The new year has just begun. In addition to a presidential election looking like a standoff at the beginning of the year, there will also be a legislative election at the end of the year that looks like it might result in a reshuffle.
In the run-up to the presidential election, the legislature has become an arena for vicious interparty battle, with both sides hoping to use political manipulation to improve their own position and degrade the position of the other side.
The most recent crossing of swords involved the Cabinet's five-year, NT$500 billion budget for the 10 key infrastructure projects, which was not passed during the last legislative session. The government proposed holding an extraordinary meeting to review the bill, but the proposal was overturned during debate. This led to yet another round of fingerpointing between the ruling party and the opposition.
In response to President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) criticism that reforms are stuck in the legislature, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), who did not want to come off as the weaker party, said the legislature has done all it can to monitor the government and care for the public's wallets.
However, the issues to be debated in the proposed extraordinary meeting were not limited to the budget for the 10 infrastructure projects. They also included a constitutional amendment to cut the number of legislative seats in half, making it fair to ask if this topic caused many legislators to feel ill at ease and completely unwilling to initiate the reform of any legislative mechanism, thinking they'd better procrastinate if at all possible.
No matter what legislators or their political parties have promised, everything is thrown to the wind as soon as personal interests are being considered.
Another piece of news seems to indirectly prove that the legislators in this legislature have no intention at all of carrying out any kind of legislative reform. Late last year, the Legislative Yuan's Expenditure Examination Committee heard a report on a plan to build a new Legislative Yuan at a new location. Legislators from both government and opposition were concerned over the NT$24.2 billion special budget allocated to the plan, and the Examination Committee asked the legislative speaker to call a meeting between legislators from the ruling and opposition parties to discuss relocating the legislature to the site now occupied by the Air Force General Headquarters within five years.
That is some legislature -- claiming to care for the public's wallets, it is willing to set up a budget to exploit the public's hard-earned money at its own leisure as soon as it is able to fatten itself. If it truly is determined to halve the number of seats in the legislature (haven't both the ruling and opposition parties put forward the sincerest of proposals), then the space in the current Legislative Yuan, including legislators' research facilities, is definitely more than sufficient. Why the need to spend more than NT$200 billion to relocate and expand the Legislative Yuan?
To prove that the parties putting forward presidential and vice presidential candidates really will do what they say they will do, and that they keep their promises, we suggest that the ruling party and the opposition issue a joint statement declaring that they will discuss the freezing of the plan to relocate the Legislative Yuan and the related budget and that they will reassess the necessity and legitimacy of relocating the legislature once the dust of legislative reform has settled.
If not, the public should either use its referendum rights to show whether the "boss" agrees with the legislature's self-fattening behavior, or ask the Control Yuan to investigate whether this kind of budget constitutes embezzlement.
This example by itself is enough to highlight the fact that the credibility crisis facing the legislature is so serious that it must be reformed.
When Wang defends the legislature by saying that opinion polls show that confidence in parliament isn't very high in any country, he is displaying a total lack of self-examination and betraying the lofty position occupied by parliamentary leaders in democratic countries.
Regrettably, a high degree of social consensus in favor of legislative reform already exists, but the legislature -- "the highest institution representing public opinion" -- still keeps boycotting and resisting reform efforts.
We cannot avoid asking: Is it really this difficult to implement legislative reform and to improve both the quality of politics and legislators?
Many symposiums have found that the design of the electoral system may be more crucial than the number of seats in the legislature, because the current system makes it unlikely that the electorate will be able to continue monitoring elected officials after their election. This renders the electorate's balancing function embedded in the democratic mechanism inefficient, and distorts the political culture.
As soon as legislators and councilors are elected, they believe it is their destiny and they immediately begin to represent themselves, caring only for their own interests. They forget that they have been entrusted with their position by the public and must give priority to public interests in order to enjoy the powers of an elected representative of the public.
Under the influence of this political culture of self-serving cliques, politicians and political parties indulge themselves in the idea that they enjoy special powers, thus harming the public interest for private gain. They are incapable of truly letting public policy be fully debated in the public arena, and because of this, elected institutions -- from central to local representative bodies -- do not enjoy public trust.
If this goes on for long, it cannot be ruled out that the crisis of confidence will develop into a crisis of legitimacy, which would harm the democratic system itself.
Because of this, reform of the electoral system should be considered the core of the legislative reform project. In particular, the single-member district, double-ballot system -- which both government and opposition have promised to adopt -- has already been in use for many years in many democratic countries. If measures such as advanced gender nomination quotas and publicly funded elections were added, Taiwan would be able to establish a long-lasting and reasonable electoral system to replace the backward electoral system left over from the Japan-ese era, and which still exists only in a handful of countries.
Thus, in order to plan for single-member districts, the number of district representatives should be reduced. That is the only way to avoid the problem of overly small districts. This also involves the number of legislators specified in the constitution, and a constitutional amendment therefore becomes necessary to shrink the legislature. But then, as long as the constitutional amendment bill is not passed by the legislature, all reform efforts will return to square one. No matter how much the public complains that the legislature is the source of political chaos, they have no choice but to allow the vicious cycle unfolding before their eyes to continue.
The problem is that if the legislature cannot be reformed, democratic progress will inevitably reach a bottleneck. This is something that cannot be ignored by political leaders concerned about future prosperity. We hope that intelligent people in the ruling party and the opposition will be able to grab this last window of opportunity before the presidential election, quickly realize the legislative reform agenda and stop shirking responsibility.
We also suggest that the two presidential candidates in the near future produce some concrete legislative reform achievements. If not, it will be difficult for them to pass the test when facing sharp questions at public debates.
Democratic politics should of course be a matter of responsible politics. Whether executive, legislative or judicial, the structure of every kind of systemic power must ensure that duties and rights correspond and that they are balanced, and that the ultimate source of power -- the people -- must not be excluded from the balancing mechanism.
With the transfer of power in 2000, the people have experienced toppling a government with their ballots. If the people are not able to make legislators enact reform, then our last chance is to emulate South Korea's successful "non-election movement" by first making sure that presidential candidates who do not display reform courage and resolve don't get elected, and then seeing to it that legislators with a bad track record and who constantly resist legislative reform don't get elected either.
After all, representatives of the people are answerable to the people. This is the year when we want to see the results of legislative reform. We do not accept that legislative reform, which affects the future of democracy, will fail due to a lack of effort at the final stage.
Ku Chung-hwa is a professor of sociology at National Chengchi University and chairman of the Taipei Society.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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