Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: KMT/Facebook
THE MAJOR POLITICAL PARTIES represented in the legislature, the DPP, KMT, and TPP, have indicated their priorities for the upcoming legislative session.
In particular, all major parties have indicated an emphasis on popular issues that they hope to win support from the public, especially from traditional demographics. For example, the DPP has indicated that it hopes to strengthen penalties for child abuse. Given that a number of abuse cases have led to widespread public coverage, as well as criticisms of the government for failing to do enough in the case of abuse committed by educators, it can be expected that the DPP will lean into the issue to try to win votes.
A number of planned legislative moves from the DPP would aim to benefit underprivileged groups in society, such as new migrants to Taiwan, students in rural areas, and Indigenous students. As such, DPP legislators have called for amendments to acts ranging from the Child and Juvenile Welfare and Rights Protection Act, the Act for Education Development of Schools in Remote Areas, and the Regulations on the Development and Management of Lands Reserved for Indigenous Peoples. Proposals include a School Food and Beverage Act to provide for student meals, the creation of a new development agency for recent immigrants to Taiwan, and a Childcare Services Act to strengthen protections for children.
The KMT intends to lean into a traditional pork barrel issue through moves aimed at benefiting public servants. Public servants are generally considered a demographic that supports the KMT, with the KMT having provided public servants, teachers, veterans and members of the military, and police with generous pensions in return for their political loyalty during authoritarian times.
The proposed amendments would change provisions for pensions so that they do not decrease on the basis of the year-on-year income replacement rate for civil servants, link pensions to current salaries for civil servants, as well as adjust them for inflation through linking them to the consumer price index. Still, changes to the pension system open the KMT to criticisms that this threatens to bankrupt the pension system for Taiwanese society as a whole, a threat that led the Tsai administration to reform the pension system during its tenure. Such pensions have at times been criticized as an issue of intergenerational justice, given that they benefit the elderly, potentially at the expense of young people.
Less controversial measures that the KMT intends to push for are relief initiatives for Hualien in the wake of devastating mudslides caused by Super Typhoon Ragasa. But the KMT also intends to increase the allocation of funding from the central government to local government, as a way of further straightjacketing the central government after having already pushed for wide-ranging budget cuts earlier this year. Though the result of the wide-ranging series of cuts was that budget allocation from the central government to local governments was decreased, the KMT has cried foul and stated that it intends to restore allocation to local governments at the expense of the central government.
Another category of measures that the KMT and its ally, the TPP, hope to push for are for clear electoral means. One notes that both parties intend to end pretrial detentions to keep TPP founder Ko Wen-je out of jail, although this opens up the possibility of all individuals under investigation by prosecutors engaging in collusion to destroy evidence because of the lack of pretrial detentions. The TPP also hopes to link the dates of national referendums to elections to increase turnout for referendums in a way that it believes will strengthen its election chances, and to allow for absentee balloting. The latter is bound to be a controversial measure in light of the fact that this could increase the ability of Taiwanese based in China to vote and influence election outcomes, if they do not actually need to travel to Taiwan to vote.
Either way, it continues to be a question as to whether the pan-Blue camp will continue with measures aimed at reshaping Taiwan’s electoral system to strengthen the position of the legislature and weaken the other branches of government. This occurs because the pan-Blue camp only controls the legislature at present. Rather than wait for another set of presidential elections, the KMT and TPP have focused their efforts on changing the fundamental system of checks and balances in the setup of the Taiwanese political system at present.