political parties to follow the guidelines or how much engagement there is from civil society organizations. Is there a room for their engagement? How open different partners are for change? And I must add to this that it's not the first time we are doing this assessment, we are not the first institution who's doing this assessment. There are other institutions like Greco in Europe particularly, but the difference between those assessments and our assessment is that those are more focused on the regulatory side of it, but we look at the entire framework. And another thing about that is Greco is focused very much on European countries whereas we are focusing on countries that are not represented in those assessments in Asia, in Africa, in the Pacific but also in the Balkans for instance. Just very quickly, we did this assessment in Mongolia and we're very proud to say that we don't want our assessment documents to just sit on your table and rot. Our idea is that those recommendations that we put forward are practical and implementable. And in case of Mongolia, we did this exercise in a very, very interactive manner, in a very inclusive manner. We consulted the agencies, political parties and our recommendations were actually used and discussed in the parliament and Mongolia recently passed their new legislation on political finance after a long debate and discussion and we're very proud to say that some of the recommendations that we provide are actually reflected in the law and also the state audit agency adopted digital disclosure for reporting of political party financing and that was also one of our recommendations on the report. So this is the primary purpose of our work that our recommendations which are really thought through and discussed with different stakeholders are taken on board by either change in regulation or advocacy by civil society organizations or change of practices by political parties. Then we had also conducted another assessment in Fiji and in the Fiji case, no real regulatory changes happened but the reform debates are happening and our assessment was really instrumental in creating those dialogues not just among the oversight agency but also among political parties and civil society organizations. And again, we're very proud that the supervisor of election, they have taken on board the recommendations we have provided and they're going to use our recommendation to have further engagement with political parties in the days to come and we are hoping that whenever come the reform process begins some of our recommendations will be considered in the process. In terms of Thailand, I will let Funtia do most of the talking but like Lina mentioned, the inspiration for Thailand assessment happened a year back when the discussions were happening and there's so many exciting things happening in Thailand and there was an appetite for a reform process. The most of the research and analysis for this assessment was done in the quarter three and four of 2022 and Funtia of course, led the in-country research process and we were engaged from distance in some of those meetings. We did a validation and experts meeting in quarter four of 2022 and some of you were present in that so thank you again for helping us navigate the different challenges and dynamics of political finance in Thailand and helping us finalize this report. The production phase was in quarter one of 2023 and again, similar to what happened in Mongolia and Fiji, we are hoping that the work that we have put our hearts that we have given to this report are actually eventually taken on board by different stakeholders to initiate a discussion, a debate and identify what Thailand needs in the long run, short run and how this report can provide support and it is not just about the report, our work is very holistic. So if there is any particular area that any of the boundary partners would like our support in, in terms of technical support, advisory support, we stand ready as international idea and I would also like to just add that this report is in no way critique of what is happening in Thailand and it cannot be a critique. Like I mentioned, none of the political finance frameworks in the most advanced economies or most robust political finance systems like even in the UK, they are not devoid of any sort of gaps or weaknesses. But there is a need for constant innovation, constant improvement. What we hope is that for money to play a very positive role in Thai politics, the recommendations will be taken on board because we gave it in a very good spirit and we are hoping that our stakeholders will also imbibe it in a same positive spirit. So this is from me. All our reports, our work on money in politics can be accessed through this link. Our website is currently in the process of renovation but everything is available online. Can be downloaded for free of course. But also you can, there's our contact details on the website. So if you want to reach out to any of us, we'll be very, very pleased to take this conversation forward. And now with this, I would like to invite our lead author, Punchura Sriwunda Booth to give a presentation on the findings, recommendations of the report. So a little bit about Punchura. She probably doesn't need introduction in this crowd, but I would like to just highlight some of her illustrious career. She's an associate professor of political science in the faculty of social sciences and humanities at Mahidol University. She's a recipient of many fellowships and awards and she's conducted research in Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand and Indonesia, which remains her two countries of deep interest and expertise. And in terms of thematic areas, she focuses on the issues of political parties, elections and politics in both Thailand and Indonesia, but also in Southeast Asia in general. So Punchura, the floor is yours. Hello, everyone. At first, I was thinking about what language to speak. They said that many Thai people would like to speak Thai. I'm sorry, but I'm a Thai language speaker. I'll try to speak Thai for you to understand. First of all, I would like to thank you for your ideas. I'm not here today. So I've been working with many, many political parties. I am providing a general overview and not going to the details because the details are already in the report. I would like, I want all of you to read. And all the recommendations for the election commission, I hope that you will take it up. I want to say that I hope that the changes for the election commission is to provide recommendations to increase the money from 30 million to 34 million for support and also for personal usage. It's not actually a lot per party, but I would recommend increase in those support. Can I have the next slide, please? The development of the laws concerning financial support for election has started since 2019, 1997. That was the first time in Thai history that there were provision of finance for the political parties. The main aim is to have the businesses who are actually supporting the political parties to actually decrease their support and then to have public funding to support the political parties. But of course, this has not actually been happening and this has followed on in 2007. Once we had the coup d'etat, there was a rewritten in the constitution, new constitution was rewritten, but there were many changes, especially the calculation or the formula for calculation for the political parties. Actually, there are actually four parts in all this that they will be providing for the calculations in four components. First, the amount of seats that they would receive in each of the election area and second, the amount of votes and the main points that they will be receiving form, the branches. There are so many branches that have been set up. Many parties that never won the election, but they have 100 branches or 200 branches. Say the Democrat party, they have almost 200 branches in the beginning, but they still work, but some small parties, I'm not gonna mention their names, they have maybe 200 or 300 branches, but finally they were not elected, which shows us that even though you set up a branch, you will not receive election, but they wanted support money from the PPDF. So later on, the formulation for correlation changed. Up to the present, methods have been changes for calculation for 2017. The branches does not affect the money for the support, but for support in receiving money from PPDF, you must be member and the member must pay to become member of the political party. In the present law, there are changes as well. Formerly, it's actually 200 baht and 2000 baht for permanent membership. Then I was the member of the subcommittee and there were discussions. Actually, it was 100, 100 baht, I'm sorry, 100 baht. If there was too much, it's impossible for the villagers to pay. So is it possible to be 20 baht, which is 50 cents? But some of the members have never been on site, so they do understand that the price of membership was too expensive for the members. But later on, they actually voiced this and they said to reduce the membership fee. So this year, prior to the election, the membership fees was changed to only 20 baht for membership. This is important for once the change in membership fee, then the rules and the law change as well. For the political party, for the support, which is the 2016, 2017 was changed, Dr. Mishai feels that the money for support for each of the Rukal Party should stay because the money for support is part of providing opportunity for them to develop the parties. So there had been changes for the allocation of the funding to provide the money to the PPDF. They try to provide transparency in the