The Party List System Is A Waste Of Money

The Party list system was originally conceived as a way to represent minority groups in the congress. The basic idea is that the system is a way of ensuring that those special-interest groups that genuinely require a say, but aren't really localized to a certain region to finally get a chance to have their voice in the congress.

Of course, that's on paper, without taking into account that Filipinos are one of the most politically devious creatures to walk the earth. If it can be exploited, it's all fair game.

Just think about it. Where are the Mangyans Aetas and other minority tribes in the party lists? They're not there. On the other hand, the current roster is filled party lists with ever ambiguous constituents, and easily neither minority nor critically important as far as representation is concerned. Here are a few examples:

Buhay Hayaan Yumabong - BUHAY, A party List representing Life. And while in the history of the Philippines it's understandable that there are more dead Filipinos than those that are currently alive, I don't think the dead people will ever care about the current issues, on account that they are in fact dead and buried somewhere underground.

Gabriela Women's Party - Party List representing Women, a sector representing pretty much 50% of the ENTIRE POPULATION, which is to say anything but minority. The only way this can be justified if we had a Men's Party, and if we call them the Mamamayang Against Corrupt Habang Opisyal (MACHO)

Citizen's Against Corruption - Yet another party list stemming from a religious group, claiming to represent citizens who are against corruption, which to my knowledge, should be about 95% of taxpayers, and pretty much anybody who understands the fact that stealing from the citizens is wrong. Minority? I don't think so buddy.

Bayan Muna - Represents the poor, the masses, the women, and the children. I really don't know about you, but I think the whole "We represent everybody" defeats the idea of representation in the first place. And unless the representatives are poor little girls who happen to be farmers, this party is just mooching off tax money.

Those are just a few. Admittedly there are in fact other parties that have genuine representations. But still.

In the upcoming elections, an even more numerous amount of party lists have joined in, in true spirit of the Filipino "Oh WOW THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH IT. WE SHOULD TOO" tradition. Even more useless, purposeless, and shady parties have entered the fray, and I won't even go to the whole backdoor Arroyo invasion plan issue here. As a result, we have a ballot that looks a papyrus scroll of the dead, and we have to do a lot more shading than what God would have expected us to.

And here's yet another more annoying fact: Since the list is alphabetically arranged, in true "Wais" fashion, almost all party lists are now named with a letter A at the start, or for 1-Utaks case, even a number. I dread to see the day one of our congress representatives will have a name that starts with an asterisk. Those that couldnt find a good word that starts with A contented themselves with adding the prefix ANG. If we can't even trust these fuckers to fall in line properly, how can we trust them to work for us?

Bottomline? The Party List System is not working, it never worked and it will never work. I say scrap it and let's waste the surplus tax we get in free beers for everybody.