Opposition lawmakers promised yesterday not to block two extra budget plans for job-creation projects but suggested Premier Yu Shyi-kun resign if the Cabinet fails to push unemployment down to 4.5 percent at the end of this year as it has promised.
The Cabinet is due to file formal requests later this month for NT$70 billion in supplementary budgets to finance the two job-creation programs it unveiled last December to combat unemployment and boost the economy.
PFP Legislator Thomas Lee (李桐豪), who has called the measures "blatant pork-barrel" legislation, proposed attaching a resolution to the budgets that says Yu should step down if the programs prove to be ineffective.
"The premier should resign to take the blame if the Cabinet fails to put 90 percent of the planned budgets into practice or bring unemployment down to 4.5 percent when the two programs expire at the end of this year," Lee said during a morning news conference.
He vowed to work with other opposition colleagues and put his plan into a resolution to be attached to the budgets.
The legislature will hear a report from the premier as well as the heads of the finance, budget and economics ministries on the purposes of the requested funds next Thursday. The lawmaking body will then send the two bills to committees for review.
Legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
The fate of the two budgets may not be decided until after the committees wrap up their business, he added.
The two provisions are expected to expand economic growth by 0.38 percent and bring the unemployment rate, now hovering above 5 percent, down to 4.5 percent by the end of December.
The Cabinet has already launched a NT$20 billion job-creation program. The legislature, when giving its nod to the package on Jan. 14, insisted the government seek funding for the project later this year.
Lee, who staged a tearful sit-in in front of the legislative chamber to protest the program, painted the hiring progress as disappointingly slow and disoriented.
"Under the program, the Ministry of the Interior plans to hire 2,000 temporary workers to set up a computer data bank for the nation's 6,925,019 households," he said. "That means each worker needs only to key in information on 6.87 households a day, a workload that is overly light."
In addition, the PFP lawmaker said the government has so far been unable to find qualified applicants to help prevent dengue fever and design Web pages.
Lee attributed the problem to the fact that most unemployed people are not equipped with sufficient computer knowledge.
"Yet the government seems to have turned a blind eye to the problem and continues to prescribe expedient, pseudo remedies to paper over its ineptitude," he said, adding that party caucuses must not extend the two programs when they expire.
Lee's appeal elicited sympathy from the KMT legislative caucus, whose leader, Liu Cheng-hung (劉政鴻), said he supports rigid reviews of all budget plans.
KMT Legislator Tseng Yung-chuan (
The largest opposition party, however, said it will not vote down the budgets as long as the Cabinet satisfies its spending inquiry.
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