spending of the party, but actually that became an obstacle for the political parties to provide a report in the new form. They also amend the punishment for not following the rules. So these are also the changes. Before I move on to the new changes and on regulations and spending, can I have the next slide please? Please take a look at our work. People say, are you reading the literature review and do the report said no. We talk to the political parties, we do interview and they provide feedback which are great and that allows me to work on other issues as well. We do online interviews for the small parties. They are providing a lot of important information as well. For the overview of party finance in Thailand, two main parts. The first are the support from the PPDF. The other part is from the any other parties. Each of the components has different laws that control it. If for the PPDF that comes from the actual law controlling the PPDF. But for the other, it follows election party law. Let me talk about the PPDF first. There had been changes in 2000, I'm sorry, 1998. There were only 25% support. This actually comes from the total PPDF money. They have to calculate how much they would provide to the support for the government. So a lot of times they might not follow the four main elements. It depends on the money allocated by the government. Later on in 2000, in the year 2000, they found that there was too many branches and that does not function so that they adjusted the percentage. In 2017, there were great changes. So the calculation changed to 40, 40, 10, 10 to 100. So it would follow the actual main party does not follow the branches anymore. Do we pay money for support for the parties? Yes, we do. Thailand does pay. You can see the representative of the party. Sometimes they provide money for the member, for registration. So you can say that for some party, it does not come from the pockets of the member, but it is money for the payment that has been received from the government. I don't know whether this is good or not say like for the Orange Party, for example, they do pay money to become members. That the members really pay from their own pocket, but the some other parties, it might come from other allocations. Let me have the next slide please. You can see the elements from the PPDF. There are board members who must decide everything. The law would change. The law that was set up in 2007, this is wrong, the slide is wrong. There are representatives of the party who are in the board of the PPDF. Any changes will have to be gone through that. But after that, in 2017, there are no representatives of the parties. They do not actually understand the party's need. They would just imagine for this project, I have received feedback from the parties and so I try to change the amount from 35 million to 44 million. So I would like to thank this project that had allowed me to participate in. The amount of money that has been increased is not stable. It would depend on the board and you would have to look at the economy of the country as well. If we have good economy, then it might increase. So the amount of money for each of the parties to use for canvassing the boats would depend also on the status of the economy. The election board has actually very high power. I mean, I'm sorry, the election board, the PPDF board, has very high power to allocate the amount of money. The also the law that determines the political PPDF also provides a lot of money for receive from the tax. In Thailand, when you do your tax payment, there is a tick box that you can say is you can donate money to the party. Formally it was only 100 baht, but you can now increase to 500 baht and you can say how much you want to pay, 100 baht, 200 baht or not. So the money would be allocated to your party of choice. At the same time, the money for the tax is very important because you would determine the amount of money would be allocated. This year, I can declare the move forward party receive a lot of donation and the total money from the PPDF formally was 12 million but now they receive 44 million. So it was a huge amount of money that they receive. Usually they do not receive as much but the move forward party receive a lot this year. So the amount of money from the tax, you can voice this. Many party says how can the election commission would control the amount of the tax money. The amount of tax money should move straight to the party but what happened is that the election commission is now actually controlling this amount. We cannot change the law now because election commission says once they actually you increase the amount of tax and you should be giving the PPDF more to the party therefore the election commission should have the control on that as well. The report sees that as a recommendation to the election commission that first any allocation of funding should change the percentage of the itemized of how you should pay. Say for many parties if you look from the 1997 to 2017 most of the party that receives the port money are large parties but they do not really need it. The smaller parties receive smaller amount so there should be ways in which you should calculate so that the smaller parties receive more. This is not a recommendation only from us. Large parties also provide this feedback that says can you provide a lot more money to the smaller parties so that we could have more member of parliament from those smaller parties. This should be under the consideration of the board so that they could tell the board we should also have representatives on the board as well. Can I have the next slide please? All right, so these are other incomes from the party. They are also able to have money from membership also from events to raise money for the party to raise donation to the party. This does not have to come to the tax money only. This also cause problems. A lot of times there is no limit to these events trying to raise money. Any money that comes in should be given to the parties but that must be transparent. The election commission looks after this but there's no limit. They should be transparency should be declare how much money you get from. So near the time of the election, they should or many of the parties create events. You can also sell products. The law is funny because you can sell only in certain areas you can sell in the areas of the party. You can sell shirts, dolls or other products but you cannot sell it online because there is no law online. So if you actually you want to become advanced political party you cannot sell it online then because there would be, there is a law against this. There are some parties wants to sell it online and they request it from the election commission but the election commission denies this. So if you want to improve you need to amend this law to sell online. Donation must be no more than 10 million per person. For the person you can donate 10 million to any parties but usually they don't do it because it says who are you to be donating this 10 million to the party? Let me talk about donation. You can see that donation according to each of the country is limited. In Thailand it's actually quite high. It's 10 million. But personally I'm not sure whether it's enough even 10 million. Anybody? Some of the political parties has the percentage of the donations. Sorry, some countries would consider the percentage of the donations. And for Thailand we maximize them at each individual at 10 million baht. So if there's a lot of individual donations that would be quite substantive. But if you look at the report of the EZT you would have just a repeated donor at a high volume or just a few group of them only and it would be for the elections within the political party if it's to the traditional form of elections. So the voting canvas is to that and some of the budget might not be enough. And the campaigns require a substantive amount of money. And that's why the political party have to limit the spending. So the expenditures that they receive from the funding it's according to article 84. I will not go into the details but the spending with the limitations the limitation of the spending. As I said in the beginning that we change from 1.5 million to per each MP in the district to 1.9 and from the party list of the political parties and it would be 44 millions. Personally I interview and I see that each of the political party have a clear metrics for the calculation so that the money will not exceed 44 million would be problematic. All the campaign would be recorded. The system would be very in place in the big political party but not so in the small party so that they avoid the violations of the law. And that is the amount, sorry, can we change the slide again? That is the amount of money that each country's allowed. So that would be the limitations of the spending that each of the political parties in each country could spend at the maximum level. It's lower than Thailand but they can continue. For Thailand it's 44 million but if you take a look at the country's size for Indonesia, Indonesia is bigger than Thailand but it's still less amount of money but if other countries are smaller than Thailand they still be able to use less money than Thailand. But for the recommendations, recommendation on the spending for the political parties I believe that there should be opportunities to allow the political party to sell merchandise online so that it would be another channel to earn revenue for them and it would prevent the investment group to take controls of the political party because the political party can earn their own income and also increase in the budgeting further on the election campaign. It's already been increased year