Dereliction of duty till the last minute?

The four-year term of the 21st National Assembly expires on May 29. But the scorecard of the current legislature is extremely shabby due to the never-ending political battles. Among 25,800 bills the lawmakers proposed, only 9,500, or just 36 percent, were passed. The pending 16,300 bills will be automatically repealed by the last day of the term. An extraordinary session in May could offer a final opportunity to deal with the remaining bills, but no progress has been made due to the deepening rivalry between the governing People Power Party (PPP) and the majority Democratic Party (DP) after the DP’s landslide victory in the April 10 parliamentary elections.

Though some of the bills are controversial, a number of them are directly linked to the economy and people’s livelihoods. One of the most urgent bills is a special act on disposing nuclear waste. The bill provides grounds for building facilities to permanently or temporarily store spent fuel from nuclear plants. It takes at least seven years to build an ad hoc storage facility, but existing facilities will be saturated in 2030 if left unattended. That could cause a serious problem for electricity supply. The two major parties agreed to pass the special bill in May, but it remains to be seen.

Bills on helping to raise and care for children are also pending in the legislature, not to mention three revisions aimed at ensuring paid leave for both parents up to three years — one and half years for each parent. Despite the urgent need to lift our pitifully low birthrate, lawmakers are still dilly-dallying on enacting those bills.

The pending economy-related bills only deepens companies’ woes. A survey on 1,000 major companies by the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI) shows that 30.9 percent of them wanted to see the passage of the act on expanding the scope of tax exemption for investments in national strategic technologies and research and development, while 28.1 percent hoped for the passage of the revised Serious Industrial Accident Act aimed at suspending the implementation of the strict punishment of employers for industrial accidents, if they hire less than 50 workers. The FKI stressed the need for the passage of such acts in the legislature to bolster corporate investment and competitiveness.

If the Assembly abandons its obligation to protect people’s livelihoods, that’s dereliction of duty. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle must not be engrossed in seeking their partisan interests. If they really want to serve the people and country, they must pass the pending bills before they are killed. If legislators want to spend the remaining month only fighting against one another, they cannot avoid the disgrace of being the worst-ever legislature.