On Tuesday, the New Power Party (NPP) held a news conference at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei to outline its position on a series of proposed constitutional amendments in anticipation of the newly formed Constitutional Amendment Committee meeting in the next legislative session. NPP Legislator Chiu Hsien-chih (邱顯智), who is to sit on the committee, took part in the news conference.
The NPP legislators said that they hoped the committee would deliberate lowering the voting age to 18, abolishing the Examination Yuan and Control Yuan, putting the final nail in the coffin of the Taiwan Provincial Government, removing wording related to unification with China in the Constitution, lowering the threshold for constitutional amendment proposals and implementing a mixed-member proportional representation system to make it easier for smaller political parties to participate.
The respective arguments for and against these proposals aside, what was remarkable was the objective and clear exposition of the ideas, including details of how they were to be executed, the reasons they are desirable and the vision for the betterment of the nation they entail.
The NPP legislators had no need to berate the efforts of the government or any other party, and the proposals are to a degree aligned with the positions of the two main parties, the Democratic Progressive Party and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
There is the potential for consensus beyond partisan politics, the entrenched blue/green divide and opposition for opposition’s sake that have been such a frustrating, hackneyed, boring part of Taiwanese politics for decades, and which are deleterious to the national interest.
That is in stark contrast to the scenes of lawmakers chucking pig guts and squelching offal into the legislative chamber carpet on Friday last week, courtesy of the leadership of KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣), who occasionally offers glimmers that he might actually change the KMT, but then resorts to shameful shenanigans.
After months of glowing reports in the international media of Taiwan’s exemplary response to the COVID-19 pandemic and what this demonstrates about a young Asian democracy dealing with a major public health crisis, the headlines now read “Pig guts fly as Taiwan lawmakers brawl over US pork imports” — on the BBC News Web site — and Reuters euphemistically describes Taiwan’s democracy, not as “impressive” as one might have hoped, but “rambunctious,” in a report saying that “fighting is not uncommon in parliament” in Taiwan.
This is not the first time the BBC has reported on fighting in the legislature. In 2017, following tussles over Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program proposals, it noted how Taiwanese interviewed knew the fights were partly political theater, but did nothing to inform the public about the issue at hand and were “humiliating and do not advance democracy.”
The KMT is presumably working on the principle that if political theater was met with public approval in the past, doing it on steroids now would raise the volume of applause. This tactic could, and frankly should, backfire.
In response to complaints that the cleaning bill for the KMT’s offal stunt would run more than NT$1 million (US$34,763), Chiang said that failure to mount a robust boycott is tantamount to appeasing a dictatorship. That is a ridiculous thing to say, on all levels.
During Friday’s chaos in the legislature, Chiu was obliged to stand on a chair to rise above the fray, literally and figuratively, to make his voice heard. When he spoke, he said the KMT is not even capable of being an effective opposition.
He was right.
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