by year and also the subsidy for the political party also. I have to say that the report has been written before the last launch and the increase and the decrease as I mentioned before and the next one is for political finance assessment of Thailand. The report of the financial statement of the political party, the new law said it has to be reported every three months before it's annually. So report by quarters when they draft their constitutions. They believe that it will increase transparency but it turned to be a main challenges for the political party. For those that receive substances or mouth donation, for example, the move forward party, I talked to them, they said at the beginning it was so chaotic for them but now it's quite okay, they settle it because they cannot accept the activities on site because if you go on site a lot, on the field a lot then some of the district said they might want to organize activity and then there might some thing unexpected happen and have to delay the activities and it would enter an impact to the financial statement report at the headquarter so it would have the ripple effect on throughout the change and there's another project I'm doing on the verifications of the spending or the money that being supported to the political party. It's very problematic because some of the political party cancel the activity so often because they receive a large volume of money but they have to cancel the activities because they cannot organize the activity on site it's beyond their control so it would impact the reporting system and they would be, they have to return the money always all the time, they frequently sometimes they have to return 20 bucks, 15 bucks, 100 bucks or 10,000 bucks and it doesn't look nice on the report and it would impact the image of the political party negatively so it's a very main obstacle for the three months reporting for the political party the annual reporting is all right the political party can do well because it's the annual budgeting including the revenue, the income and everything the recommendations that I receive from the ECT and the political party that they're trying to change but it's still proving quite difficult is that they want to cancel the three months report and change it to six month report or if it has to be three months report so it has to be given like a rest period like from 15 days after the three months extended it to 30 days so that it would help with a small political party that have limited personal resources and the next one the disclosures of the financial information of the ECT ECT also disclosed on the website but overall information is not with all the details and so the general public would not see the transparency of the political party when they spend the money some of the political party that receive large amount of money if you take a look at their activities it's just a repeat activities again and again and very small attendance sometimes only 10 attendance, 15 attendance why do they need to organize it that way so that they can completely use up the money because otherwise you would feel such a regret you need to return those money back to ECT so they need to organize it just to use up the budget and you have to report it within three months it's make the political how to rush themselves expedite everything and the activity organized would not be of good quality and it is such a shame because we give the political party money we'd hope that they would do something substantial they have the capacity to do so but all the law are really making it a deadlock for them so it's like you throwing the money into the water cannot achieve the cost effectiveness but I would like to advise some political party that they organize the large scale activities and would have a good outcome and with good activities so each political party have to come up with their own initiative and the recommendation that I have is that the disclosures of information the ECT need to do it more into detail not just overall budgeting about how much money they subsidize or given as a support and also with the detail about the activities, spending, et cetera if we take a look at the recent elections there was no rules but the new rule is that they have to inform all the policies and also to stay with the financial use if the activity that they've been used by using the public funding and then the ECT would disclose everything exactly it would improve the transparency you don't need to go into the attendance detail but inform the activities of what has been done not just the total amount of money that's been given to the political party it would help improve the transparency and the oversight is the next one ECT have the provincial's committee to overseeing the activity most of the ECT provincial's committees are friendly to the political party lots of people say that the ECT are not effective enough in their performance but for me, been working for a long time ECT really provide great assistance to the political party they try to provide impromptu solutions and great recommendations however, it's not really contributing to the effectiveness to the political party because in Hong Kong for example ECT have only a few people working for them but there's so many political parties so the capacity is stretched by the ECT office and also the provincial's ECT are not reporting to the central government they are reporting to the headquarter in Bangkok and the headquarter also have limited personal resources so recommendation is that the ECT should open up the opportunity for the CSO or the citizen in general to verify the spending of political parties I am not sure what method it would be or what kind of approach but if there's a third party to verify it it would increase transparency and it would be like a clear show to the people that what money has been used by the political party and it would help the people make an informed decision on who to vote in the next time and next is the sanctions the sanctions, if you make a mistake it would cause the dissolution of your political party but the new law is good there's no dissolution of the political party like the future forward is not by the law from the PPDF any longer it's about something else if the political party dissolutions and if there's a small tiny mistake for example like a wrong date or sending the reporting outside the required date and then they require political dissolution that is too much so if it's not applied anymore not applicable anymore there's a small political party that's trying to build up that base could grow and become a bigger and it would contribute to the political party to have their own income by improving the policies of the parties there's some of the small political party always raise a concern with me that why so limited amount of money how can I build my parties I agree with the ECT that the government has no duty in building up the political party with the state have the duty in supporting only and they need to earn the income by themselves so if the political party rely on the subsidy from the government it doesn't help them strengthen up the capacity the government can provide assistance but the political party also need to strengthen their own capacity by themselves so this is all the summary by the other report thank you very much thank you Puncera for providing such a thorough summary of the report of course each of you has the report in your folders we have the report both in Thai and English so I hope you have collected the language that you're most comfortable with but also the reports have already been uploaded online as of yesterday so you can also download it please share it with your networks for with partners who you think and benefit from the research from the findings and the recommendations and please reach out to us if you have any questions of course so in addition to presenting the findings of the report we also wanted to bring today here two experts on political finance who have worked on this issue and who know a lot about how things work in Thailand and have studied the the weak linkages in political finance in the country so one of our first commentators is Dr. Paul Chambers thank you for flying in to Bangkok to join us today Dr. Chambers is a lecturer and special advisor on international affairs at the center of Asian community studies at the faculty of social sciences at Narishwan University Narishwan University I always yeah of course my pronunciation is not very good he has written more than 100 publications which includes journals articles reports under his name Dr. Chambers focuses on his research on the issues of democratization civil military relations and international affairs in Southeast Asia he was also part of the expert groups meeting that we held in November to share the initial findings and his insights including his written comments on the report were really really useful while we were finalizing the report so we are very pleased and honored to have you here today to talk not just about the findings of the report your impressions but also what do you think is the way forward for the country thank you thank you very much I guess if you can put my ah okay yeah thank you international IDEA for having me here today pleasure to be here ah I also want to ah thank everyone who kapkun tuktan nakratthi matini ahahangong it's really a pleasure to be here and ah I want to express my appreciation to Dr. Poonchada ah the lead consultant as well as the editors ah it's I think it's really an all encompassing report ah looking at public funding private funding spending regulations reporting disclosure requirements oversight and sanctions okay that's a lot okay um so when we