Govt unlikely to revise budget despite court ruling

Urip Hudiono, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government is unlikely to submit a last-minute revision to the 2006 state budget to satisfy a Constitutional Court ruling on the allocation of money for education, with the draft budget already in final deliberations at the House of Representatives ahead of expected approval this week.

State Minister for National Development Planning Sri Mulyani Indrawati said on Monday that for the time being the government was satisfied leaving the matter to the House for any later revisions.

"We will just leave it at that and see later on," she said.

The government usually submits a revision of the state budget to the House for approval after a midyear assessment.

Coordinating Minister for the Economy Aburizal Bakrie said previously the government might consider revising the draft budget to allocate more money for social and development programs -- including education -- at the cost of a widening budget deficit.

The Constitutional Court ruled last week in a judicial review of the National Education Law that the government must allocate at least 20 percent of the state budget for education, in accordance with the 1945 Constitution. The court also ruled that the allocation should take effect immediately, rather than through gradual increases.

The government had earlier presented to House Commission XI for financial affairs a scheme in which it would gradually increase the education budget by an average of 3 percent each year, until it reached 20.1 percent of the total budget in 2009.

For the 2006 state budget, the government has proposed Rp 31.3 trillion for the education sector, from Rp 375 trillion in total planned expenditures. The proposed budget is being deliberated by the House for approval in a plenary session on Oct. 27.

Commenting on the court's ruling, legislators and analysts doubted the feasibility of its implementation due to the current limitations on the state budget to finance programs.

Though agreeing with the court's ruling and praising the benefits it would have on the education sector, economist Faisal Basri of the University of Indonesia said the real problem was with the Constitution.

"There is perhaps no other constitution in the world that places such an inflexible requirement on the government," he said.

The head of the Budget Committee's working team for budgetary spending, Achmad Hafiz Zawawi, said the committee had held lengthy discussions on whether the 20 percent allocation for education would be based on the Rp 350 trillion in total budget expenditures or just on the expenditures for the country's human resource development programs and state agencies.

In the end, Hafiz said, the committee would likely agree to base the allocation on the Rp 180 trillion allocated for state agencies.

"That is more appropriate for the current budget and easier to measure as well as monitor," he said.