Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday voiced his disagreement with a recent poll that showed his disapproval rate rose to 48.5 percent, the highest since he took over the premiership a year ago.
“If interviewees were asked about the controversies on the expansion projects at the Central Taiwan Science Park, the land expropriation in Dapu (大埔) and the fire at the sixth naphtha cracker plant, of course the disapproval rate would rise,” Wu said when approached for comments on the recent poll.
“If the questions had been constructed differently, the questionnaire would have led to different results,” he added, citing other polls that put more than 80 percent of the public in agreement with the government’s responses to the controversies.
He did not name the polls he was referring to, however.
On Friday, the Chinese-language monthly Global Views released its latest poll that showed President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the Cabinet’s approval ratings on the decline. The poll showed Ma’s disapproval rating at 57 percent, a slight increase from 56.2 percent last month.
It also showed Wu’s disapproval rating had gone up from a low of 39 percent in February.
Regarding the Cabinet’s performance, the survey saw an increase of 1.6 points to 51.8 percent in its disapproval rating, the highest since August last year, when the rating was at 63.2 percent following public dissatisfaction with the government’s response to Typhoon Morakot.
Wu took over as premier after his predecessor Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) resigned to take responsibility for the government’s much-criticized disaster relief efforts.
“No matter what polls show, there are always things that the government does not do well enough,” Wu said yesterday. “The decrease in the government’s approval ratings means that people expect the government to do better. The government has to work harder.”
Weighing on the Ma administration have been a string of confrontations between affected residents and police over a slew of environmental disputes, among which include the fate of the giant Formosa Petrochemicals refinery complex after three fires in six months raised questions about safety and environmental damage.
The government has also backed a new factory by the world’s fourth-largest LCD panel maker, AU Optronics, even after farmers and environmentalists blocked it with a lawsuit last month.
Meanwhile, unemployment remains at a stubborn 5.2 percent, unusually high for Taiwan, and statistics from the Ministry of the Interior show that the number of households living below the poverty line rose to a record high of 108,000 in the second quarter of this year.
“People are impatient with the Ma administration for slow reform and its lack of efficiency,” Tamkang University strategic studies professor Alexander Huang (黃介正) said. “It’s reputation, expectations and frustration combined.”
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY REUTERS AND STAFF WRITER
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