Tax Holidays – not quite the definition I was led to understand

Some people are happy to pay their own way in life. Some other people are unashamed freeloaders who will take anything going, regardless of need or financial circumstance.

Say ”Good morning,” to those NGO employees with 4×4 Toyota Land Cruisers.

Now you might think that with Afghanistan and Iraq consisting of flames and rubble, hostages being grabbed, the Tsunami aftermath and it countless victims across Asia, millions still starving in Africa and pretty much the entire world going to hell in a handbag that the NGO crowd in Cambodia might have a few better places to be, or that the Powers That Be (PTB) here in Cambodia might be interested in (capable of) holding the fort themselves for a bit while the erstwhile international community props up the Gulf and does a spot of bricklaying.

But oh no, as I write a charter plane full of those NGO employees who drive 4×4 Toyota Land Cruisers is heading for Bangkok. Not to use the city as a forward base in assisting with Tsunami relief operations, or for a connecting flight over to The Green Zone, but to attend a 7 day conference on ‘The strategic benefits of long term educational opportunities within the natural resources framework’ -now, having spoken to somebody able to translate NGO-ese into something resembling the mother tongue, this apparently has something to do with going around schools and telling the kids that tossing old hand-grenades into streams to kill/catch fish is a bloody stupid thing to do.

Let us face facts, if they are so dumb that they do not know that in the first place, I doubt very much that a half-hour lecture from Dr Weird Bread in his sandals is going to enlighten them all that much.

Let us call a spade a spade for a second – as opposed to a self empowering service utensil for sustainable agricultural improvement – this trip to Bangkok is a jolly, a picnic, a junket, a complete waste of time and money. It is in short, a holiday.

Now I will admit that everyone deserves a holiday, even the Playboy bunnies (two weeks in Snooky, seeing as you are asking). And I am sure that being a highly paid NGO employee with a 4×4 Toyota Land Cruiser is a stressful job [right ?!?] . But is it too much to ask that these highly-paid professional hand-wringers might actually pay for their own break in Thailand? The rest of us have to, the rest of us have to carefully keep off the Gins and Tonic for a few nights every week to save up the spare cash for the petrol down to the beach.

Let us be honest here, most of them are pretty well paid. If there is one constant in life, it is that people paid a Western salary whilst living in Cambodia are rich. That they accumulate this poisonous wealth by vastly over-charging their respective parent organisations, international banks and the RGC for providing “advice” that borders on the risible, and usually at the end of the process at the expense of the Cambodian people, is another constant. (You want an example? The Khmer440 libel lawyer, affectionately nicknamed ‘Dick Turpin’ by us underpaid columnists, has just charged me US$200 for allowing the previous paragraph to appear in this diatribe.)

So we have established, without doubt, that the NGO employees with 4×4 Toyota Land Cruisers are a wealthy group. Not for them the unseemly hovering around the cut-price leftovers at closing time in P?sar Thmey. Not for them the Sunday boiled rice that is still going strong on Wednesday as fried rice. Not for them the poor people’s footwear mantra of ‘plastic flip-flops in the rainy season, no sandals in summer.’

So why can they not pay for their own holidays? It is a simple enough proposition. I would like a hotel suite in Burma. It costs US$100 a night. I want to stay for five nights. Here is US$500. What’s wrong with that?

Instead our respective governments ship some hard earn tax money out here and the NGO employees with 4×4 Toyota Land Cruisers are on the next flight out of the Country. You really could not make it up. And there are plenty of previous crimes, oops sorry, examples as well. Conferences in Vietnam, The Philippines and Sri Lanka to name but a few.

If I flew back to the UK, turned up on HM Government’s doorstep, knocked on the gates and demanded a similar deal, I would be drugged, beaten, handcuffed and waking up in a red boiler suit at Camp X-Ray before you could say ‘Osama bin Laden.’

Yet the lentil-eating, leather-elbowed, sandal-wearing, self-proclaimed saviours of South East Asia are able to take the piss out of the rest of us by exploiting their positions at the taxpayers’ expense.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Read the last two paragraphs of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. ‘

Nothing sums up this self-serving, corrupt and morally-bankrupt system of NGO?s and IO?s quite as succinctly.

Damn it all, where is the gin.

Lord Playboy

The views in this column are entirely those of Lord Playboy (of Phnom Penh, Sonteipheap and that muddy patch of ground next to the school;) they are in no way are representative of Khmer440, its editors or staff, of any Ministry of the Royal Government of Cambodia who employs Lord Playboy, of people who are stupid enough to believe that elections are free and fair, of employees of the local Khmer beer garden who see me coming and move another case of Tiger into the icebox, those twats in the diplomatic service who call Phnom Penh ?a hardship posting?, or that oh so sweet girl called Neary I met on Sunday lunchtime. Damn, things will be different when I am running the Country.