The reiteration of the drug war was there.

And so was the insistence on the correctness

of his stance toward China. But, surprisingly, for his fourth State of the Nation
Address, President Duterte didn’t dwell too much on his pet themes. He returned,
instead, to his old and tested battle cry of fighting corruption, spending a good part of
his one-and-a-half-hour speech to venting frustration about it.
It’s a theme and an image that have undoubtedly served him well, first in his
phenomenal campaign and now in the first three years of his presidency. His public
approval ratings, as he pointed out in his speech, are practically through the roof
midway through his term. And yet, despite his unyielding battle against it, Mr. Duterte
rued that corruption is still everywhere, fueled by the greed of officialdom and the
selfishness of people.

“It is both a national embarrassment and a national shame,” he thundered. “For every
transaction, a commission; for every action, extortion; and a request that goes on and
on—endlessly and shamelessly.”
Turning to a joke, he said: “The Philippines is so corrupt… that if you kill all the
senators and congressmen and the President, we will have a new day.” If a quake
happened that very moment, he added, the cleansing would have been achieved.
Nervous laughter all around. This was Congress and the country’s top officialdom
before him; touché, as they say. In the latest budget, legislators from Mr. Duterte’s
supermajority had brought back the hated pork barrel, a source of gargantuan
corruption in the recent past, and divvied up billions of pesos of allocations among
themselves. But such was Mr. Duterte’s supposed disdain for corruption that… he
said not one word about it.
He did, at one point, asked Congress to reimpose the death penalty not only for drug
trafficking, but also for plunder.