Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te has announced a pay rise for some officers and enlisted personnel, but Kuomintang legislator Hsu Chiao-hsin criticised the new scheme for leaving out a large group of volunteer service members, calling it bad news for them.

• Lai Ching-te has added a third category of combat unit allowance, giving serving officers and enlisted personnel an extra NT$4,000 a month, backdated to 1 July.
• Hsu Chiao-hsin pointed out that a large group of volunteer service members still receive no combat allowance at all, creating an unfair situation in which conscripts all receive it while some volunteers do not.
• The Legislative Yuan long ago passed the third reading of the Act on the Remuneration of Military Personnel, which stipulates that the volunteer service allowance be raised to NT$30,000, yet the Executive Yuan has neither sought reconsideration nor refused to countersign — it simply is not implementing it.
• The related dispute has been submitted to the Constitutional Court but has not yet been docketed; until a ruling of unconstitutionality is issued, the law should be implemented as normal.
• Hsu Chiao-hsin drew a comparison with civil servants' pensions: the government did not wait for a constitutional interpretation before restoring the income replacement rate to 80%, yet it is not applying the same approach to military personnel.

Outlook: The dispute over military pay will not be settled in the short term, and the Blue camp will continue to press the Executive Yuan to raise the volunteer service allowance to NT$30,000 as required by law.