The extraordinary Diet session to be convened on Oct. 3 should focus on re-examining the state funeral for the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which was held despite bitterly divided public opinion.

Diet members should also seek to clarify the relationship between politicians and the Unification Church, now formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. 

The Diet should also address such urgent policy challenges as dealing with surging prices, which directly affect people’s daily lives.

Another urgency is improving responses to the COVID-19 pandemic based on lessons from the seventh wave of infections, which swept through the nation in the past few months.

There should also be meaningful debate on another important question--how to inject transparency and accountability into the ways Diet members spend 1 million yen ($6,900) of fixed monthly allowances intended to cover research, travel and communications expenses.

These allowances are paid to Diet members in addition to their monthly salary of around 1.3 million yen. 

The ruling and opposition parties agreed to make a decision on the issue during this year’s ordinary Diet session, which ended in June. But no decision was made.

The legislature failed to honor the agreement amid growing public criticism about the role of money in politics due to a string of scandals involving Cabinet members of the Abe administration, including vote-buying and bribery cases.

The package of allowances for “documents, communications, travel and accommodations,” or “buntsu-hi” for short, became a target of criticism because it is hidden behind the thick veil of opaqueness.

There are no clear standards or criteria for use, and Diet members are not required to disclose how they spend the money. There is no system for independent audits to determine whether the funds were used properly, either.

Lawmakers are not required to return unspent allowances to the state coffers.

It is said the funds are used by Diet members to pay the salaries of their private secretaries, buy tickets to fund-raisers held by fellow legislators and pay for eating and drinking sessions with supporters.

The allowance package has been described as “a second wallet” to give Diet members money they can freely use.

The ruling and opposition parties agreed to review the allowance program after the Lower House election last autumn as a rookie lawmaker of Nippon Ishin (Japan Innovation Party) questioned the rule that the full amount is paid even for a month when Diet members work only a single day.

In April this year, the Diet passed a bill to revise the law to pay the allowances by the day. But there has been no progress in the work to tackle the core challenge of securing transparency and accountability for use of the allowances.

The revision to the law redefined the purposes of the allowances from paying for expenses of “sending out public documents and carrying out communications of a public nature” to financing expenses related to “such activities as research and study concerning national politics, public relations, interactions with the public and sojourns.”

The title has also been changed to “research, study, public relations and sojourn” allowances.

But the new expanded purposes do more harm than good. They could be used to endorse using the allowances to pay for eating and drinking sessions under the pretext of “interactions with the public” and paying the salaries of private secretaries as financing “research and study.”

The effective expansion of the scope of the expenses to be covered by the allowances does nothing to prevent questionable and shady ways the money is spent unless lawmakers are legally required to disclose how they have spent the funds.

The two main opposition parties--the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and Nippon Ishin--recently agreed to “fight together” on six issues in the extraordinary Diet session, including legislation to require lawmakers to disclose how they spend the monthly allowances as well as helping victims of the shady donation-sales practices of the Unification Church and others.

While the largest and the second largest opposition parties have made clear their commitment to tackling this issue, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has remained reluctant to embark on reforming the program and its attitude is now at stake. 

In recent weeks, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has repeated his pledge to “return to my original mindset.”

If he is serious, Kishida should exercise effective political leadership to ensure reform of the allowance program during the upcoming Diet session as a step to secure transparency of political funds.

This was one of the promises he made during his campaign for the party leadership election.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 30