Committee membership for legislators of smaller parties should not be determined by drawing lots, New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said yesterday, after many of the party’s lawmakers did not make it onto their preferred committees.
Of the party’s five legislators, only Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) and Hung Tzu-yung (洪慈庸) got their top choices, becoming members of the Economics Committee and the Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee respectively.
However, Freddy Lim (林昶佐) was allotted a seat on the Foreign and National Defense Committee instead of the Education and Culture Committee, which went to Amis Legislator Kawlo Iyun Pacidal, who was hoping for a place on the Internal Administration Committee governing Aboriginal affairs.
“If the larger parties have the generosity to let smaller parties pick from their areas of expertise, that would be a better way to handle it,” Huang, who doubles as the NPP’s executive chairman, said as he echoed comments by People First Party Legislator Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞).
Huang, who rose to prominence during the 2012 movement against monopolization of the media, was placed on the Finance Committee instead of the Transportation Committee, which has jurisdiction over the National Communications Commission, which regulates the media.
The Organic Law of Legislative Committees (立法院各委員會組織法) stipulates that parties that have too few legislators to qualify for seats on any of the legislature’s eight committees will have their committee membership determined by drawing lots.
Committee membership lasts for a year and lawmakers are allowed to trade positions if they fail to draw their preferred committee.
Parties with more than eight legislators are allotted committee membership proportionally and can directly submit committee membership lists.
In related news, Deputy Legislative Speaker Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) yesterday met with Social Democratic Party (SDP) officials to discuss legislative reform as the party grapples with its future after failing to win any seats in last month’s legislative elections.
SDP spokesman Chen Shang-chih (陳尚志) said that the party would seek to attract new members, but that specific plans would have wait until a new governing committee is elected next month.
The party has about 100 members, he said.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching