Last week's veto by the right-wing Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government of a petition by over 100,000 citizens for a referendum on the bitterly controversial "Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement" with the authoritarian People's Republic of China has exposed the KMT's use of Orwellian "double speak" to prevent any genuine exercise of democratic democracy in Taiwan.
The "justification" for Thursday's veto by the KMT-controlled "Referendum Review Committee" of the petition submitted by the Taiwan Solidarity Union on the question "Do you approve or do you not approve the signing of an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement by the government with China?" had been published in the "China Times" May 24 in an open letter to the RRC by KMT unificationist ideologue and lawyer Chen Chang-wen.
In his letter, Chen stated that the TSU proposal was "politically calculated" since its design would only allow the KMT government to proceed with the ECFA if over 50 percent of eligible voters cast ballots and over 50 percent voted "yes."
On the other hand, the ECFA would be vetoed by the citizenry if over 50 percent voted "no" or if less than 50 percent of the eligible voters cast ballots.
Chen maintained that such an arrangement would be unfair, especially since it is obvious that the TSU and most of the petitioners actually oppose the pact, urged the RRC to reject the petition to prevent a "democratic crisis."
After the RRC dutifully vetoed the TSU petition last Thursday, National Chengchi University political science Professor Hsiao Kao-yen elaborated its "theoretical justification" in a commentary published June 6 in the same newspaper by claiming that allowing the TSU to pose the question in positive terms as a "ratification" vote would have created an "anti-democratic paradox."
In fact, the TSU referendum proposal, whose format and passage requirement fits well the pattern of direct democratic "ratification" votes for treaties of the importance of the ECFA in normal democratic states.
An example is the "mandatory referendum" mechanism in Switzerland under which treaties and constitutional changes must attain the higher standard of approval by over 50 percent of voting citizens and favorable majorities in two-thirds of its cantons.
Rather, the so-called "anti-democratic paradox" is located within the "birdcage" design of the Referendum Law approved by the KMT-controlled Legislative Yuan in November 2003 over the objections of the then governing Democratic Progressive Party in the form of the world's highest 50 percent turnout threshold for valid passage.
Such turnout quorums are condemned by virtually the entire global community of academic and professional experts in direct democracy methods because they allow citizens who refuse to vote to veto the decisions of citizens who do exercise their citizenship rights and thereby open the door for precisely the type of anti-democratic boycotts launched by the KMT against the past six national referenda.
Moreover, the KMT itself has without exception exploited this "anti-democratic paradox" to spin referenda, which received overwhelmingly "yes" votes, into citizen "vetoes" after using boycotts to block referenda proposals from attaining the unreasonable 50 percent turnout threshold.
The most notorious example was the KMT's insistence that the invalidation of the March 20, 2004 referendum on whether Taiwan should bolster its defense against PRC missiles because it failed to reach the 50 percent turnout quorum (despite a positive 92 percent "yes" vote) justified the KMT's four year legislative boycott of Taiwan's procurement of advanced defensive weapon systems, including Patriot III-C anti-missile missiles.
The KMT tacitly acknowledged the undemocratic character of the 50 percent turnout quorum when its rubber-stamp legislature passed a special law on gambling in January 2009 that allowed referendums to liberalize gambling to be approved by a straight majority of voting citizens without imposing any turnout quorum.
Heads I win, tails you lose
Now the KMT camp intends to turn its own past logic upside down.
Instead of insisting that a proposed referendum needs a double majority to pass, the KMT now maintains that the onus is on dissenting citizens to obtain a nearly impossible double majority to veto the KMT's "fixed policy" for the ECFA.
With this new exercise in twisted logic, the KMT is violating the dictum that "what is good for the goose is good for the gander."
After all, the historical record is crystal clear on which party introduced the world's stiffest turnout threshold into the Referendum Law to lock up the right of referendum and on which party has, without exception, twisted the failure of referendums, which received overwhelmingly "yes" votes, to reach the 50 percent quorum into citizen "vetoes."
Instead, in its search for a fig leaf to cover up its anti-democratic essence, the KMT has adopted as a "new" discourse the familiar logic of neighborhood bullies, namely "heads I win, tails you lose."
The best way to resolve this "paradox" would be to simply remove the turnout quorum from the Referendum Law and let our citizens decide on whether to accept the ECFA gamble with a straight up or down vote.
Source: Taiwan News Online - Editorial 2010/06/09
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