Just a few days after Friday last week’s fatal Taroko Express No. 408 train crash, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), predictably, seized the opportunity to blame the tragedy on the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
At a press conference on Monday in Taipei, KMT caucus secretary-general Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) accused the DPP administration of negligence, saying it had failed to implement safety recommendations laid out by an ad hoc committee following the Puyuma Express derailment in 2018 that killed 18 people.
Executive Yuan spokesman Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) rejected the accusations, saying the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) had already implemented numerous safety improvements recommended by the committee.
The KMT appears to have amnesia: Three of the major TRA accidents over the past decade happened during the administration of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), a KMT member. Two of those accidents — one in Taoyuan in 2012 and another in Changhua in 2015 — involved trains colliding with vehicles on the tracks, similar to the crash that occurred last week in Hualien County.
As is typical practice in Taiwan whenever a tragedy occurs, Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) tendered his resignation. However, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and other officials told Lin that this is not the time to discuss resignations — and they are right. Maybe it was a lack of proper supervision of TRA construction projects on the part of Lin that led to the accident — but just as KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) wrote on Facebook on Saturday, nobody’s resignation will solve the safety issues at hand, or make up for the lives lost. The government must now focus on reparations and improvements.
There are clearly systemic issues to work out, especially when a contractor can get track-level access unsupervised, and when there are no barriers between tracks and access roads. The best thing politicians can do now is cooperate on solving these underlying issues. It is absolutely in the public’s interest for the two major parties to cooperate on disaster prevention, and on dealing with the aftermath of accidents. Unfortunately, partisanship and opposition for the sake of opposition have become the political norm in Taiwan, which is detrimental to democracy. Some have held out hope that another party, such as the New Power Party or the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), could serve as an effective third force to balance this partisanship. However, those parties have few seats in the legislature, and often suffer from a lack of cohesion on key issues.
To its credit, the TPP has taken a better approach to dealing with the Taroko crash than the KMT has. The TPP on Tuesday proposed a resolution, which was passed by lawmakers, requiring the transportation ministry to present a plan for improved supervision of the TRA within one month. It also asked for construction along TRA tracks to be suspended in the meantime, and identified specific ways in which the agency needed to make improvements. This is the type of response the public expects to see from a third-force political party.
However, TPP caucus convener Andy Chiu (邱臣遠) still appeared to place the blame on the Tsai administration, saying it had failed in its promise to improve TRA personnel training, error-proofing mechanisms and hardware to ensure safe operations. Some might say that it is an opposition party’s role to blame the ruling party for accidents, but more could be achieved if parties worked together. For instance, a report published on Sept. 30, 2016, on the US News & World Report Web site states that the US government’s response to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco had been effective due to cross-party cooperation on funding and other issues.
Perhaps it is due to its first several decades as a one-party state that Taiwan struggles to achieve bipartisanship on key issues, but this is a struggle it must overcome to truly strengthen its democracy.
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