Fri, Jan 07, 2011 page8

• EDITORIAL: Rethinking the role of government

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  Governments in Taiwan have a tendency to take advantage of the disadvantaged in society. Despite paying lip service to the importance of helping the less well-off, both local and central governments tend to ignore them either in favor of corporate interests or out of a general tendency to look down on the poor.

  Take the example of single and unmarried mothers. Because salaries have stagnated for more than 10 years while the cost of living has risen dramatically, growing numbers of young people find it hard to get married and raise a family. Both parents need to be working just to cover the basic costs of raising a single child. This puts pressure on any new family, and hence, divorce is on the increase.

  As a result of these economic and social pressures, more of babies have been born to unmarried mothers. One might expect local governments to see this as a good thing, considering that Taiwan’s birthrate has already plummeted to one of the lowest in the world, meaning huge social problems are looming just around the corner when the population starts to fall.

  Indeed, central and local governments have announced a raft of subsidies for newborns, with Hsinchu County offering a bonus of up to NT$100,000 for the birth of triplets. Although these incentives are intended to increase the birthrate, for some reason, unmarried mothers need not apply.

  Local government offices say that any request for a payment relating to the birth of a newborn must be accompanied by paperwork proving the parents are married. No other requests will be considered. In other words, in the eyes of local government officials, the 7,492 babies born to unmarried mothers in 2009 are not worth spending a single dollar on. National Taiwan University professor Chen Chao-ju (陳昭如) said it was as if local governments did not consider children born to unmarried parents to be “ideal citizens,” adding that these regulations clearly violated the principle of gender equality.

  Another example of the rights of the disadvantaged being trampled underfoot is the case of elderly farmers in Houlong Township (後龍), Miaoli County, who protested against a Miaoli County request to extend a deadline on the submission of an industrial park project. That’s just what elderly farmers down south need — another industrial park to pollute their land. Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) had even promised that their land would not be expropriated to build the park.

  Thankfully for the farmers, the Construction and Planning Agency rejected Miaoli’s request to extend the deadline, but not before vigorous protests and not before industrial planners said they could build a somewhat smaller industrial park, which would do little to alleviate pollution.

  Most of these elderly farmers that industrial planners seem to view as minor irritations to be ignored or bulldozed out of their fields to make way for huge chemical plants, own the land they occupy. They have rights that should be legally protected, and are a burden on nobody, as they mostly rely on subsistence farming. Kicking them off their land would just force them into the cities, to the houses of their grandchildren, where they would be a financial burden.

  In cases too numerous to count, local governments around the nation regularly display a callous disregard for those on the bottom rung of society, or they have to be all but forced into doing their job — namely protecting the rights of the weak and vulnerable in society. If Taiwan truly aspires to serve as a beacon for human rights in the region, this has to change.
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