Last week on March 3, the lawmakers in the Diet’s Upper House
entered discussions on 95.88 trillion yen of the initial budget FY
2014 (3.5% increase from this year). As Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
schedules to attend the third meeting of Nuclear Security Summit in
Hague on March 24-25, the Cabinet and ruling parties are willing to
pass the budget into legislation on around March 20. Simultaneously,
budget-related legislations such as revised income tax act and local
corporate tax act will be taken as discussion issues in the Upper
House soon.
*The state of deliberations in both Houses and committees are
available from the following websites.(Japanese only)
House of Representatives Internet TV：http://www.shugiintv.go.jp/en/index.php
Live broadcasts and video recordings of the deliberations in the
House of Councillors (Japanese only)：http://www.webtv.sangiin.go.jp/
On reforms of Board of Education in the local governments which the
ruling Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito have progressed
discussions, the parties’ working team on March 5 decided to impose
obligations on each local governments to establish Comprehensive
Education Panel chaired by mayors/governors and let the panel sketch
educational guidelines through legislative measures on the local
education administration act. Due to various concerns shown by Komeito,
the revised plan entails softened expressions with regard to
authorities of local leaders and educational panels. Komeito have
finally agreed and accepted the legislation plan on the Board of Education.
The term of newly-establishing post “education chief” will likely
be arranged as three years, as proposed in a meeting on March 7, as
the result of concession between LDP’s two years and Komeito’s four
years. On personnel authority over the new official, Komeito in turn
will likely accept LDP’s idea to give the local leaders to
nominate/dismiss the newly-establishing education chief. The ruling
coalition attempts to acquire the Cabinet’s approval on that bill
around March 14, so they schedule to finalize the draft bill on March 11.
Meanwhile, although the opposition Democratic Party of Japan and
Japan Restoration Party had planned joint submission of a
counterproposal that abolishes the Board of Education and gives
overall administrative functions to local leaders, they have failed so
far to reach a final agreement on a monitoring body on the
mayors/governors. As the joint struggle may face a break-down, JRP
will seemingly call for consultative negotiations with Your Party or
Yuinotoh, rather than with DPJ which has confrontational attitude to
the Abe Cabinet.
On March 5, LDP and Komeito entered discussions on a new basic plan
on energy which decides the country’s mid- and long-term energy policy.
The parties established a working team on Mar 7. The draft plan
announced explicitly to recognize nuclear power as “important
base-load” and to seek resuming operation of the country’s nuclear
power reactors as soon as their safety are confirmed. Also, it
announces to accelerate utilization of various, domestic renewable
energy as much as possible by 2015.
Yet, the draft has avoided mentioning numerical targets, causing
criticisms from the ruling parties that it should entail numerical
targets such as on nuclear-dependency or introduction of renewable
energy. Also, there are intraparty views that establishment of new
nuclear power plants must be refrained. Komeito, having bowed
expansion of renewable energy to 30% of all the power generation and
nuke-free policy in the future, have voiced such opinions.
The ruling parties will seek reaching a conclusion and obtaining
Cabinet’s approval within March after discussions on such issues as
whether or not to entail numerical targets and how to handle Monju, a
prototype fast-breeder reactor.
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