The so-called "five-no's" pledge made by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in his inaugural address in 2000 stands and Chen is still committed to avoiding a referendum on the country's sovereignty, Legislator Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴), head of the DPP's international affairs department, told a Washington audience Wednesday.
"The president's `five-no's' policy remains, and that is still the bottom line. Nobody is talking about having a referendum on Taiwan's independence or sovereignty," Hsiao said in a speech at a luncheon at the Brookings Institution, a think tank whose scholars include former chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan, Richard Bush.
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
Bush was the host of the lunch, which attracted nearly 100 government officials, scholars and friends of Taiwan. Hsiao is in Washington at the head of a 24-member DPP group in the US for a 10-day training course on US Taiwan policy and US party preparations for next year's elections.
Commenting on the referendum, Hsiao said, "What we really want to see is a normalization of the concept of the referendum identified with public policy issues, just like the United States."
"This is in response to what we see as paralysis in the current system [of handling contentious issues in Taiwan]", she said.
Lack of legal basis
"What we're really talking about are a series of public welfare issues," she said.
Hsiao said that while the Constitution allows referendums, there is no law to regulate them.
"If we have a referendum before we pass a law, that referendum will not have any legally binding power," she said. "It would be used for consultative purposes. It will be used for mobilizing enough public pressure to enable progress in our country to overcome the stagnation and paralysis that we all see in our legislature, to overcome the structural problems we have between the executive and legislative branches."
Policy tool
She said a referendum could be used to deal with issues such as the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, legislative reform, changes to the electoral system and cutting down on the number of legislators.
"These issues are not going to get through the normal process, given our political culture in Taiwan and given what we can see in party politics in the next year and in the next few years," she said.
She described the current blowup over the referendum issue a "serious misunderstanding of the referendums we're talking about in Taiwan right now."
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