Fuel 'subsidy' for House criticized
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The move by the House of Representatives to provide a new monthly allowance of Rp 10 million (about US$1,000) for fellow lawmakers drew strong criticism on Friday.
All 550 House members will receive the new allowances for six months starting in November, reportedly as compensation for the recent fuel price hike.
The size of the allowance was much greater than the Rp 100,000 monthly cash given by the government to some 15.4 million poor families across the country to cushion the impact of the fuel hike.
"This is an unfair policy, particularly as the allowance is 100 times larger than the cash subsidy for the poor," said Fahmi Badoh of the Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW).
He said that the lawmakers should not be given a new monthly allowance as they already received a more-than-adequate monthly income of over Rp 29 million.
In comparison, more than half of the country's 220 million people live on less than $2 a day.
Fahmi said that the lawmakers had received such a huge increase because they were supposed to use part of it to finance visits to their constituents across the country. "But in reality, they seldom meet with the people who elected them."
University of Indonesia political analyst Arbi Sanit also described the policy as unfair.
"This is what we call an unfair policy; made by both the executive and the legislative branches," he was quoted by Antara as saying.
He feared that the policy would further lower the confidence of the people in the House, which has been criticized for its poor legislation performance, as evidenced by the extremely low number of bills passed during the first year of their five-year term.
The move to provide the new monthly allowance for the House members comes at a time when some lawmakers, particularly from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and the National Awakening Party (PKB), planned to launch a campaign for the House to hold an extraordinary plenary meeting in a bid to force the government to review the fuel hike policy. Some lawmakers have criticized the fuel price hike for being too excessive.
The government on Oct. 1 raised fuel prices an average of more than 126 percent in a bid to help ease the burden on the state budget in covering the cost of the fuel subsidy, which had consumed about one-fifth of the annual state budget amid soaring international oil prices. Many have criticized the policy, with some lawmakers claiming that they had only given approval for the government to raise fuel prices by around 30 percent.
Meanwhile, House deputy speaker Zaenal Ma'arif said that the additional monthly allowances for lawmakers was not made to compensate for the new fuel prices because the policy had been discussed with the government long before the fuel price hike was announced.
He was quoted by news portal detik.com as saying that the higher allowance was needed by the lawmakers to help finance their various activities, including visits to constituents.
Ade Daud Nasution, a legislator from the Reform Star Party, dismissed the suggestion that the lawmakers were taking home a huge sum of money each month.
He said that in "reality" he had to allocate a lot of his monthly salary for his party, for costs incurred while visiting constituents and donations for non-governmental organizations.
"I end up bringing home only about Rp 5 million (each month)," he added.