Lawmakers yesterday wrapped up a second round of negotiations on proposed amendments to the Act of Military Service for Officers and Noncommissioned Officers of the Armed Forces (陸海空軍軍官士官服役條例) and resolved to put 18 disputed draft amendments to a vote during a plenary session at the legislature on Tuesday next week.
Despite extensive discussions this week, the four legislative caucuses remained largely divided over the proposed pension reform for retired military officers. No consensus was reached on rules for pension payment and calculation.
The Cabinet has proposed that military officers be required to serve for 20 years before they can start receiving their pensions, with their income replacement rates increasing by 2 percent, from 55 percent, each year until they reach 95 percent for noncommissioned officers and 90 percent for commissioned officers.
However, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus proposed a starting income replacement rate of 60 percent.
A motion filed by KMT Legislator Lu Yu-ling (呂玉玲) aims to set the starting income replacement rate for active military officers at 55 percent and that for retired officers at 60 percent.
After the caucuses failed to agree on pension payment rules, Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) said that the item would be discussed and voted on during a plenary session.
A motion by the New Power Party (NPP), which said that military instructors at senior-high schools should be stripped of their pensions if they are found to have sexually assaulted students, was protested by Ministry of National Defense officials, who said that it was too “partial.”
The remark was echoed by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘).
A defense ministry official asked why the NPP called for such legislation rather than a bill that would ban military instructors convicted of selling controlled drugs to students from receiving pensions.
NPP Legislator Freddy Lim (林昶佐) said that the Act Governing Retirement, Severance, and Bereavement Compensation for the Teaching and Other Staff Members of Public Schools (公立學校教職員退休資遣撫卹條例) also contained a rule that bars teachers that have sexually assaulted students from receiving pensions.
Since a military instructor is a teaching position, the same rule should apply, Lim said.
The NPP motion is also to be deliberated during the plenary session next week.
The caucuses failed to agree on a rate of return for the pension fund, which was set up using portions of military personnel’s salaries.
The return rate should be set at 4 percent, with any shortfall resulting from investments being offset by taking from other government budgets, to ensure that military retirees’ pensions would not be further reduced, KMT Legislator Ma Wen-chun (馬文君) said, adding that agencies failing to meet the 4 percent mark should be held accountable.
As a pension fund management bill is expected to be reviewed at the legislature during the next legislative session, it would be more fitting to discuss legal standards on the rate of return then, DPP Legislator Wang Ting-yu (王定宇) said.
One area lawmakers did agree on was that the window for lieutenant generals to receive a promotion before they have to retire should be extended from eight to 10 years.
This would allow capable lieutenant generals who lack the opportunity to move up the ranks to stay in their posts longer, Minister of National Defense Yen De-fa (嚴德發) said.
Additional reporting by Tseng Wei-chen
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
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
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