Yeh's delegation met in Sydney Aug. 4 with representatives of the Australian Trade Commission, or Austrade. Its managing director, Peter O'Byrne, made a brief presentation on Australia's infrastructure and investment projects at the meeting.
Yeh provided information about some of the construction projects taking place in Kaohsiung and invited Australian businessmen and architects to take part in the bidding. These include a project to move a section of railway underground and to build a stadium for the World Games, which Kaohsiung will be hosting in 2009. According to Lin Chin-jung, director of City Hall's Bureau of Public Works and another member of Yeh's delegation, 80 percent of the electricity used in the main stadium for World Games should be supplied by solar energy.
Yeh said that the city also welcomes investment in other projects, including a wharf renovation, the development of broadband services, a new container zone in Kaohsiung Harbor and development of the urban waterfront area. Yeh expressed her hope that Austrade could help people and companies go to visit, invest and do business in Kaohsiung, which the acting mayor described as "a city full of potential."
O'Byrne promised to travel to Kaohsiung from Taipei once Taiwan's high-speed railway is operational. He added that Australian engineers have participated in testing the rail link, and that he was familiar with the system.
During the delegation's sojourn in Sydney, Yeh met with Taiwanese expatriates and students at the University of Sydney to talk about Taiwan's political situation. Yeh criticized Beijing for trying to squeeze Taiwan out of the international community. Beijing's actions "have seriously damaged the friendship between people on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait," Yeh was quoted as saying.
Also attending the meeting at the university was Chen Yonglin, the Chinese diplomat who blew the whistle on a network of Chinese spies operating in Australia and defected to the West last year. Chen said that democracy is Taiwan's leverage, but that the island's future still depends largely on China. He said that a tyrannical China would leave no space for Taiwan in the international community, and that China had come to a critical point where it must decide whether to transform itself into a democratic country.