Ding ding! Can Taiwan's parliament pull its punches as a new round gets underway?

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 ruling Kuomintang Party has a majority of seven seats in the new legislature.

The nation’s highest legislative body is notorious 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. Power changed hands to the Democratic Progressive Party in 2000, but the fighting strategy of parliamentarians remained, despite full democracy. The Kuomintang came back to power in 2008, but flying fists and histrionics still remain the hallmark of the unicameral parliament. It is now up to the members of the new parliament to disprove the verdict of Foreign Policy magazine’s Cameron Abadi, who damned Taiwan’s legislature as one of the worst in the world.

To begin with, Abadi is a little biased against Taiwan. It is true that our Legislative Yuan, which was a powerless rubberstamp body while presidents Chiang Kai-shek, CK Yen and Chiang Ching-kuo were in office, has metamorphosed into a “soap opera” for melodramatic lawmakers to please their constituency voters. But over the years, the ranks of these self-aggrandising actors have steadily shrunk as middle-class middle-of-the-road voters have continued to increase in number. 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 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, 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 that the parliamentary reform would yield substantial results, but the parliament under control of his party has remained unresponsive to calls for efficiency.

All this means that the reform of 2005 has failed. But all is not lost. The Kuomintang’s majority has been slashed but the three People First Party lawmakers and as many independents are its likely allies. With these six seats added, the governing party is just five short of a two-thirds majority, 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 while a new financial tsunami is swelling with the deepening European 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 – can do to improve parliament’s reputation is to cease resorting to their “selling out Taiwan” mantras against the Kuomintang every time a government bill is discussed. They shouldn’t have to be reminded that all the brawling and histrionics in the previous legislature resulted from disputes over government measures purportedly aimed at improving relations between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. We fervently hope that all 113 lawmakers will do their best to prove Abadi wrong.