Premier Yu Shui-kun yesterday said that the Cabinet has not ruled out the possibility of using cross-party negotiations to help pass significant bills -- including a law legalizing referendums -- in this legislative session.
"Although the plebiscite law is not one of the priority bills we hope to pass this legislative session, we welcome any legislative caucus to present a draft bill and we'll do our best to help push it through this legislative session," Cabinet Spokesman Lin Chia-lung (
Yu made the remark during the weekly closed-door Cabinet affairs meeting yesterday morning.
Yu yesterday approved 120 priority draft bills the Cabinet hopes to pass in the legislature this session, excluding the plebiscite law.
Although DPP Legislator Trong Chai (蔡同榮) has been aggressively pushing for the enactment of such a law, the DPP caucus does not seem to be upbeat about the legislation because of the law's controversial nature and the potential of leading to a showdown between the ruling and opposition parties.
The KMT and the PFP caucuses have been firmly opposed to such legislation, out of concern that pro-independence groups might push for a plebiscite on politically charged issues such as independence.
Of the 120 priority bills Yu approved, nine are related to "sunshine" bills, including the political party draft law, the political donation draft law and the statute governing the disposition of assets improperly obtained by political parties.
Twenty-nine of the bills are designed to boost the economy, including the NT$50 billion public construction bill, national technology protection draft law, optical media draft law, and the statute regarding the establishment and management of the free-trade harbor zone.
Meanwhile, the Cabinet yesterday approved the draft bill of the organic law of the national human rights memorial museum, which would make the museum a subsidiary unit under the Presidential Office after the Academia Sinica and Academia Historica.
The Cabinet also approved the draft amendments to the organic law of the Presidential Office to include the museum under its wing.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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