look at Thailand and political party finance Thailand has one of the most sophisticated cases in Asia for party finance and you're called to put pasta on get poor ah actually put pasta on get ah gangua pasta thai ah that should be Thai-English manga so I think I'll wait they'll all PowerPoint okay I thought that's a nice cartoon for you ah to understand every plant every country took but pat me ban ha got political party finance okay but that tied away um so this is a very comprehensive analysis and we I mean I'll just go ahead it's a comprehensive analysis of the current political finance framework in Thailand and I think it does justice to some of the problems that are being encountered um looking at Thailand Thailand is one of only 50 percent of southeast Asian countries that require political parties to report on their campaign finances and even though young Chen now this is an example of the sophisticated nature of party finance laws in Thailand okay um of course we have to remember that a lot of countries in fact I'd say most of the countries in Asia are not on a democratic par with Thailand anyway so of course Thailand would have more sophisticated finance laws personally I think it's more sophisticated than in my country in the United States okay but we have Donald Trump okay but that's that's being said but continuing I'm trying to use up time so you'll thought by the next uh third word swatting next one back oh okay good all right okay only two out of seven countries in southeast Asia that being Myanmar and Thailand have limits on the amount third parties can spend on election campaign activities this is Myanmar even after the coup in Thailand the spending limits for a political party or candidate include the spending by any other person on behalf of the candidate or the political party for Asian countries this includes Cambodia Myanmar Nepal as well as Thailand provide no free air time Thailand grants state subsidies to all political parties and indeed this has been a bone of contention about how much the state subsidies right Thailand has adopted a match adopted a matching funds regime in which 40 percent of subsidies are granted to parties on the basis of their electoral support another 40 percent in accordance with their subscription fees and the rest 20 percent depending on the number of branches okay which has written a lot about regarding public funding the report at hand recommends revising the fund the subsidy funds allocation formula to allow small parties to receive a larger public subsidies also tying the amount of subsidies received by political parties to the number of female candidates members of parliament consider allocating free broadcast time for campaign activities all of these i agree with i would also recommend that the state carefully scrutinize the identity of some of these small parties oftentimes there are these tiny parties simply seeking some money from public funding for personal gain okay what about private funding well in thailand donations from public companies foreign entities and gambling businesses are banned the report recommends though thailand imposes donation caps consider revising the current maximum amount of 10 billion about 10 million but to political parties especially during an election year and issue coherent regulations on the online sale of souvenirs in addition to physical sales to allow parties to earn more income i would recommend also that the unlimited private funding for parties with some kind sometimes can get through the parties okay really there needs to be more enforcement okay as for spending regulations the report recommends revising the maximum spending limit for electoral campaigns for both candidates and political parties introducing a regulation on online campaign spending including placing limits on how much can be spent and taking steps to ensure better transparency also issue guidance to distinguish between vote buying and customary gift giving by politicians i agree with both of these all of these this is great of course i would also recommend retaining some kind of maximum spending limit but do not get rid of it and i would recommend better enforcement on the ban of vote buying oversight mechanisms the report says consider involving party representatives in the decision making process concerning new regulations to avoid the adoption of policies that cannot be in that's great okay and strengthen and empower cso's in thailand to serve as effective watchdogs that's excellent that's something that really needs to happen okay um i guess my only recommendation here is to try to make sure that the cso's are given an effective voice in other words exactly how can we get cso's to play a role an effective role now turning finally to sanctions well Sri Lanka probably has the most liberal sanctions framework in asia while india malaysia singapore and thailand are the strictest thailand is very strict only thailand contemplates the loss of public funding on top of other pecuniary criminal or administrative sanctions most asian countries provide for at least one type of sanction of like a loss of political rights or suspension of candidates but thailand dissolves political parties based upon party finance violations for example the dissolution of anakot mai which was connected to a donation's case okay there was also the case of the pakpa chatipat which was not dissolved and so this gets to my main point and that is that you know thailand suffers from two problems today i think i think other problems every country has but the ones i'll talk about and that is in thailand there has been a judicialization of politics at the same time in thailand there's been a politicization of the judiciary not everything but in some cases yes okay we have to admit that there are certain partisan forces that are involved in the dissolution of some political parties okay such as anakot mai and perhaps those same partisan forces are against dissolving pakpa chatipat okay so i would recommend for sanctions diminishing the harshness of these sanctions especially those when the dissolution seems to be geared toward attacking certain political parties i think thailand really suffers from using party dissolutions as an alternative to military coups okay so i know we're talking about political party finance but i had to bring the military in here somehow so anyway other than that i think the report is wonderful thank you very much thank you thank you very much dr chambers for your remarks and also for guiding the next steps which his presentation was a testimony that the work is not over obviously it has just begun there's a lot that needs to be done and this was the first step and we hope to also take on board his additional recommendations as we continue to work in the country our second commentator for the day is dr ladavan tanty vitaya vitak she is a human rights activist since 1976 and and she started working with poll watch in 1993 and then went on to serve as an official of the election commission of thailand for 15 years she retired as the secretary general of the law reform commission of thailand and then joined poll watch foundation as its secretary general which continues to date i would like to hand over the mic to you thank you thank you well i would like to follow in her tracks so that it will be very convenience for me as well i actually prepare everything in english but the if i speak thai i believe you also gain the insight for those of you who do not speak thai so we have the simultaneous interpretation service for you first of all i would like to express my sincere gratitude to dr panchana for conducting this study which i think of immense importance because the finance actually i'm still have doubt why do we not use money politic directly but does it sound negative that's why you use political finance but political finance is quite a technical and formal but in the end it's money politics anyhow it is an interesting topic indeed because finance is an influence that determine the life of the political parties and the candidates for all time you cannot refuse that money is the has the final say for the election vote the way to achieve power and also for negotiations in the parliament nowadays we are not critiquing anyone so we want to keep everything in line because they are forming the government right now they might say the CSO of course we need to take part okay let's continue with our topic today can i have the first slide please this is the opinions first of all i would like to have a caveat that the political party it has to be the political parties for the people it's a mechanism to go to govern the country to administer the country so political party it has to come from the people not a private company it has to come from the people and people organization it has to come with transparency it has to have accountability it's open for scrutiny and then the people need to take a part in it and most importantly how do we make the political party strengthen that we strengthen the political parties how to make it really people-based organizations and finance is important what the professors has kindly presented in various topic and with your recommendations and finding i see your effort and diligence and i see a lot of good recommendations what i would like to stress and highlight and that is to not mention in your presentation earlier is that the support the considerations for the financial support that the political party should receive from the female candidate proportions actually i should say the female member not just a female candidate the female MP but if you add the elements of the gender lens or the females who um members female candidate who participate in the political