Over the past two or three months, I have petitioned President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), the Taipei City Government’s Parks and Street Lights Office and Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) for different reasons. However, my petitions seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

This leaves me to feel that the government’s handling of public petitions and its problem-solving capability are flawed.

Not long ago, I met with Ma to promote the abolition of capital punishment. Seizing on the rare opportunity, I handed over a joint petition launched by writers Chang Hsiao-feng (張曉風) and Chen Jo-hsi (陳若曦), artist Ho Huai-shuo (何懷碩), dentist Lee Wei-wen (李偉文), choreographer Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) and myself, calling on the government to not transform part of the 202 Munitions Works in Taipei City’s Nangang District (南港) into a biotech park.

I received Ma’s reply on July 2, which said: “Your precious opinion is valuable to me. I have already instructed the Cabinet to study it.”

That kind of reply tells me my petition was useless. Allowing large corporations to develop the site was the central government’s decision and Ma was certainly aware of this.

During his two terms as Taipei mayor, he did not favor the project. Surprisingly, he did not say a word when his government passed the project.

The Taipei City Government and the Ministry of National Defense’s Armaments Bureau replied on Aug. 2 and Aug. 3, respectively. The replied were almost identical to their earlier media statements.

Ma said the Cabinet would study our petition, but the Cabinet is apparently even lazier than the president, since it simply passed the petition to a subordinate agency for consideration. In fact, releasing the site for development was the Cabinet’s decision, officially approved by former premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) on July 12 last year.

In response to our request that the project be stopped, the Cabinet should have said whether or not it accepted our request. If it did not, the Cabinet should have offered an explanation. Instead, the Cabinet only passed the buck to a subordinate unit responsible for policy implementation, ordering them to answer our question.

I wonder if Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) would cleverly argue that the whole thing was Liu’s idea?

I also wrote a letter to Hau’s office in May asking how Hau, a former Environmental Protection Administration minister, could propose to turn 144 hectares of the site into a special industrial zone for big corporations in accordance with the Cabinet’s policy.

In response, I only received a previously used official reply from the city’s Department of Urban Development.After requesting that Hau reply directly, he once again refused to do so and I received another reply from the urban development department, not the mayor.

In the past, I have also written to the Parks and Street Lights Office and Taipower regarding some problems in my neighborhood. Neither replied appropriately.

They either didn’t even read my letter carefully or gave me an irrelevant answer.

Public petitions serve as an opportunity for the government to improve administrative performance, resolve problems and reduce complaints.

The government will lose the public’s trust if it is incapable of responding to and dealing with citizens’ problems effectively.

Chiu Hei-yuan is a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology.

TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG

Thu, Aug 26, 2010 - Page 8, Taipei Times