Paetongtarn welcomes reporters’ year-end label
PM says it’s OK to call her administration ‘the government pampered by Dad’, referring to Thaksin
Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said on Monday that it was fine for Government House reporters to call her administration “the government pampered by Dad”, saying her father had a lot of good and useful experience to share with her.
Paetongtarn was responding to year-end nicknames given by Government House reporters to the government and certain Cabinet members as a New Year tradition.
Paetongtarn said her father, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, had accumulated good experience on making the country’s economy good, so it was fine for her father to advise her government.
“It’s good. Dad has long experience. It’s good for him to help me. The country’s economy when he was the prime minister was good,” Paetongtarn said.
“It would be better if some measures [of Thaksin’s government] were applicable to the current economic situation.”
Paetongtarn added lightly that she would like to change her label slightly from “Paetong Phoi” to “Paetong Pad”. She said she was not reading from paper scripts (phoi) but she was reading from her iPad when she worked.
“I’m using an iPad, not phoi,” Paetongtarn said.
Asked to comment on the reporters’ decision to choose “My husband is a southerner” as the words of the year, Paetongtarn said she didn’t see anything wrong in those words.
“My husband is a southerner, my father is a northerner and my mother is a central resident. My siblings are half northerner and central people. This is the truth. My husband is really a southerner,” Paetongtarn said.
The reporters selected the words cited by Paetongtarn as an argument that she did not ignore the plight of southern flood victims “because my husband is a southerner”. Her argument was met with criticism that it was illogical to argue so.
