In a year when Taiwan has received so much praise for its handling of the COVID-19 outbreak and its donations to other nations as they deal with the pandemic, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers on Friday once again made the nation a byword for ludicrousness with their repulsive offal-throwing display on the floor of the Legislative Yuan.
Video clips have circled the globe for more than two decades as lawmakers from both sides of the blue-green divide have engaged in fisticuffs, throwing punches, water, lunchboxes and chairs at each other — but Friday’s spectacle struck an all-time low.
The ultimately unsuccessful effort to abort Premier Su Tseng-chang’s (蘇貞昌) policy report to the legislature on the decision to allow imports of controversial pig and beef products — on his 13th attempt since the middle of September — made a mockery of the KMT’s claims that its antics were only a bid to protect the public’s health.
They will certainly provide footage to use in the 2022 local elections.
The KMT caucus said it is demanding complete factory inspections and clear labeling on the controversial imports, even though the government has said — and Su reiterated on Friday — that it plans to require on-site inspections at US meat factories and clear labeling of products.
At a post-fracas news conference, after his caucus colleagues made their mealy-mouthed apologies for dumping and throwing pig intestines around the legislative chamber, KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) plaintively asked if public health was not in the nation’s interest.
Of course it is, but what is equally in the nation’s interest is strict enforcement of regulations. This is a much bigger problem, and not just when it comes to food imports.
Time and again this nation has experienced tragedies and loss of life due to lax regulatory enforcement of construction, environmental, labor safety and a host of other laws and regulations at the local, municipal and national levels.
This was highlighted by the Taiwan Transportation Safety Board’s release on Wednesday of its investigative report on the collapse of the Nanfangao Bridge (南方澳橋) in Yilan County on Oct. 1 last year, which killed six people and injured 13.
Among the critical failings cited in the report were the absence of one central government agency to be responsible for all of the nation’s bridges, with confusion over which central or local agency managed which bridge; a lack of inspections (the Nanfangao structure was visually inspected despite key cable and anchorage systems being inside the arch, tubes or steel girders); and stranded steel wires were severely corroded.
Perhaps regulatory order and a competent inspection system would have discovered the corrosion and broken cables that triggered the collapse.
Construction of the bridge’s anchorage system did not match the as-built drawings, which could have affected the “subsequent assessment, planning and implementation of bridge maintenance and inspection,” the report said.
Even scarier, the report said that Ministry of Transportation and Communications guidelines for training courses for highway bridge inspection personnel do not offer content related to the inspection of special bridges like the Nanfangao Bridge, and trainees are not taught how to enter restricted spaces, such as girders or arches, to conduct inspections.
“Consequently, we cannot assure that inspectors have the ability to inspect special bridges,” it added.
While lawmakers and the public disagree on import policies, they should find common ground in demanding an immediate and complete overhaul of the administration of all bridges — big, small or special — as well as courses that will graduate the kind of bridge inspectors that this nation so clearly needs.
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