Last Thursday, the Cabinet’s Referendum Review Committee approved the Consumers’ Foundation petition for a referendum on US beef imports by a vote of 16-0.
The proposed referendum has now entered the second stage, which requires 860,000 valid signatures.
Confronted with this situation, Government Information Office Minister Su Jun-pin’s (蘇俊賓) response was that “the Cabinet would respect referendum initiatives launched by civic groups.”
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) is probably not happy about this, given his comments in a radio interview on Nov. 3 last year, when he said that renewed negotiations were impossible, that the issue wasn’t appropriate for a referendum and that there was too much populism and not enough rational reasoning involved.
Let’s put aside the question of whether the Referendum Review Committee — which last year rejected a petition for a referendum on an economic cooperation and framework agreement (ECFA) with China supported by more than 150,000 signatures — will once again avoid trampling on public opinion because of “concerns over the political situation.”
That was an obvious result, and really is nothing to be happy about. Instead, it would be more worthwhile to consider the more difficult obstacles facing the current referendum proposal — which has now more or less become the wish of the general public — by the current unreasonable referendum law.
Even if the high threshold of 860,000 signatures can be reached, Article 30 of the Referendum Act (公民投票法) stipulates that more than 50 percent of all eligible voters must vote. Unless a referendum were combined with the 2012 presidential elections, that is an insurmountable obstacle.
In reality, however, a presidential election will never be combined with a referendum.
This means that even if a majority supported a referendum, it would still have no chance because of the impossible threshold.
This is no exaggeration. Even the Penghu County gambling referendum, which the government pushed hard to initiate, would very likely have been a futile exercise had it not been for the government’s amendment of the “Outlying Islands Building Regulations (離島建設條例)” to remove restrictions on voter turnout in the referendum law.
This should not dampen the enthusiasm of civic groups, nor does it imply that the outcome of a referendum alone is important, while the process in itself is not.
Instead, civic groups that stand up to the government’s unreasonable arrogance are worthy of great resepct.
The referendum process is important for the further consolidation of Taiwan’s democracy.
However, the spirit and purpose of the referendum system can’t be truly implemented unless the Referendum Act is revised, and only when this mess of a law has been fully reformed will there be reason to cheer.
Huang Kuo-chang is a member of Taiwan Thinktank.
TRANSLATED BY JENS KASTNER
US aerospace company Boeing Co has in recent years been involved in numerous safety incidents, including crashes of its 737 Max airliners, which have caused widespread concern about the company’s safety record. It has recently come to light that titanium jet engine parts used by Boeing and its European competitor Airbus SE were sold with falsified documentation. The source of the titanium used in these parts has been traced back to an unknown Chinese company. It is clear that China is trying to sneak questionable titanium materials into the supply chain and use any ensuing problems as an opportunity to
It’s not every month that the US Department of State sends two deputy assistant secretary-level officials to Taiwan, together. Its rarer still that such senior State Department policy officers, once on the ground in Taipei, make a point of huddling with fellow diplomats from “like-minded” NATO, ANZUS and Japanese governments to coordinate their multilateral Taiwan policies. The State Department issued a press release on June 22 admitting that the two American “representatives” had “hosted consultations in Taipei” with their counterparts from the “Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The consultations were blandly dubbed the “US-Taiwan Working Group on International Organizations.” The State
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court and other government agencies released new legal guidelines criminalizing “Taiwan independence diehard separatists.” While mostly symbolic — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never had jurisdiction over Taiwan — Tamkang University Graduate Institute of China Studies associate professor Chang Wu-ueh (張五岳), an expert on cross-strait relations, said: “They aim to explain domestically how they are countering ‘Taiwan independence,’ they aim to declare internationally their claimed jurisdiction over Taiwan and they aim to deter Taiwanese.” Analysts do not know for sure why Beijing is propagating these guidelines now. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), deciphering the
Many local news media last week reported that COVID-19 is back, citing doctors’ observations and the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) statistics. The CDC said that cases would peak this month and urged people to take preventive measures. Although COVID-19 has never been eliminated, it has become more manageable, and restrictions were dropped, enabling people to return to their normal way of life due to decreasing hospitalizations and deaths. In Taiwan, mandatory reporting of confirmed cases and home isolation ended in March last year, while the mask mandate at hospitals and healthcare facilities stopped in May. However, the CDC last week said the number