On Saturday, 97 percent of the people in Chichi, Nantou County, who could be bothered to vote showed they didn't want a garbage incinerator built in their community. Surprised? We weren't either. After all, what Chichi residents were really being asked was "do you want an eyesore of a facility, that will create lots more traffic on your narrow roads and rain potentially harmful pollution on you and your neighbors, built in your community?"
In this light we were only surprised that 80 people voted yes -- perhaps they had been offered jobs at the incinerator. The Chichi vote was almost as mindless as the Pinglin on-ramp vote a couple of weeks ago -- "do you want an on-ramp to the freeway allowing you to go places faster?" That result wasn't surprising either.
A rash of these mini-referendums are being organized with no other purpose than to tell us something that everyone already knew. Somehow the fact that "the people have spoken" is supposed to carry weight. But should it? After all, what people are being asked to decide on is between what is plainly good for them and what is plainly not.
Of course Chichi residents don't want an incinerator in their backyard. Probably no community in Nantou County does. But if an incinerator has to be built in Nantou County it has to be built somewhere against some community's wishes. For each community in turn to tell us they don't want it is simply irrelevant.
The problem with these mini-referendums is that they threaten to bring the whole idea of referendums to decide highly controversial issues into disrepute. People will soon begin to see referendums both large and small as a money-wasting way of telling us what we already knew -- indeed Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
Part of the problem lies in that phrase "to decide highly controversial issues." Actually strident opposition to something by those who have the most to lose does not make it controversial. The incinerator is not controversial in Chichi, there is in fact a remarkable unity of opinion on the issue. And that is of course because there is no down side presented to not having the incinerator, just as in Pinglin nobody expects anyone to support only being able to get to Taipei or Ilan along slow backroads rather than the new highway.
For any referendum to make sense people have to be given a choice of balanced outcomes -- "Do you want an on-ramp if you have to pay for it?" perhaps. Or "will you accept an incinerator if the county government raises spending on your community?"
The mess that the whole referendum issue is in is, of course, the result of the ineptness of the government's policy. For it was the central government, in fact President Chen Shui-bian (
If the Chichi and Pinglin votes seem stupid in conception remember where this conception came from.
It saddens us to have to say this because we have always been ardent supporters of the referendum idea. In fact the right of referendum is the only thing -- short of civil violence -- that stands between the people of Taiwan and the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) plans for unification. All the more dangerous then, that the concept is being dragged down by these current stupidities.
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