party with the considerations for the allocations of ppdf budget that we could it's not about gender equalities or anything but what i want to say is that this is very important issue we need to promote more female in politics because we know that the structures are not conducive for that and a number of factors limited the access of the female into the political arena nowadays then the CSO has a proposal that women should participate more in politics and i asked the female candidate in the past the political party said it's very hard to recruit female candidate especially in in the up countries that's your number of limitations but if you have the incentive to help them it would advance in the pathway for women to enter politics another important recommendations that i would like to rest that the uh the Dr. Paul has just mentioned it's about the on at the finance report financial report that should be disclosed and we should simply find it from professor that should are mentioned also that it's it's a three month report and they would they're not changing yet to six months they should change it to six months from three months to six months report uh borders but the problem might not be just about the report itself or three months or six months report but the system of reporting is to troublesome to complicate I used to be in the government system before so when you need to do a reporting the evidence you need to gather was like everything all the tiny bills it's so complicated actually I at my concrete when I work in the in the area I admit that I used to be in ECT before I I know that the work of our political parties it's taking massive amount of effort is very you need to deal with a number of political party that at the olden day there's no system in place at all so when you want to issue regulations and framework it's quite difficult as well but I see constant improvement and progress but the most important thing is that if you still have the mindset of just controlling the mindset on the base of this might be the potential corruption in that place or those places if you come up with this kind of idea it's very bureaucratic thinking very general bureaucratic mindset I I have the direct experience because I've been invited as a speaker or the lecturers by using the the ppdf for one political party and after a month they call me and ask for my copy of my ID card I was just a guest speaker normally the copy of ID there's already been issue that it's not required you can just input the 13 numbers and you don't need a copy of ID any longer but the easy it is to require copy of ID card so this is a tiny thing but it is a problem like it could impact the way they decide the activity as a professor say so that's why the same old people because you already have everything in place if you want to organize other activity you need to come up from the scratch about how you sources of evidence and how you perform A, B, C, D but actually I do have a proposal but right now what I would like to say that simplify the process and nowadays use the digital tools to help you there's an online transaction with a clear evidence concrete one it would help a lot so decide to make everything more up to date more cutting age and so online finance report and the next one is that the party should make their regulations so she should simplify the regulations for the political party so that they can do it better they can organize a better activity they can use new innovations to set up the activities so that they could strengthen the members parties and so encouraged to see with participations and the political party should have the roles in designing the regulation as well I believe that the ECT also have the hearing from political party and try to improve the rules and regulations but how do we do to get the CSO to play an active role to have an active engagement in the designing stage Kun Adi are you doing that we get the director to help us facilitate with the slide presentations but what I would like to also say a very important recommendation is that how do we do sorry previous slide please how do we do is so that the political party this might be different opinion from the professor Panjita as we say the political parties are important in the way that they would achieve the power to govern the country so we should not provide support to large political party all the rules and regulations yes on one hand is to support the political party in nature but how do we encourage the diversity vacations of the growth of the small political party so in the three years I believe that we should encourage the growth of small political party we might need to set up a mechanism and a specific tool for those small political party aside from the main one that we already have for the big political party and it's a small political party by the time they can formulate and register the parties it requires such a lengthy process and time it takes considerable time to formulate the members and register their parties if they could set up the party we should give them ample opportunity to grow in maybe two or three years at the beginning specific support so that you know from toddler they could walk in because otherwise the benefit would be funneled into the large political party mainly and the next one is that the ppdf the political party fund need to be flexible another point in case is that tax the tax for individual tax or juristic person's tax when you pay the tax at the end you can have the checkbox whether you want to donate for political party I want to propose that of course we we give the funding from the ppdf with the limitations with the and we don't have a large amount of money so what I want to say that the donations for political party could be used to reduce personal tax just like when you donate to the foundations or hospitals or temples you can use the receipt for the reductions of personal tax I think this would be another approach that would enable the political party to earn more and have more channel to receive the donations and the money that would come into the open channel would help them because we want to limit the money that go in the back door right because there's a lot of backdoor money and if we can have the open system it would increase the transparency considerably and I would like to continue just a little bit when we take a look at the financial system there's an open and closed one we talk about the open system right through the funding through the regulations through the reporting system if we take a look at the closed system the closed system actually here I actually I get this from news very important in interesting articles and where I did the homework because I've been asked to express my opinions about this this is from the Newsome Thai PBS on 11 of May it stated that the elections on the 14th of May there's the circulations of the money in the economy increasing substantially for the first three months of this year it increased more than 200 billion and if we take a look that you're 200 billion but increase the increase of course it means that there's three every quarter there's a money circulated in the economy for sure and then there will be the reporting but specifically during the election time there's a high cap and the number that the professor said that political party have the limitations on the spending during the election day or election time right 44 million cap that they could spend for each party for the campaigning that this is a ceiling on the limit for spending 44 for the but if it's per individual candidate it's 1.9 million baht so i times the money i calculated in the past elections we had the 4,781 candidate for constituencies and we have the political parties who submitted the party list at 67 parties so i times them so if i combine all the number it's about 12 billion baht 12 billion baht here in rate actually this is such a large number i never imagined before but the bank of thailand stated that during the first three months of the year the election time the money that been circulated in the economy increased by more than 200 billion baht 200 billion baht and this has been affirmed that by the thai number of commersed that the amount of the money you spent in all the constituencies are circulated more than 120 billions it's also corresponding to the news team of the the one that will refine the informations from the bank of thailand that the amount of bank not circulated in the economy for the first three months which is January to March it increases more than 234 billion or 3.47 percent and if you segregate them the 1000 baht bank note has more circulation by 1.9 percent so it seems it means that they are giving out 1000 baht now not 500 baht because the circulations of the 500 baht bank note are decreasing by 14.2 percent but actually the money that would reach to the people might be 500 baht because it got deducted you know on the way in thailand they always deducted the money and keep it in their own pockets so we have to accept that the board buying in thailand still persist they still give out lots and lots of money still there's a circulation of the money in the economies but i ask why why it happened and what is ECT doing i'm sorry to say so i'm very ECT sure but i need to ask you these questions because give me a second please that's an opinion that's an opinion of the bank of thailand that the amount of the electronic transactions increase significantly especially the internet and mobile banking channel there's more the transaction of more than 2182 times a million transfer per month growing by 39.6 percent comparing to the same period of last year so it's indicated that the direct give hands out of