Japan Press Weekly

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2012 January 18 - 24 [POLITICS]

Diet seat cuts must not be used as tool for tax hike

Akahata editorial (excerpts)

Alleging the need to correct disparities in the value of each vote in the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party of Japan decided to curtail the House’s fixed number of parliamentarians by 5 for single-seat constituencies and by 80 for proportional representation constituencies.

Tarutoko Shinji, who is in charge of the DPJ “political reform” policy, said that cuts in the quorums of the Lower House is an absolute condition to an integrated reform in social services and the tax system. However, it is fundamentally wrong to implement a cut in the number of proportional representation quorums, which will increase the undemocratic bias in the current electoral system, in an attempt to impose on the people a set of adverse policies involving curtailed social services and a higher consumption tax rate.

The present electoral system has two components: 300 single-seat constituencies each electing a lawmaker and 11 proportional representation blocs to which seats are distributed in proportion to the number of votes the candidates obtain. The single-seat constituency system is undemocratic because it is highly advantageous to major parties and very many votes are “wasted” without any link to seats. Besides, segmented single-seat constituencies tend to enlarge disparities in the value of a vote. The Supreme Court ruled the electoral disparities as “unconstitutional.”

In contrast, the proportional representation component produces no “wasted votes,” linking all votes to Diet seats. Under the present electoral system, this is the only framework to correctly reflect the people’s will in Diet seats.

When the present electoral system was introduced in 1994, mounting opposition to the attempt to set up an across-the-board single-seat constituency system resulted in the compromise of a partial reduction in the proportional representation system. This was because the public recognized that an exclusive single-seat constituency system would bring about greater distortion between the public will and the representatives holding Diet seats.

The problem this time is that the DPJ has decided to cut the quorums of Dietmembers and salaries of public servants as preconditions for increasing the consumption tax rate.

Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko said that he would stake his political career on getting the consumption tax rate increased and reach a conclusion on the proposed cut in the number of Diet seats during the next ordinary session of the Diet. What an insult to the people to use the undemocratic scheme of reducing the proportional representation seats as a tool to raise the consumption tax in the face of overwhelming public opposition!

If the number of proportional representation seats were to be reduced by 80, about two-thirds of the Lower House seats would be elected from single-seat constituencies, resulting in an even greater control by the major political parties of the Diet. People’s voices of opposition to a consumption tax increase and to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement will hardly be heard by the Diet.

Any democratically meaningful reform in the election system must entail correcting the distortion in the present system which prevents the people’s will from being accurately reflected in Diet proceedings. For this purpose, proportional representation seats need to be increased, not decreased.