One hundred and sixty-eight pieces of legislation have been passed since the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took office last year and President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday told her party to speed up the process of finalizing more bills amid confrontations between the DPP and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
“We welcome supervision and negotiation, but that does not mean delays or obstruction,” Tsai said. “The opposition parties are urged to end confrontation and give up prejudice. The nation cannot move forward without solidarity.”
The finalization of an infrastructure act, a draft act to promote transitional justice and pension reform bills are the priority to be handled in an extraordinary legislative session, if there is one, Tsai said.
“We are the ruling party and we have to take the full responsibility to carry out reforms,” she said.
The DPP-dominated legislature has approved 168 laws and amendments in areas such as transitional justice, pension reform, labor rights and energy, DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) said at the party’s weekly Central Standing Committee meeting.
With the first anniversary of the DPP administration on Saturday, Ker enumerated the DPP’s legislative progress since last year, including the promulgation of the Act Governing the Handling of Ill-gotten Properties by Political Parties and Their Affiliate Organizations (政黨及其附隨組織不當取得財產處理條例) and the Act on the Settlement of the Combination of Years of Service in Public Sector and Political Organizations (公職人員年資併社團專職人員年資計發退離給與處理條例).
The two acts, which aim to recover misappropriated national assets and overpaid pensions, are a milestone in developing transitional-justice mechanisms, Ker said.
The party also amended the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) to reduce weekly working hours and lift regulations considered exploitative of migrant workers, such as a rule requiring such workers to re-enter the nation every three years to renew their contracts, which allegedly emboldened agencies to extort fees from them, Ker said.
Amendments to the Long-Term Care Services Act (長期照顧服務法) and the Housing Act (住宅法) ensure medical care for people with chronic illnesses or disabilities, as well as housing rights for poor people, he said.
The DPP has rolled out pension reform bills to resuscitate the nation’s financially unstable pension funds, with the preliminary legislative review of proposals to cut the retirement benefits of civil servants and public-school teachers being completed, Ker said.
A preliminary review of the Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program was also finalized last week following weeks of heated opposition, he said.
However, the legislative efforts have been hampered by the KMT, which has disrupted the legislative process since April 25 with hundreds of motions raised to cripple activity, Ker 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:
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