the money it still happened because i see the news that the police arrested and we watch also reported that they arrested people who give out the money for board buying and fin debt also report all the volunteer not just fin debt and we watch in the past we received a volunteer from multiple CSO organization i law people organization themselves they work to to the fullest of their capacities for the word buying detections ECT also have rapid task force they devoted so much money to the police to all the district to have the mobile unit to detect this kind of of violations they arrest them but I don't know what happened because there's been no issue of yellow card and red cards there's a few cases maybe more than that hundred cases but the results of the case considerations really slow but I'm not going to refer to some of the expedite judgment so some of the judgments very quickly done but the red card and the yellow card is taking forever to process I don't know why but they use so much money to detect these kind of violations yeah so what buying happened but it's said here that it's been through done through mobile banking nowadays so what is ECT doing what the mobile banking can't you worry find it can't you detect the wrong doing so what I want to say is that the law actually invested so much authority to ECT regarding the mobile banking as well because article 32 or section 32 section 32 of the ECT law of the election law investor power to the ECT to request the informations from the Bank of Thailand if they have doubt about the fraudulence or suspicious transactions did ECT attempt to even use this article or this section or ask for the informations on the financial transaction online because the law already allow you to do so and if you detect it you can immediately stop the actions but it seemed to me that I am not certain whether ECT utilize this section or not if you use it I believe that the the report from the Bank of Thailand has been launched weeks before election day so I believe that the ECT would be fully aware about it so do you have any attempt to have any measures to manage this problem because I think it would still persist in the future about the online world buying so should ECT work on this because you already have the power issued as vested in you the last part actually this is what where I would like to end at the beginning that ECT should have the measures because the does the developments in using the money to do world buying or in the final money's politics and also impact the roles of ECT but because I am from the and the CSO and I would like to add something that the ECT is still not doing which is the CSO to really have a point in the political elections we receive the support for to the CSO to take part in it but nowadays we have to come up by our own financial means even though the laws allow the ECT to provide support to the CSO the especially Section 9 to allow the ECT to support to the CSO also including the general public to inform to report it about any suspicious behavior so that the elections would be transparent and fair and just but the ECT do not use us CSO for me I would like to link the CSO with ECT and it end that our CSO have to come up with the mean ourselves and for the CSO also we need we're trying to have an outreach with ECT to talk to ECT but the ECT seems to have the believe that we can and CSO can't just stand on our own to feed and verify the transparency and fairness of the electorate ourselves so this is the last one it's about the section 22 bracket 5 to promote the support the CSO so that we can work on civic educations and educations and so we are trying the Open Forum for Democracy Foundation we're trying to work to encourage the people to understand how important that work is so the next one I know that I need to end soon because I run over the time but this is about the the article 9 section 9 about the the election act so that the ECT could provide support to the CSO so CSO could detect the wrongdoing and to report such wrongdoing to the ECT it is very clearly stated but I don't see ECT doing anything so my last recommendation is that please ECT implement the law effectively maybe maybe not effectively but just implement it first enforce it first especially section 39 sections 5 and section 9, 5, 32 thank you very much thank you Dr. Ladavan for your very insightful reflection of the report but also of a political finance framework in general and I think your presentation was a perfect prelude to open the floor for discussion because you put a lot of questions for a lot of our participants including election commission of Thailand who are present here so we have approximately 20 minutes for questions yeah so we can have questions reflections because we don't want to just have this one way conversation just from the speakers but we also would like to hear from you the beneficiaries of the report our stakeholders who are present here and also maybe if you want to answer some of the questions that were being posed by our speakers and presenters there are mics on the table so please when you speak if you could introduce yourself and the organization or institution you represent it would be much appreciated anyone want to give the first shot yes Hello I'm Meta Matkao from the campaign for popular democracy or the government for the democracy according to what I've listened to I want to have a question the law for the political party does it follow the human rights when you're talking about the branches and the amount of budget that is supporting is that a lot of times it looks more like capitalism to me or more like a total totalitarian control where those who have a lot of money can control the political parties so I don't know whether there are anything written in the law when you are talking about using money outside of the system say for example if someone donates not more than 10 million for party for per year but you know say Palang Prasarat they would receive 10 million right but I think some other parties are also 5 million per person but do they use more than that according to that I think for the move for party I think there's one person who is donated 1 million but you know when you're using money for election and possibly work buying many of the parties are using more than allowed by the law is that further recommendations to ensure that spending for election I wanted to see whether there are any laws concerning political parties in Thailand which is balanced with you know international law because as I understand it's an operational law that should not be you know should be reconsidered thank you should we take a couple of questions and then maybe we'll respond yes sir please I have a question I am I am advisor at Phua Thai party formerly I was working with the ECT I think many people looked at me when we were talking about ECT I was there I have left about two years ago so thank you very much IDEA that has set up this interesting and important event last time I was there I was here too so thank you for Dr. Panchadas report it is an interesting and important report that may lead to changes in terms of political finance for the better so I have certain points that I would like to present to the researchers and all the participants first from what you had presented as a report and verbally I agree in the four main points and but I have three points which differs from your presentation I would like to point out one point that you did not present or touch up on as well in the four points that I agree upon first is that I agree with what you had presented of the components of the board of the PPDF because formerly they were representative of the parties but at the present law does not include any representative so that does not consider the board oftentimes not consider the real application of the law is very difficult I agree totally that when you are reviewing the constitution or the organic law for the constitution you must amend this section so that that is representative of the political party as part of the board of the PPDF that is the first point and agree with second donation for the tax I agree that the research Sir had said that it should be belong or go straight to the party it should not be controlled by the ECT or regulated by the ECT the ECT should just forward the amount to the party and the party would report to the ECT but in reality it's not like that the donation even to tax the party would have to create a format for proposal for using that and if they don't follow the proposal they have to return the money I think that this is something that should not happen the money should be forwarded to the party and they should be allowed to freely use it but certainly you have to report within the financial spending the third point that I agree with is the selling of the products and services actually if you don't want the parties to be controlled by possible capital groups you should allow them to have these sort of activities but in the present law there are certain points that is limited both with the products itself you can sell only memorabilia or souvenirs but you should be able to sell maybe like rice to help the people rice to help the farmers for example that would be at a good price you are limited you are not allowed to do this you are limited at your venue for selling you must sell only at the headquarters of your party you have to sell only at the branches for example these are limitations but at present the market for any buying is online so if you allow the parties through this that they would have real income and they can rely on themselves more so I agree with this point the fourth point I agree with is the report on the spending of every three months there's huge problems I agree possibly six months or one year is better than three months because in certain activities there are changes and there are obstacles report of every three months is very difficult these four points I agree with there are some other points I agree with but I am not mentioning them now in the points where I differ in opinion firstly for dissolution of the party I think that certainly if you are misspending should not be a cause for dissolution but I agree with section 12 in the political parties I think if you receive the donation which are from fraudulent source this is something that you should be considered say I am not quoting my future forward party when they were dissoluted is that when they actually loan had money on loan from the head of the party a lot of times you don't know those who come in and donate you don't know where they come from but if there are people who complain saying that that donation or this person from fraudulent sources or from gray sources and it would lead to dissolution of the party it's a danger or a risk to that political party this is a point where I would like to point out something that I disagree with is as mentioned by Dr. Paul Chambers that you should there is a ceiling of about 10 million per year but the event for raising fund has no ceiling I think there might be a limitation how much is appropriate it is something that you should question how much 100 million is that enough 200 million I think this should be open but it should be clear and transparent who is joining this event for fundraising and it should be declared openly and there is a point as an issue that I wish to for you to take note the research has not mentioned this at all is the amount of money allocated according to the political parties it is written in the law according to section 11 it is the received from section 78.2 many times the ECT would receive the amount of money for allocation and within the amount the office must pay not less than 50% but not more than 70% of the amount allocated but each year the amount is not the same some year the government give you 200 million 400 million there is no clear criteria so these money are allocated to the political party not more than not less than 50% not more than 70% but the problem is that once we receive the allocation from the budget office there will be some money left that has not been given to anyone it's accumulated the money that is accumulated would be would rest at the ppdf at present there is accumulated fund of about 150 million I'm sorry 1 10 billion 1.5 billion I'm sorry so they cannot give any of this accumulated fund to the political parties but then they said no they would cannot allocate anything it must be from the yearly budget but actually the budget office said yes you can but the ect said no there is no regulation that I think this is a limitation the money is gone is 1.5 billion it's sitting there at the ppdf office so that should be written in a new law or an amended law of how you can use this amount this is a note that I want to provide it is not mentioned by the report at all thank you should we respond so that we don't accumulate too many because there are too many ideas that are coming so would you like to take Poonchuda first thank you very much for the question and comment at the beginning also for the fund raisings I agreed in the same directions with director I'm sorry I used to call you director all the time so there should be no limitations because it's the only opportunities to earn the income to the political parties that is not against the law but it needs to be transparent about about who don't know what where they received and the ect also need to be able to observe that need to be done so that it's clear that when you organize this fund raising a duty how the money flow how it has been spent for the elections and it would be the single fund activity of the political party to use the money earn to use it for their campaigning I might say that the apachatipat democratic party that have it sporadically but it's not a big fund raising not like the one that they would organize near the election day so I think this is necessary and there should not be any limitations on the donations amount and another one the questions about the violations of the human rights um a part of it I believe that it's while later there's strong democracies affirmations because to establish a political party to grow the political party it should be the needs of the people to build it up but the ect or the lawmaker they're trying the limit of the political parties formulations in every tiny issues whenever they see them misdeed of a tiny small mistake of the small political party they have the announcement to handle those tiny problems they don't see the whole pictures the whole mechanism that it is a problem from the small political party but it has an impact on the large political party that they already have a good system in place about that and do issued a regulation to you know like have a guillotine on the small political party but and then they launch it without having any prior announcement so it's very confusing for the political party especially for the new political party for example that move forward party they they have so much money coming into the parties that they can't follow up on the news regulation news announcement because when they submit it there's a mistake and then they couldn't correct the report in time so they need to send the money back again so when I verify the money spent the money earned into the parties and I got move forward has so much money coming into the party as I say when there's some of the spending it's very small like 20, 25 but and it's not that fall there's so repertoires of regulations they've been launching announcement again and again and it's limited to growth of political parties and they can't keep track of the announcement and we talk about political parties in the other countries any that is democratic enough I'm not going to talk about the European country it's hard for us to compare with them it's a different benchmark altogether so let's compare with Indonesia our neighbor they also have the political finance laws and also they subsidize the support to the same way with Thailand but they don't have such limitation like Thailand the political financing in Indonesia is very small it's very thin but in Thailand that you have section and section and sections and so it's very different limitations altogether and the way they calculated I personally feel that Indonesians calculations formula are more fair fairer they're just focusing on the the election results only they don't take a look at the branches or the members anything so it's encouraged the growth of democracies the small parties are Indonesia Indonesia if you follow up you see that they can grow up until the present day but at a small party in Thailand in a short period of time they disappear because there is no support provided and the political parties also have no no way to support themselves and no no assistance from the government but Indonesia they receive this assistance from the from the government and the the political party themselves they survive a few times in the election round and they could grow continuously so this is the short answer I'd like to give come come on sum up your comment for comment yo uh beginning people pass a time we'll stop it pass on get there so I understand your comment about the unlimited funding and you don't agree with me let me amend what I said to say specifically that I do not support unlimited funding by one either one corporate donor or one person actually in experiences in many countries in the world you can have many people each person donating a certain amount and so it it becomes it is still very democratic but there is a limit for each person and when you put it all together yes it can be lots and lots and lots of money okay but it still becomes democratic that way you don't end up with a single donor like Rockefeller power dominating one party and maybe one country by creating a hegemonic political party which scoots all the other parties out of the equation and that can become you know less and less democratic over time at the same time I think that if it's unlimited finance for a single donor there can become problems of a lack of transparency and a lack of accountability that I think at that point the Gaugall thought really needs to work hard to ensure against so just again I am mostly talking about limiting by donor okay so limits per donor and limits per corporate donor thank you for there so once he does it and I would like to request you to please keep your questions brief because unfortunately we don't have unlimited time and we have other two sessions as well so please keep your questions brief so that we can receive more questions from the floor I would like to thank Dr. Panchadar to present a very insightful information Dr. Panchadar and me we are all in money on university together but when I asked the place the political party in the year 2007 I think Dr. Panchadar is starting another piece of research we did not get to talk a lot about political parties but I am glad to see your progress in the field and also in the expertise regarding political parties in the year 2007 I would like to give a rational a little bit before the questions the problem of the small political party has been chronic has been ongoing for a long time so it is still persisting right now to the current day since I established the Sankhom Pachadipathai Party or the Democratic Socialist Party Social Democratic Party and I argue with the Director Great who sat next to me about how I