Following the passage last month of amendments to the Referendum Act (公民投票法) that lower the legal voting age and thresholds for referendums, it is refreshing to see different political camps embrace a democratic tool that was once shunned to initiate plebiscites on issues that concern them.
The nation saw six referendums fail due to the high thresholds. They all took place under former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) administration and revolved around some of the most politically sensitive subjects on the table, including Taiwan’s admission to the UN, cross-strait relations and political parties’ illegitimately obtained assets.
Pan-blue politicians have typically deemed plebiscites stunts used by their pan-green counterparts to manipulate voters, which is why they often urged their supporters to refuse to vote on such proposals.
When the pan-blue camp forwarded a referendum, it was mostly to retaliate against or to tank a pan-green initiative.
Over the past decade, referendums have never been able to serve their true purpose: allowing informed voters to steer the direction of important government policies, instead of issues being driven by political agendas.
The passage of the amendments allows things to change, albeit slowly.
As the amended act greatly reduces the thresholds for initiating, seconding and passing referendums while precluding votes on issues such as the nation’s official title and territory, there is a growing trend — although it remains to be seen whether it is a positive one — of political camps resorting to plebiscites to decide matters that are closer to people’s lives.
At least nine referendum initiatives have been announced, including three by the New Power Party: one to rescind the labor law amendments that cleared the legislative floor on Wednesday last week, one to draw up a minimum wage act to guarantee basic living standards and another to ask President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to hold a national affairs conference to formulate a new constitution.
The Social Democratic Party and some civic groups also plan to initiate a plebiscite demanding the revocation of the labor law amendments, which allow some industries to raise the maximum number of consecutive working days from six to 12 and lower the rest time between shifts from 11 hours to eight hours.
In the pan-blue camp, Sun Yat-sen School, an organization founded in 2016 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), has initiated three referendum drives in only a few weeks.
One of them aims to reintroduce morality classes and rebuild Zhonghua culture (中華文化) — the culture of Chinese races — in schools, while the other two seek to oppose the Democratic Progressive Party government’s civil servant pension reform and its passage of the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例).
Proposals that touch upon the nation’s international status have surfaced nevertheless, including one put forward by an alliance led by former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) for a neutral Taiwan and one proposed by pro-independence groups to rename the national delegation to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics from “Chinese Taipei” to “Taiwan.”
Although some of the referendum initiatives on the table are reminiscent of subjects covered in past plebiscites, the fact that new issues have emerged should be seen as a good sign, because it could encourage more people than just those with strong views on the independence-unification issue to become involved in public affairs.
The side effect of all this could be that officials at the polling stations for the nine-in-one local elections on Nov. 24 might end up overworked, as there are expected to be a record number of referendums.
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