The Control Yuan yesterday censured the Cabinet-level Council of Aboriginal Affairs for dereliction of duty in not providing proper assistance to the nation's Aborigines and making them suffer from the difficulties of unemployment.
"The council obviously wastes its resources by setting up job-service stations in cities and counties where relatively few Aboriginal people live," a report released by the Control Yuan stated yesterday.
"Also, its training programs provided to that group do not fit their needs and do not sufficiently lower the group's unemployment rate," it added.
The report was announced yesterday by Control Yuan members Lin Ju-liang (林鉅鋃), Lin Jiang-tsai (林將財), Lin Chiou-shan (林秋山) and Huang Wu-tzu (黃武次) who conducted the investigation into the matter.
The four highlighted the problem of high unemployment for Aboriginal groups in Taiwan and used that as the basis for the Control Yuan's censure of the council for its failure to resolve such problems.
According to the report, official statistics show that in May of this year, the Aboriginal unemployment rate reached 8.37 percent compared to 5.02 percent for non-Aboriginal groups.
This year's statistics also show that the nation's Aborigines who are currently looking for work have, on average, been jobless about 65 weeks. Among those Aborigine job hunters, 3 percent of them have been without work for more than 5 years.
The Control Yuan found that the Aboriginal council had set up job service stations for Aborigines in five urban areas including Taipei, Keelung, Taoyuan, Taichung and Kaohsiung.
But most Aborigines do not live in those cities -- they live in Hualien, Taitung and Pingtung Counties; and the highest unemployment rates for Aboriginals are in Keelung City (21.44 percent), Ilan County (20.27 percent) and Hsinchu County (21.44 percent).
"The administrative measures should be service-oriented, but the council obviously did not do it well and wasted the resources of the government," Huang said.
Furthermore, the new report pointed out that even though the council has provided job-training programs every year since 1999, the participation rate in such programs has been as low as 11 percent.
Also, even after obtaining certificates from such programs, only 5 percent of the participants are working in a field related to their studies.
"The council achieves little in terms of promoting job-training programs as well as introducing participants to proper positions," the report said.
The report concluded that the council should take at least partial responsibility for the fact that the unemployment rate among Aborigines remains high.
The council has two months to report to the Control Yuan with its proposed measures for improving its performance.
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to
A relatively large earthquake may strike within the next two weeks, following a magnitude 5.2 temblor that shook Taitung County this morning, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. An earthquake struck at 8:18am today 10.2km west of Taitung County Hall in Taitung City at a relatively shallow depth of 6.5km, CWA data showed. The largest intensity of 4 was felt in Taitung and Pingtung counties, which received an alert notice, while areas north of Taichung did not feel any shaking, the CWA said. The earthquake was the result of the collision between the Philippine Plate and the Eurasian Plate, the agency said, adding
Snow fell in the mountainous areas of northern, central and eastern Taiwan in the early hours of yesterday, as cold air currents moved south. In the northern municipality of Taoyuan, snow started falling at about 6am in Fusing District (復興), district head Su Tso-hsi (蘇佐璽) said. By 10am, Lalashan National Forest Recreation Area, as well as Hualing (華陵), Sanguang (三光) and Gaoyi (高義) boroughs had seen snowfall, Su said. In central Taiwan, Shei-Pa National Park in Miaoli County and Hehuanshan National Forest Recreation Area in Nantou County saw snowfall of 5cm and 6cm respectively, by 10am, staff at the parks said. It began snowing
The 2025 Kaohsiung Wonderland–Winter Amusement Park event has teamed up with the Japanese manga series Chiikawa this year for its opening at Love River Bay yesterday, attracting more than 10,000 visitors, the city government said. Following the success of the “2024 Kaohsiung Wonderland” collaboration with a giant inflatable yellow duck installation designed by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, this year the Kaohsiung Tourism Bureau collaborated with Chiikawa by Japanese illustrator Nagano to present two giant inflatable characters. Two inflatable floats — the main character, Chiikwa, a white bear-like creature with round ears, and Hachiware, a white cat with a blue-tipped tail
RSS