named my parties and I have to shorten my political party so that it responding to not repeating the same name as the old parties even though we don't use the exact word but the ECC is really strict it could not be even similar so we want to work on the ideologies and it encounters so much trouble the proposals by the Professor Panchadar regarding self-reliance of the political party I think it is very vital we should not support the political party to receive a large amount of subsidy from the PPDF so that they could grow but I believe that they are not crazy you need to have self-reliance because you can throw by the members right you rely on the member I see Dr. Paul's nodding I know you understand Tai really really well so the member need to contribute to the funding of the the political parties in a really good amount so that it could grow you cannot rely on the outside donor so how do we encourage the process of providing the support financial support to the political party by the member in the easel ring before that we ask for the end the enrollment fee for 100 baht and we have a goal that we will collect one baht per day and per year will be between the 65 baht but we have the way to pay it could be like quarter by half year or whatever but it's too very difficult but nowadays all life payment is so much convenience I believe that we should pay attention on how do we get the member of political party pay the support or the financial term to the political party in an easel way and I was so surprised by the information I received from you I also follow up on this issue that the financial support by the member of the political party it would be collected in the same rate as our political party it should not be like that each of the political party should be able to determine that the supporting you know financial support by the member by themselves it might be at first five 150 and then at the end 20 it's so much concern how do we increase this amount and also to expedite the convenency in the collections they could pay mid-year they could pay in allocation form if 20 baht per year it's too close to the financial support in the labor union in many organizations which is very very low rate so I would like to encourage ECT or PPDF and also the researchers to please encourage so that a member could be a strong driving force and to pay more for the political parties thank you more question because we have actually gone over time but we will have opportunity to talk a lot more during the break and throughout the day so for you thank you I would like to add just a short point I believe that it's involved the declaration are these closures of the expenditure to the ECT I think that the political parties trying to send the observer to observe in a valid point just normal observer ECT say that they need to add that into the expenditure for their election campaign so it would have a negative impact on the observer's process and to protect the rights of the people as well and it is quite a threat and so in the area that they think it should be of concern the political parties should be able to send our own people so with this kind of issues and they need to enclose it into expenditure it's kind of like a barrier to them and we think it should not be expenditure it's nothing to do with election campaign at all so I would like to propose that this ECT should understand about the observer's role stated thank you okay we'll take one last one but then we really need to move on and go for a coffee break I think we could help ourselves my name is Issa Kunsu from the Open Forum for Democracy Foundation I believe that there's no break so I was waiting actually for my coffee but if there's no break I believe that we can come to you for a long time so if the moderator says as you please make it short and sweet so I believe that there's some point I would like to inform the meeting during the research process I actually agree with the key point the key pointing but when you take a look at the law that's regulated the whole financial policy system when the ECT when they draft the law they will send it to the parliament and they would be under consideration and the ECT also send the representative there so the purpose is to control but we want to make them see that it should be in the support and promotions but it would not be passed because we are just a minority there I am also a member of the commission in the organic laws for the constitutions laws and I also involve very closely and I see a very negative attitude that they have towards the politicians and political party both from the ECT and the bureaucrats so when you want to support the political party you have to come up with a new mindset that you want to have a law that really in a supportive manner just as Dr. Lada once said the example in Indonesia that the political party should receive more support actually you don't need to interfere them for three years you just provide them with the money allocation that they report to you once every year no need to control them and then for the three years you can verify whether they have more members they have more capacities in the sending more candidates for the next election or not so this is the idea when we can reform the law in the future and also the fee for the political party or the supporting finance to the political party I think it is necessary for the people to take part in supporting the growth of political parties these kind of supporting fee you should not be to mean the cap or the exact amount let the people support in any way that they can for example the online transactions if they want to be a member they might pay 100 baht per month if they feel like it they could be a member of multiple political parties if they feel that those political parties work well together and as a government they might donate one into multiple parties and I think this is by voting team by the vote of the people but he said he can be a member of just one single political party this is a limitation of the rights of the secret but if I like two political parties I want to support two political parties you cannot judge me on that correct but when I vote I can vote just one it depending on me as well and this is how I think and for the engagement of the people to monitor is a very fine election ECT especially this type of ECC I don't know if there's any representative from the ECT to be honest and the work that you have with the CSOs really you will be low power but you lack communication with the CSO a significant and it makes us the CSO at first we approached the secretary so the secretary is okay because he's really been sincere with us he's we've been we know each other for so long of course they're always accommodated and he always accommodated but he cannot disobey the the same of the whole ECT so there's no close collaboration I know because I talked to the ECT some of the ECT members some of them want to work with us but the majority said no so he later on he escaped me but the secretary himself he's okay he always have a communication with us and the ECT staff also have present the information that we want so that is a good thing and I hear Dr. Paul say that the free broadcast by the political party during the election we used to have that but later on we still do but it's only for the policy information and not more than 15 minutes for one political party so that they could explain about the policy when they do the campaigning that's all yeah thank you so we won't be able to take more questions from the floor but Punjira if you would like to respond to some of the remarks including Dr. Paul and then we will take a coffee break right just briefly I think most are comments that was given so thank you so much I agree with the membership fee that you know it cannot be high but of course how you pay it I have never thought about it and it should not be high at all because there are we have a lot of people who are quite poor and they want to participate as part of the party they are working in the local area on the side so if you collect a high membership fee it's there's a good chance that they will leave the party definitely that's what all I want to say yes I agree with you my Paul the amount of time that is given to poor political parties by the media for free is not my Paul so I think there needs to be some changes to that so yeah thank you thank you very much Dr. Ladavalli we finally have a remarks I just want to say that as you can see that I think that you are the minds that are in terms of finance you should focus on transparency rather than being recollected to strictly to the public to the public to the public from the people it's a sign to the national public to the public to the public to the public to the public to the public to the public to the public from the from the party so so how can we have them participate more in the politics another point is that I agree with the moral distribution of the parties if there is no mentorship or if they're not doing anything it can be disoluted but you should not control and penalize any party to the solution thank you thank you very much to our panelists our speakers and for your very engaging participation we can all do with the cup of tea or coffee so let's take a very short break unfortunately we have run out of run beyond our time for this session but we already have our speaker waiting for the second session so let's keep it short maybe in 10 minutes let's come back and start our session two which will zoom into the issue of online campaign finance which Lena mentioned was the weakest link in political finance all across the globe so we look forward to seeing you back again in 10 minutes thank you