By Chris Wang / Staff reporter
About three out of four — 74.7 percent — respondents in a public opinion poll released yesterday said they were not satisfied with President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) performance, a record high disapproval rating for Ma since he took office in May 2008, Taiwan Indicator Survey Research said yesterday.
Ma’s approval rating remained at 12.3 percent, the poll found.
The survey also covered several public policies or issues that have become controversial, including the new freeway electronic toll collection system.
Sixty-one percent of respondents said the government had committed a “serious mistake” in its policymaking.
Among those respondents, 42.5 percent supported termination of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications’ contract with Far Eastern Electronic Toll Collection Co because of the problems with the eTag, with 26.1 percent supporting a one-month period to allow the system to be fine-tuned and 19.9 percent backing harsh penalties against company.
The poll found that the majority — 71.2 percent— of respondents supported the registration of actual housing prices, but opinions varied on who should be held accountable for providing the information to the government — the buyers, sellers or land administration agents.
When asked who should be responsible for providing information about property sales, 47.5 percent of respondents said both sellers and buyers should be responsible, 21.1 percent said land administration agents, 8 percent said buyers and 6.8 percent said sellers.
Almost half of the respondents (49.2 percent) agreed with the Legislative Yuan’s amendment of the Land Administration Agent Act (地政士法), saying that agents should be given time to correct unintentional mistakes.
Of those respondents, 36.2 percent supported an immediate reprimand for the agents and 14.7 percent said they had no opinion.
The poll was conducted between Wednesday and Thursday last week.
It collected 1,002 valid samples and had a margin of errors of 3.1 percentage points.