The pan-blue camp's draft referendum bill was slammed yesterday as half-hearted because it was weighed down by restrictions impeding its usefulness.
"The pan-blue parties showed hesitation toward referendums by way of drafting the referendum bill with lots of restrictions," said Hsu Yung-ming (
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and People First Party (PFP) alliance released a draft of their version of a referendum law Thursday, in response to the pan-green camp's campaign for referendum legislation and a new constitution.
According to the draft, referendums could only be called as a result of popular ballot initiatives, they should not take place at the time of presidential elections and no referendum could be called on constitutional matters such as changing the nation's flag, name or the designation of its territory.
"The restriction to ballot initiatives, the separation of a referendum from a presidential election and the exclusion of issues involving constitutional discussion revealed show the pan-blue parties are nervous about the impact of referendums on themselves and local politics," Hsu said.
Ruling out constitutional issues from being subject to referendums meant that exactly the kind of high-level, highly divisive issues that popular democracy in the form of referendums might be used to resolve had been placed out of bounds, Hsu said.
The result would be that only low-level issues would be eligible.
"Referendums would be restricted to debates on public policy discussions. And a referendum only for a low-level political issue would be hardly draw in voters, especially if it came up on a different date to a presidential election," Hsu said.
The pro-China pan-blue camp is keen to prevent any referendum on the question of reunification with China, or the desirability of adopting more Taiwan-centric national symbols, hence the exclusion in the draft of constitutional issues.
It also claims that to hold a referendum at the same time as a presidential election would be to risk political unrest.
But the restriction is widely seen as an attempt not to erode the pan-blue vote since the alliance favors the less popular side of virtually any referendum issue that has been touted so far, and is afraid that rejection of its stance on any referendum issue will also mean rejection of its candidates in the election.
The pan-blues have however said that referendums might be carried out in conjunction with legislative elections.
The draft proposal also stipulated that people could initiate a constitutional amendment by petition, which, once it succeeded in collecting sufficient signatures, would be submitted to the Legislative Yuan for approval by an ad hoc panel of lawmakers.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Cho-shui (
"The KMT idea authorizes people to file a constitutional petition rather than carrying out a vote of referendum to decide whether the country wants a constitutional overhaul. The law grants lawmakers a monopoly of power over a constitutional overhaul since the Legislature has the ultimate decision over the people's petition," Lin said.
Lin said that the pan-blue proposals were unique among referendum legislation around the world in barring from eligibility precisely those issues which were of the utmost national importance.
The draft proposal, should it become law, prohibited people from making decisions via referendum on diplomatic, military or national security issues, the declaration of war or ratification of peace treaties.
The idea of referendums being separate from presidential elections was also out of the ordinary and confusing since this was a common practice in other countries.
"How could the opposition think that the nation would be at risk when a referendum comes alongside the presidential poll but no risk might come of from a referendum taking place alongside the legislative election," Lin said.
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