There are many unscrupulous merchants who rent or illegally occupy mountain forest areas in Taitung County and cultivate them with profitable crops such as ginger and sugar apples. As much as 3,000 hectares in the county is being misused in this way, causing entire mountaintops to be denuded, which in turn causes landslides.
Following breakouts of the highly pathogenic H5N6 strain of avian influenza among geese and ducks in Hualien County, a few days ago it was confirmed that the sudden death of nearly 4,000 turkeys over a number of days on a farm in Tainan’s Liujia District (六甲) was also caused by the H5N6 virus, which can be transmitted from birds to humans. These outbreaks show that Taiwan is having big problems with respect to inter-ministerial disease control administration.
For many years now, elections have taken pride of place on the political scene. Amusement-style administration is ubiquitous as presidents and ministers busy themselves handing out hong bao (red envelopes), admiring festive lanterns and organizing running events, while paying scant attention to basic orderly administration issues such as social security, hygiene, disease control and the conservation of mountains and rivers.
Concerning the conservation of slopes, which includes sloping, hilly and mountainous terrain, such areas account for about 330,000 hectares in Taitung County, or 94 percent of its total land area of 350,000 hectares, yet the county government only has 10 officials responsible for slopeland management and inspections of water conservation projects, while the National Property Administration’s Taitung Branch Office has just 12 officials tasked with managing and inspecting more than 80,000 plots of slopeland.
Such examples of poor allocation of personnel and insufficient funding are often seen in the administration of police forces, fire brigades, illegal structure management, food safety, environmental protection, public hygiene, quarantine inspections, waterway management, water pollution prevention and the prevalence of illegal factories.
These administrative weaknesses have led people feeling insecure, eroded mountains and polluted rivers.
The Legislative Yuan Budget Center’s report on the overall evaluation of the central government’s general budget for this year said that in 2013 foodstuff factories made 218,170 different products, yet there were only 409 local government food inspectors, meaning that on average each of them had the onerous task of inspecting 533 types of products.
In addition, by the end of 2015 more than 300,000 companies had registered on the Office of Food Safety’s information network, known as the “food cloud,” and experts warn that local government health departments do not have enough time or personnel to check the veracity of data registered on the system.
These experts say that if companies were allowed to self-manage, it would throw the door wide open to abuse.
The report said that natural disasters seriously threaten bridges and there is the problem of landslides in water catchment areas.
Some counties and cities still have many school buildings that need to be made more earthquake-resistant, it said.
Management measures with regard to investment and the supply side when replacing old electric power equipment do not pay sufficient attention to environmental protection, it said.
Running water is inefficiently distributed and it would take at least 53 years to replace all of the nation’s aging pipes, it said.
There are many such problems, but local governments have insufficient and poorly allocated budgets. Their administrative personnel are aging, with older staff failing to pass their technical experience down to younger staff. As a result of these and other factors, local authorities are unable to provide proper safeguards for lives and property.
Many such warnings about administrative decay can be found in the center’s evaluation of this year’s budget and its evaluation deliberations on the final financial statement of the central government’s general budget for 2015.
However, the Legislative Yuan, in contravention of the Freedom of Government Information Law Act (政府資訊公開法), only provides these two evaluations to legislators for reference. This makes it difficult for members of the public to understand how the government is misusing budgets or to grasp the shortcomings of its governance.
The most important function of administration is to ensure public safety and maintain various aspects of social order, but nowadays the government often puts the cart before the horse by concentrating on things such as ribbon-cutting, public relations and measures designed to drum up support from groups and communities.
When it comes to policy implementation, it is often a case of doing the easy things such as holding conferences and making big promises and grandiose claims, while avoiding the hard graft of making comprehensive plans, properly implementing laws and regulations and allocating sufficient budgets and personnel to properly perform the duties of orderly administration.
If this mentality of neglecting orderly administration continues unchanged, it would mean that this year’s judicial reform conference and the anticipated financial conference are likely to be no more than fireworks displays that cannot salvage the ever-worsening social environment and administrative practices.
Lin Terng-yaw is a retired Tunghai University law professor.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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