Taiwan’s first four-year Legislative Yuan will open on Feb. 1. Altogether 113 parliamentarians will be meeting for four years rather than three, as in the past, to tackle the increasingly tough job of legislating for the common good of the electorate. The lineup is 64 for the Kuomintang, 40 for the Democratic Progressive Party, three each for the Taiwan Solidarity Union and the People First Party, and as many independents. The ruling Kuomintang has a majority of seven in the new legislature.
The nation’s highest legislative body has been known for brawling and histrionics. In the 1980s and 1990s, when minority parties had no procedural way to change governing bodies controlled by the Kuomintang, regular fights exposed inefficiency, crookedness and authoritarianism. After the Democratic Progressive Party came to power in 2000, the fighting strategy of the parliamentarians has remained despite full democracy. The Kuomintang came back to power in 2008, but the brawling and histrionics still remain the hallmark of the unicameral parliament. It is up to the members of the new parliament to prove what Cameron Abadi of Foreign Policy puts on the world map as one of the worst parliaments is not that bad.
To begin with, Abadi is a little biased against Taiwan. It is true that our Legislative Yuan, which was a rubberstamp body while Presidents Chiang Kai-shek, C.K. Yen and Chiang Ching-kuo were in office, has metamorphosed into an arena for histrionic lawmakers acting their self-aggrandising parts to please supporters in their constituencies, but over the years, their ranks have been shrinking as middle-class middle-of-the-road voters have continued to increase in numbers. Selfish, incompetent morons are being voted out of their seats in the Legislature.
The parliamentary reform of 2005 halved the Legislative Yuan to 113 seats from 224 elected by parallel voting based on what is known as a “mixed member majoritarian” system, which combines first-past-the-post voting with party list proportional representation. The previous Legislative Yuan was elected in line with the reform, and the Kuomintang which had fielded People First Party candidates as its own won a virtual three-fourths majority of the 113 seats at stake. President Ma Ying-jeou was elected in 2008, thanks to the electorate’s protest against corruption and graft, of which Democratic Progressive Party President Chen Shui-bian was the symbol. Ma has since doubled as chairman of the Kuomintang to see to it the reform would yield substantial results, but the parliament under control of his party has remained almost as unresponsive to calls for efficiency as it used to be.
All this means the reform of 2005 has failed. But all is not lost. The Kuomintang’s majority in the Legislative Yuan has been slashed but the three People First Party lawmakers and as many independents are its likely allies. With the six seats added, the governing party controls a two-thirds majority short of five, and that is a potent legislative force to ram through important government bills to continue to improve relations between Taiwan and China, on which we rely ever more heavily for survival in the relentless economic globalisation while a new financial tsunami is being touched off by the deepening European government debt crisis.
There is no doubt that the new legislature has fewer selfish, incompetent and histrionic members. What the opposition, which comprises the Democratic Progressive Party and the Taiwan Solidarity Union, of which former President Lee Teng-hui is the spiritual leader, can do to avoid Taiwan’s notoriety of being saddled with the world’s worst parliament is to cease to resort to their “sell-out-of-Taiwan” mantras and mudras against the Kuomintang in deliberation of government bills in the Legislative Yuan. They need not have to be reminded that all brawling and histrionics in the previous legislature resulted from dispute over the government measures purported to improve the burgeoning rapprochement between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. We wish all 113 lawmakers would do the best they can to prove Abadi is wrong.
