Democracy is supposed to mean government of the people, by the people and for the people, but President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his team are governing this country in the sole interests of the wealthy.
As Nobel economics prize winner Joseph Stiglitz says of the US, it is government “of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent,” where everything works for the benefit of the 1 percent of rich and powerful businesspeople at the very top of the economic pyramid.
Thus, while the Ma administration seemed to be responding to seething popular resentment when it announced that it would push for the enactment or amendment of five laws related to justice in housing, these laws actually do little to promote justice. The newly enacted and amended laws offer nothing of any substance, the government having gone through the motions for the sake of appearance.
Where Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) had promised that the government’s proposed amendments to the Land Expropriation Act (土地徵收條例) would compete freely with those proposed by civic groups, in the end, Ma and Wu’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) did not dare allow the articles to be debated one by one in the legislature. Instead, it mobilized its lawmakers to sneakily push the draft act straight to its second reading. Farmers, young people and members of the Taiwan Rural Front held a continuous street protest on Dec. 12 and Dec. 13. For the first time in the two years of the current stage of the farmers’ movement, fierce clashes broke out, but in the end the protests were to no avail.
Civic groups wanted to see comprehensive measures instituted to restrain the kind of runaway expropriations that have become commonplace in Taiwan. They wanted regulations put in place to stop fertile farmland from being easily expropriated for use by major construction projects, unrestrained by any kind of standard. They also wanted a system to be set up for holding public hearings so that people whose land is under threat of expropriation can air their views, which naturally tend to be different from the way government departments see things. However, the Ma administration hardly accepted any of these ideas.
One extraordinary excuse I have heard for not holding public hearings is that the Ministry of the Interior does not have enough staff to set them up.
Even the proposed amendment that there should be a record of why applications for land expropriation are approved — something that has a great bearing on people’s lives, property and work — was simply dismissed by the government.
Ma keeps talking about how expropriated land should be purchased at market value, but the task of assessing land market value remains under the control of evaluation committees that are in the hands of local governments. In its version of the amendment, the government refused to change the system to let licensed professional real-estate assessors estimate the value of the land instead. In short, the government version is just old wine in a new bottle.
The crafty and sly nature of Ma’s government team was clearly revealed on the evening of Dec. 13, when the KMT caucus put forward a provisional proposal with regard to the newly amended Article 30 of the Land Expropriation Act, which stipulates that expropriated land should be purchased at the so-called market price. Most unusually, the provisional motion was that the Cabinet should set a separate date for this article to come into effect, instead of letting it come into effect the day after the president’s proclamation of the amended act, as is the usual practice. This is just one example of how the government has been playing tricks from beginning to end.
Even more preposterous is the way in which, following successive votes on the proposed amendments, the KMT caucus took the opportunity to sneak through a supplementary motion to the effect that the new act as amended could be applied right away to the already approved expropriation of land for construction of Greater Taichung’s urban mass transit system. The purpose of this provision was quite obviously to win votes in Greater Taichung, where the outlook for the KMT in next month’s elections is decidedly shaky. The KMT’s brazenness in sneaking through such a measure leaves one speechless.
Let us now consider the Housing Act (住宅法). This act was originally proposed in response to the high cost of housing in the greater Taipei area, which makes it impossible even for middle-class people with good jobs to buy homes, more so for young people. Under its original proposals, the government was willing to set aside only 7 percent of social housing for disadvantaged people and it was only through the determined efforts of Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chen Chieh-ju (陳節如) that this proportion was raised to 10 percent. However, the rewards and subsidies on offer that benefit construction companies for building social housing are extremely generous.
The act also places the rights and obligations for establishing social housing entirely in the hands of local governments. That being the case, how is the central government supposed to manage imbalances of supply and demand between different areas?
For example, while there are a lot of empty houses in built-up areas of Greater Taichung, the city government keeps reclassifying farmland and expropriating it in large tracts. An obvious motivation for this urban sprawl policy is the profit that some people stand to make from the change in land use.
Three other laws have also been amended to require the registration of the true value of real estate — the Real Estate Broking Management Act (不動產經紀業管理條例), the Land Administration Agent Act (地政士法) and the Equalization of Land Rights Act (平均地權條例). The original idea was that the price of land should be registered case by case, but lobbying by wealthy people and construction companies has resulted in this provision being relaxed so that land value only has to be registered zone by zone. Furthermore, while the land price has to be registered, it does not have to be made public, and it will not be used to determine the level of taxation. No wonder many experts are saying that the government is not playing the game for real, but just putting on a show to win votes.
Ma’s governing team is always talking about fairness and justice, but it does not give a fig for the less privileged members of society. If it acts so arrogantly even in the run-up to elections, you can be sure that once re-elected it will be sure to do more of the same and worse. People might give up hope of ever seeing things get better. While farmers live in fear of having their land expropriated at any moment, city dwellers live under the constant threat of seeing their homes demolished to make way for “urban renewal.”
If the other 99 percent of us do not want to end up being oppressed and exploited as wage slaves and serfs, we had better use our votes to get rid of the politicians who are taking Taiwan in that direction.
Let us hope that the two pairs of candidates who are challenging Ma and Wu in the presidential election can give a full account of their policy views regarding rural questions, especially the production and marketing of farm produce and the preservation of farmland, and the problem of runaway land expropriation. Disadvantaged people and the public in general would like to hear what they have to say.
Chan Shun-kuei is a lawyer and a member of the Taiwan Rural Front.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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