|
Government of
deception, for KMT
By Cheng Li-chiun 鄭麗君
Following Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators’ failure to pass their
deceptive proposal for a referendum to determine the fate of the Fourth Nuclear
Power Plant in the recent extraordinary legislative session, people from all
sectors of society have continued to call for a halt to the plant’s
construction.
However, the government blithely ignores these calls and keeps doing whatever it
sees fit to further its own ambitions.
To carry on with the construction of the plant in Gongliao District (貢寮), New
Taipei City (新北市), President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration has resorted to
every tactic possible. Not only has it made up lies about how energy shortages
will ensue if nuclear energy is abandoned, but the safety inspections being
carried out at the plant are mere theatrical plays staged by state-run Taiwan
Power Co (Taipower).
Another form of deception used by the Ma administration is the manipulation of
the referendum question, which reads: “Do you agree that the construction of the
Fourth Nuclear Power Plant should be halted and that it not become operational?”
The government has phrased the question in the negative so that it can take
advantage of the high threshold of participation stipulated by the act for a
plebiscite to pass so that it can manipulate the outcome of the vote.
The “straightjacket” Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that if more than half of all
eligible voters do not participate in the poll, a referendum will not pass,
thereby treating those who do not vote as opposed to the question being posited
to the public.
Since abstaining from voting is equal to casting a negative vote, if the
plebiscite asks the electorate if it wants to “continue with construction,”
those who refrain from casting a ballot by default oppose nuclear power. By the
same token, if the question asks whether voters want to “halt construction,”
those who do not participate automatically become proponents of nuclear power.
Based on past referendums, more than half of all eligible voters do not vote and
as a result no national referendum has ever succeeded, which means that it is
next to impossible that the KMT’s referendum on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant
to pass.
Ma’s administration has no plans to amend the act; instead, faced with
ever-increasing public opposition to nuclear power, it is exploiting the flawed
referendum system by posing a question that asks the opposite of what it
actually wants.
Abusing the high participation threshold by asking a question biased toward
those who want the opposite of what is being asked — finishing the plant — makes
the referendum a deception aimed at cheating those opposed to nuclear power. The
government has deliberately crafted its question to shape the result of the
vote.
Yet another means of deception employed by the government is evidenced in the 33
KMT legislators who proposed the referendum question, which as mentioned before,
runs counter to their policy position.
If these lawmakers were truly serious about halting the project, they would have
reached a majority consensus with their counterparts in the Democratic
Progressive Party and the Taiwan Solidarity Union and the legislature would have
already passed the opposition parties’ counterproposal to suspend construction
immediately.
This would have forced the Cabinet to request that the president order the
construction budget for the plant be cut, in accordance with Article 71 of the
Budget Act (預算法), and that work on the plant be stopped. There would therefore
be no reason for the issue of finishing or aborting the nuclear facility to be
put to a referendum.
After coming up with the idea of staging a bogus referendum, the government
stepped its manipulative efforts up a notch with a keyword advertising tactic, a
move that recently came to light in scandalous fashion.
The tactic involved the government purchasing keyword advertising on popular
search engines that linked 92 words — including the names of 29 anti-nuclear
activists — to pro-nuclear Web sites that it had set up.
The links used the names of prominent anti-nuclear figures such as writer Liu
Li-erh (劉黎兒), Green Consumers Foundation chairman Jay Fang (方儉) and Nuclear-Free
Homeland Alliance executive director Lee Cho-han (李卓翰), to promote the
government’s pro-nuclear stance.
These activists posses great credibility among the public because they have been
working hard for a long time to make public information on nuclear safety that
the government tries to keep hidden, so that Taiwanese can truly understand the
realities of nuclear energy.
Since the government is incapable of dealing with the safety issues of nuclear
power, it should stop the Gongliao plant project as per public opinion.
However, it is instead spending large amounts of taxpayers’ money and abusing
the names of anti-nuclear activists to continue disseminating pro-nuclear
information aimed at brainwashing the public.
How much money does the government think it needs to spend to alter people’s
opinion when more than 70 percent of Taiwanese have already said that they are
in favor of immediately halting the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power
Plant?
These manipulations show that Taiwan is being ruled by deception by a government
that has overstepped the moral boundaries of politics. Once this unique set of
political moral boundaries are crossed, the legitimacy of a political system is
doomed.
Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) has an academic background in law and political
science, but he has tried to use a referendum based on deception to silence
those who oppose the government’s ideas and pull the wool over the public’s
eyes.
Now, he is allowing administrative bodies to use people involved in the
anti-nuclear movement to carry out a propaganda war.
With political morality at such a low point, the worst thing Taiwanese can do is
continue putting up with the way the government is using deception to rule the
country.
Cheng Li-chiun is a Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
Translated by Drew Cameron
|
