The date for finalizing a bill on pension reform for military retirees has been delayed indefinitely, Premier William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday, citing the need for further discussions between the public and responsible agencies.
Lai made the remarks before leaving the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, where he had been scheduled to give an administrative report.
Lai’s report was delayed and the proceedings halted after Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) said more communication was required.
Photo: Huang Yao-cheng, Taipei Times
The military pension reform bill was initially listed as one of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government’s top priorities in the legislative session that opened yesterday.
However, the Executive Yuan had, following a discussion on Monday, reached a consensus with the DPP caucus to delay finalizing the Cabinet’s proposal, Lai said, adding that there is not yet a timetable on how long the bill would be delayed.
The issue requires further discussion among the Veterans Affairs Council, other agencies and the public, he said.
Lai did not give reporters a definite answer on whether the pension floor for military retirees, tentatively set at NT$38,990 — higher than the NT$32,160 floor for retired public-school teachers and civil servants — would undergo further changes, saying only it was among the topics to be discussed.
He added that he empathized with Su and lawmakers over their decision to break up the meeting after an incident earlier yesterday, when 62-year-old retired colonel Miao Te-sheng (繆德生) fell from a height of about 6m while climbing the wall of a legislative building in a protest against the proposed bill.
Miao was in a coma as of press time last night.
Earlier in the day, retired lieutenant general Wu Sz-huai (吳斯懷) delivered a petition addressed to Su after he was briefly hospitalized after fainting during scuffles that broke out during the protest.
Legislative Yuan Secretary-General Lin Chih-chia (林志嘉) accepted the protesters’ petition on behalf of Su and said he would distribute copies to lawmakers.
The legislature would do all it can to continue discussions on the matter and find a solution that is acceptable to everyone, he added.
The petition called on the Legislative Yuan to delay reviewing the bill on pension cuts for military retirees, because the Presidential Office’s Pension Reform Committee had broken a promise it made in May last year that a bill would not be tendered by the Ministry of National Defense before extensive communication was carried out between the office and retirees.
The bill on pension reforms for military retirees should be halted, so that it can be proposed in tandem with the bill targeting other workers’ pensions, Wu said, adding that this would help all pension cuts to be implemented at once, thereby preventing a scenario in which the cuts need to be amended later, as was the case with the DPP’s initial amendments to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) in 2016.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
Conflict with Taiwan could leave China with “massive economic disruption, catastrophic military losses, significant social unrest, and devastating sanctions,” a US think tank said in a report released on Monday. The German Marshall Fund released a report titled If China Attacks Taiwan: The Consequences for China of “Minor Conflict” and “Major War” Scenarios. The report details the “massive” economic, military, social and international costs to China in the event of a minor conflict or major war with Taiwan, estimating that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could sustain losses of more than half of its active-duty ground forces, including 100,000 troops. Understanding Chinese
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
RSS