A referendum was held recently in Pinglin township in Taipei County. If this move was supposed to demonstrate the will of the public, it was no different from both wearing rainwear and carrying an umbrella -- it was superfluous.
Consider the plan for stations to be built along the high-speed railway. At first, there were a certain number of stations. Now, after political lobbying, more stations have been added. If you now were to ask Pinglin residents whether the exit for the Pinglin traffic control center along the Taipei-Ilan Freeway should be made a regular freeway exit, people would fall over each other in their eagerness to agree. Apart from transportation considerations, there are other predictable potential benefits, such as tourism, land and so on. Holding a referendum does little more than amplify the volume of demands.
But if we had expanded the area where the referendum was held to Taipei County, or even Taiwan, would we still have gotten 98 percent of votes in favor? One can but wonder who should be qualified to vote in a referendum on a specific issue?
Over the past dozen years, many people have awoken and now refuse to ignore their right to express themselves the way they did during the authoritarian era. Unfortunately, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, and though we of course have to fight for the things that make sense, we now also fight for things that do not make sense, as if "the public" transcends everything.
As soon as there is a decision placing high-voltage towers, crematories, waste dumps and incinerators or designated SARS-treatment centers in a certain place, local residents are certain to launch mass protests.
It is easy to see that if this kind of opinion poll-style referendum caught on, many public construction projects would be brought to a halt. If a waste dump is planned for a certain township in a certain county, residents of that township would demand that it be placed in another township, while county residents would demand that it be placed in another county. Taiwan would be divided into 300-odd townships and thousands of villages and boroughs that all could use a referendum to back their demand to pass any hot potato or stinking garbage bag around.
People naturally fight to obtain good things and push bad things on to someone else, but Taiwan's legal system and democratic education still haven't been able to teach people the limits of how far you can go.
Let's use the distribution of high school placements for next year as an example. A few hundred students with high test scores failed to gain acceptance, mainly because they and their parents had given too few school choices. Despite this, many parents blamed the government for not announcing the intervals between different test-score classes, and demanding that the government find a way of solving their problems. There isn't always sound reasoning behind public hardship and bending to the public's wishes.
Given that the relationship between the public and officials has not been normalized, it is certainly not a good thing to hold a referendum before the legal rules have been laid down. It is true that a referendum is the most direct way towards democracy, but with the current implementation, results may be completely selfish and fragmentary. If one township can hold a referendum on whether or not they want a freeway exit, then can another township hold a referendum on whether or not they want a graveyard? If every township in a county holds a referendum and the result in each referendum is that they don't want a waste dump in their township, should the garbage then be shipped to another county?
Chen Ro-jinn is a freelance writer.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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