Print

Mail

wiki links

DPP moves to enforce quota drive

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) decided yesterday to discipline party officials who fail to fill their quota of signatures in the party's campaign to recover the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) stolen assets.

The DPP's Central Standing Committee passed a resolution yesterday that stated that DPP legislators who fail to meet the quota by June 30 would be referred to the party's disciplinary body for punishment.

At a press conference yesterday, acting DPP Chairman Chai Trong-rong (蔡同榮) said that he insisted on pushing party officials to "carry out their responsibilities" in the campaign because its outcome will have a great impact on the party.

If the campaign failed, he said, the party's credibility would be undermined because the public would conclude that the DPP lied about its goal of recovering the KMT's stolen assets.

The two referendums held simultaneously with the presidential election in 2004 also showed that holding a referendum on the KMT's assets would be "greatly advantageous to the DPP in next year's [presidential] election," he added.

"Every party official should play their own role," he said. "It is not like we are asking them to commit murder or arson. We are only asking every one of them to garner 3,000 signatures," Chai said.

When asked for comments, DPP Legislator Gao Jyh-peng (高志鵬), who doubles as the director of the DPP's Central Discipline Committee, declined to elaborate on possible punishments the committee would impose on party officials who do not collect enough signatures.

"I believe they are all like naughty primary school children who will not finish their summer homework until the very last day of the vacation," he said.

Under the Referendum Law (公投法), the DPP must collect at least 830,000 signatures by the end of June, but the party has set a goal of collecting 1 million signatures.

To reach that goal, the DPP assigned signature quotas to party officials ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 signatures.

As of Tuesday, the party had only reached 24.61 percent of its goal, with 37 officials failing to submit any signatures and many others submitting only a few.

Chai had originally proposed to suspend DPP members who failed to reach their quota for one year.

Although this now seems unlikely, the DPP reserves the right to suspend the party rights of candidates in party primaries and legislative and presidential elections. As a result, the resolution received mixed reviews from party members yesterday.

DPP caucus whip Wang Tuoh (王拓) said punishing party members by suspending their rights would be controversial and detrimental to party harmony.

"I personally believe recovering the KMT's stolen assets is a very important public issue, but punishing those who fail to fill their quota of signatures by suspending their rights will only be interpreted as a move to rule out certain candidates," he said at a separate press conference yesterday.

He had received many phone calls from fellow DPP legislators concerned about the resolution, Wang said.

"For example, Keelung is a district where pan-blue supporters outnumber pan-green supporters and therefore it is more difficult for members in Keelung to complete their share," he said.

see editorial on page
This story has been viewed 1289 times.