Bills for consumer affairs agency clear lower house committee

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TOKYO, April 16 Kyodo -
Bills to form a new government agency to comprehensively deal with consumer
affairs cleared a House of Representatives committee Thursday with a unanimous
vote, paving the way for the body to be set up as early as this fall.
The lower house is expected to pass the bills at a plenary session Friday and
send them to the opposition-controlled House of Councillors. They are likely to
be enacted into law before the ongoing Diet session ends June 3.
While expressing his delight over the unanimous passage, Prime Minister Taro
Aso told reporters in the evening, ''Forming a consumer affairs agency is not
our goal...we need to continue our efforts to provide public administration
from the side of consumers.''
Chief Cabinet Secretary Takeo Kawamura separately told a press conference in
the afternoon that the establishment of the body would ''make huge headway
toward (improving) the administration of consumer affairs.''
The agency has also been ''what the general public and those who engage in
(dealing with) consumer problems have strongly hoped for,'' the government's
top spokesman said.
The plan was initiated by Prime Minister Taro Aso's predecessor, Yasuo Fukuda,
in January 2008 amid a spate of food-labeling scandals and related incidents
that seriously undermined public confidence in food safety, such as a food
poisoning case involving Chinese-made frozen dumplings.
The bills were submitted to the Diet last September, but Diet deliberations had
been suspended until recently due to fierce wrangling between the ruling and
opposition blocs.
The main opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which had refused to even debate
the bills, made major concessions on the heels of last month's revelation of a
fundraising scandal involving a secretary of DPJ President Ichiro Ozawa, which
has cast a pall over the party's prospects of winning a general election that
must be held by this fall.
A senior DPJ official had also expressed concerns that the party's intense
opposition to the bills could have given the public the impression that the
party is not enthusiastic about improving consumer affairs policy.
Meanwhile, the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and the New
Komeito party agreed to revise the government-proposed bills to incorporate
some of the opposition party's proposals.
Welcoming Thursday's passage of the bills through a committee, DPJ Acting
President Naoto Kan told a separate press conference, ''Our party's ideas are
largely included in the revised bills and the unanimous passage is a reflection
of our efforts.''
==Kyodo
2009-04-16 21:13:34