Japan Press Weekly

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2011 September 14 - 20 [POLITICS]

What happened to DPJ’s election pledge?

To raise nursing-care workers’ salaries by 40,000 yen was one of the major promises the Democratic Party of Japan made in the 2009 general election, which the party fought under the slogan, “The people’s livelihood comes first.”

Since the change of government in 2009, this slogan had been less and less cited by DPJ members. However, it was again used by Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko and his cabinet members in their inauguration speeches.

In his first policy speech on September 13, the prime minister pledged to “return to our starting point where we put the people’s livelihood first.”

Welfare Minister Komiyama Yoko, at a press conference on September 5, stated, “The task of our cabinet is to promote policies based on the stance that ‘the people’s livelihood comes first’.”

At the conference, the minister was asked by a reporter how she plans to realize the DPJ’s 2009 election promise to drastically increase nursing-care workers’ salaries by 2012.

She answered that the realization would be difficult as long as the fund is not secured with a unified reform of social welfare programs and the taxation system.

However, what the government actually proposes in the “uniformed reform” is to raise the consumption tax rate to 10% in order to produce the financial resources needed for social welfare programs. In other words, the Noda Cabinet is attempting to have the public accept further tax burdens under the pretext of offering better nursing care. Their actual policies are far apart from their pledge to return to their initial slogan.