Reform is necessary to improve the quality of the legislature, academics said at a forum in Taipei yesterday.
"Some Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] lawmakers attend more of their supporters' wedding banquets and funerals than they do legislative meetings. They also spend more time thinking about how to get re-elected or how to earn back the money they spent on their election campaigns," said Yang Jih-ching (楊日清), a political science professor at National Chengchi University. "The KMT should have a system to prevent such legislators from being nominated again."
Yang spoke at a forum hosted by National Taiwan University political science professor Chang Lin-cheng (張麟徵). The forum was called to discuss whether the newly reduced legislature will prove more efficient than its predecessors.
For the new legislative session due to convene on Feb. 1, the number of legislative seats has been reduced from 225 to 113, with the KMT securing 81 seats in the Jan. 12 legislative elections.
KMT Legislator Joanna Lei (
"For example, at the moment, cross-party negotiation processes are not open to the public -- only the final results are," she said, adding that much maneuvering went on behind the scenes.
While all other legislative meetings are recorded, "the recordings can only be viewed from within the legislature. We need to make them public," Lei said.
Lei ran in the Jan. 12 elections as a representative of the New Party. However, none of the party's candidates will be able to enter the Legislative Yuan, as the New Party only received 4 percent of the second ballot.
Lei said that more legislation was required to keep the legislature in check.
"Only when there is total transparency and regulated lobbying and conflict of interest avoidance will legislative politics become `clean,'" she said.
On whether the new legislature -- with the KMT holding a comfortable two-thirds majority -- would become a one-party "legislative monster," Alexander Lu (
"I wouldn't worry that the election result would create a setback in democracy, because the change in the electoral system was agreed upon by all major political parties, and the new legislature is a result of a direct election," he said.
"In other words, it's a reflection of the will of the people," Lu said.
Lu said the new status quo could help to make the legislature more efficient.
"Now the KMT is fully responsible for what happens in the legislature. If it does a bad job, the majority could go to another party in the next election," Lu said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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