Diet battle intensifies with opposition set for no-confidence motion over pension bills
Kyodo/Japan Today
TOKYO ― The face-off between the ruling and opposition blocs intensified in the House of Representatives on Thursday, with opposition parties set to submit a motion seeking the resignations of two Diet committee chairmen as well as a no-confidence motion against Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa.
The wrangling centers on two pension-related bills which the ruling bloc of the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito party plans to force through the lower house at a plenary session in the afternoon.
Stepping up their efforts to filibuster the bills, three opposition parties ― the Democratic Party of Japan, the Social Democratic Party and the People's New Party ― agreed at a meeting of their Diet affairs chiefs Thursday morning to submit the motions in the afternoon.
The parties are seeking the resignations of Yoshitaka Sakurada, chairman of the Health, Labor and Welfare Committee, and Ichiro Aizawa, chairman of the Rules and Administration Committee.
On Wednesday, the ruling coalition rammed through the welfare panel a bill to scrap the five-year statute of limitations for pensioners to retroactively claim any shortchanged portion of benefits stemming from record-keeping blunders by the Social Insurance Agency.
The ruling bloc earlier forced through the welfare panel a bill to abolish the agency and transfer its national pension functions to a new entity.
The LDP and the New Komeito want to get the two bills endorsed as a package at a lower house plenary session in the afternoon and to send them to the House of Councillors so that they can be enacted as early as possible before the June 23 end of the ongoing ordinary Diet session.
But the ruling and opposition wrangling is expected to intensify in the lead-up to the upper house election in June.
Facing Democratic Party of Japan leader Ichiro Ozawa in a parliament debate amid loud jeers from opposition lawmakers, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday promised that the government will complete within a year the process of crosschecking 50 million unidentified payment records with information on some 30 million current pensioners to see if any of them match.
"It is indeed unreasonable for people not to be able to receive the pensions they have dutifully paid for and this is something that should not happen," Abe said in response to Ozawa's questions.
"I will not allow any more of the attitude of those in the Social Insurance Agency who assume they can do anything because they are government employees and rigidly demand that people bring receipts of their premium payments as proof," Abe said.
Acknowledging that former agency directors general and all other officials concerned bear "grave responsibility" for the record-keeping and other pension management problems that have arisen, Abe said he himself also feels great responsibility as head of the government.
While the opposition was upset that the ruling majority passed the bill despite its demands for further deliberation, Abe and his aides were outraged at the DPJ's refusal to postpone the parliament debate between the two party leaders.
Abe had wanted to attend the funeral of Toshikatsu Matsuoka, the agricultural minister who committed suicide Monday, in Kumamoto Prefecture on Wednesday afternoon.
"Minister Matsuoka was an important member of my cabinet...and I really wanted to attend his funeral at his hometown," Abe told reporters in the evening. "I had hoped to somehow get the DPJ to agree to postpone the party leaders' debate by a day or two, but they did not agree and that was very regrettable."
