The Overseas Community Affairs Council and Veteran Affairs Council should be eliminated, New Power Party (NPP) legislators said yesterday, vowing to propose rules to partition the agencies’ funding and force personnel to cut waste.
“Based on our logic, Quebec should treat everyone in France as an ‘overseas Frenchman,’ Austria should treat everyone in Germany as an ‘overseas German’ and the United Kingdom should treat everyone in the United States as ‘overseas Britons’ in an effort to encourage investment,” NPP Legislator Freddie Lim (林昶佐) said during a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Finance Committee, adding that the Overseas Council’s functions represented “piling beds and houses on top of one another,” a Chinese-language metaphor for needless duplication.
The council is charged with executing a range of policies directed at “overseas Chinese,” with roots in Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) competition with the Chinese Communist Party for overseas support, after it played a key role in the Xinhai Revolution in 1911.
“Many of the council’s functions are important, but would be conducted more professionally if given to other agencies,” Lim said. “Because the council only has a small budget and few employees, it is difficult for it to properly conduct educational, diplomatic and economic functions.”
He cited several examples of what he called poorly executed policies, including outdated textbooks and low viewership of the Overseas Community Affairs Council’s satellite television station.
“Many textbooks being used were written in the 1980s or 1990s,” Lim said, adding that many courses offered overseas duplicated courses offered by the Overseas Chinese Culture and Education Foundation.
It would be more efficient to allow the Ministry of Education to integrate admissions for ethnic Chinese students from Malaysia with those of other foreign students, he said.
Malaysian-Chinese students comprise the vast majority of the nation’s “overseas Chinese,” which are admitted separately from students from China, while students from Hong Kong and Macau constitute another category, he said.
“Each year we spend NT$100 million (US$3.1 million) on the satellite television station, but the result is that only one-third of those we define as ‘overseas Chinese’ watch it,” he said.
Meanwhile, NPP executive chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) called for the Veteran Affairs Council to be merged with the Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Health and Welfare, citing multiple Control Yuan reports criticizing the agency over inefficiency, waste and conflicts of interest.
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