The main reason why there is so much disorder in the nation’s politics is the cavalier attitude our government officials and elected representatives take toward the spirit of constitutional government.
In this nation, where state power is divided between five branches of government, just as with the three-power system that is usual in Western countries, the purpose of having a separation of powers is to prevent state power from being monopolized by certain individuals, families, parties or groups, because that would lead to dictatorship.
Just as investors hedge their investments, we distribute state power among the executive, legislative, judicial, control and examination branches of government.
When one branch of the state is lazy and negligent or gets out of control, the other branches are there to impose checks and balances upon it so that the nation can keep advancing in the direction of fairness and justice.
The practice of executive departments providing elected representatives with subsidies is a particularly bad example of a cavalier attitude to the spirit of constitutional government, because it undermines the check-and-balance function of the Constitution’s separation of powers.
While the executive departments that provide such subsidies should be criticized, the legislators who benefit from them are more deserving of contempt, and should be made to resign. If this happened in other democracies, it would certainly be a big scandal for which those involved would have to bear political responsibility.
However, politicians often brazenly claim that this is just the way things work, or else they protest that they do not put the money in their own pockets, and they think that they can easily get away with such excuses.
The big problem is that the public often tolerates such perverse practices by elected representatives and government officials, and this tolerance is causing the nation’s democracy to stagnate or even regress.
I have on occasion talked to Control Yuan officials responsible for the “four sunshine laws” about how to strengthen the Lobbying Act (遊說法) and the Act on Property Declaration by Public Servants (公職人員財產申報法). We also talked about how to make election spending more transparent and open to inspection, and I suggested that the relevant information should be put online so that the public could examine it more easily.
Surprisingly, the Control Yuan officials were quite frank in admitting that the Control Yuan’s spending has to be submitted annually for examination by the Legislative Yuan, so the Control Yuan is not in a good position to “offend” the legislature.
What, then, is the point of having the Control Yuan, which is supposed to act as an independent body? No wonder people in Taiwan are so dissatisfied with the government. All the parties on the political stage today must share the blame for allowing such distortions of democracy to continue in Taiwan.
Then there is the issue of the tens of billions of New Taiwan dollars that state-run companies allocate each year to look after their friends. A certain share of this money goes, by unspoken agreement, to the legislators who are supposed to oversee these companies. Once these legislators accept this money, or when they apply for subsidies on someone else’s behalf, what kind of oversight role can they be expected to play thereafter?
Employees of state-run companies have from time to time exposed cases of legislators making behind-the-scenes demands for money, or for certain contractors to be awarded the contracts for various projects or for particular people to be appointed to particular jobs. Meanwhile, in public, these lawmakers are fond of criticizing state-run companies and pretending to have a great sense of justice. The hypocrisy is sickening.
All this is not just true of central government. The “cooperation payments” or “constructive suggestion payments” given to councilors by county and city governments nationwide also smack of buying out elected representatives so that they will treat the executive departments with kid gloves, while councilors take the money and do with it as they please. Who is going to monitor how councilors use the funds available to them?
The amounts involved range from several million to more than NT$10 million (US$304,210) per annum. Each year, Taiwan’s nearly 1,000 councilors stealthily divvy up more than NT$5 billion of taxpayers’ hard-earned money. While the greedy ones put this money in their own pockets, there are also those who have a glimmer of conscience and do not pocket the money themselves, but who still take it to cover the expenses of their “vote captains” and supporters.
Many people are concerned about whether political power will pass from one party to another in January’s presidential and legislative elections, and whether the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) will retain a majority of seats in the Legislative Yuan.
However, what people should really be concerned about is whether Taiwan can see a handover from the old kind of politics to a new and better kind. If the aforementioned abuses inherent in the old style of politics cannot be gradually rooted out, the division of powers, which is crucial to the spirit of constitutional government, will go on being eroded, and Taiwanese will still have democracy only on the surface and not in essence.
In that case, differing election results will only be a matter of who gets to count the cash, so it is high time we set about overturning the old style of politics in Taiwan.
Chang Hung-lin is executive director of Citizen Congress Watch.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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