A little more than 52 percent of the public is unhappy with the Executive Yuan’s efforts to boost employment, while 52.9 percent are dissatisfied with its efforts to boost economic development, a survey by the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC) shows.
The survey, conducted on March 26 and March 27, interviewed 1,241 people above the age of 20 through random selection of residential telephones. In all, 1,073 agreed to answer the survey, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.
The survey showed that 43.8 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with the amount of increase in social welfare provision and 48.4 were unhappy with the education system.
Photo: Hung Jui-chin, Taipei Times
While 48 percent professed confidence in the government’s policy implementation for the next year, 40 percent said they were not confident.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) said that while President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) had won re-election on an economic platform, post-election surveys by the government showed that more than 50 percent of the public were dissatisfied with the government’s performance on economic development.
There were also higher figures of discontent with regard to other policies, which shows that Taiwanese are very unhappy with the government, Tsai said, adding that the public had lost all trust in the Ma administration.
Ma should reform his Cabinet, halt policies such as electricity and gas price increases, and apologize to the nation, Tsai said.
Tsai also claimed that the commission survey had tried to avoid the issue of public trust in the Cabinet by changing the title of its survey.
Past surveys by the commission had been titled “The People’s Satisfaction with Governmental Policy Implementation” and included questions on satisfaction with the Cabinet’s performance and administrative efficiency, Tsai said.
The change in title to “Satisfaction of the Executive Yuan’s Policy Implementation” stems from the government’s anticipation of negative feedback and represents an attempt to avoid the issue of the Cabinet’s approval rate and presidential performance by omitting those questions, Tsai said.
DPP Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) also alleged that questions on satisfaction with government performance on cross-strait relations, performance on cross-strait diplomacy and performance on taxation reform were purposefully left out.
“Why are there no questions concerning cross-strait diplomacy, when in past policy implementation surveys there were?” Chen asked.
The Ma administration must have known that the controversial “One country, two areas (一國兩區)” rhetoric voiced late last month would not be accepted by the majority of the public, Chen said, adding that the Ma administration did not include questions concerning cross-strait issues, because of fears that such questions would lower the government’s overall score on policy implementation.
Commission spokesperson Sung Yu-hsieh (宋餘俠) said the survey focused on the implementation of Cabinet policy, which was why issues of diplomacy and cross-strait matters, which pertain to presidential powers, were not included.
On the issue of tax reform, Sung said the lack of questions on the subject reflected the Ministry of Finance’s uncertainty over its capital-gains tax policy at the time the survey was conducted.
As for the lack of questions on satisfaction with the Cabinet and the president, Sung said the commission felt responses to the questions pertaining to presidential satisfaction were easily swayed by the fame of a person or the respondents’ personal feelings.
“We concentrated on questions that would be of genuine help to government policy implementation and left out those that touched on satisfaction with specific individuals,” Sung said.
Translated by Jake Chung, staff writer
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
Taiwan yesterday denied Chinese allegations that its military was behind a cyberattack on a technology company in Guangzhou, after city authorities issued warrants for 20 suspects. The Guangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau earlier yesterday issued warrants for 20 people it identified as members of the Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command (ICEFCOM). The bureau alleged they were behind a May 20 cyberattack targeting the backend system of a self-service facility at the company. “ICEFCOM, under Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, directed the illegal attack,” the warrant says. The bureau placed a bounty of 10,000 yuan (US$1,392) on each of the 20 people named in
The High Court yesterday found a New Taipei City woman guilty of charges related to helping Beijing secure surrender agreements from military service members. Lee Huei-hsin (李慧馨) was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for breaching the National Security Act (國家安全法), making illegal compacts with government employees and bribery, the court said. The verdict is final. Lee, the manager of a temple in the city’s Lujhou District (蘆洲), was accused of arranging for eight service members to make surrender pledges to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in exchange for money, the court said. The pledges, which required them to provide identification
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the