Legislators yet to start work, busy making preparations
Legislators yet to start work, busy making preparations
Kurniawan Hari, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
Eight days after they were sworn in, most members of the House of
Representatives have yet to start working.
Observations by The Jakarta Post suggested that only House
leaders and a few members were present at the House on Friday.
Even then, they had no scheduled activities.
Their absence is largely due to the fact that the House
secretariat has yet to prepare and assign offices to each of the
House's 550 members.
Reelected legislators were seen moving to their new offices,
while new lawmakers have yet to have their computers installed.
Ultimately, both the reelected and new legislators, who were
sworn on Oct. 1, are unable to start working just yet.
"Perhaps we can enter our offices on Monday. I checked out the
situation yesterday (Thursday) and the computers had still not
been installed," said Suryama M. Sastra, a new legislator from
the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), here on Friday.
Apart from cleaning the offices of the legislators, workers
were also putting the finishing touches to the construction of a
four-story plenary meeting hall.
Amin Said Husni of the National Awakening Party (PKB) and
Anwar Arifin of Golkar were also seen at the House building, but
they also had nothing to do pending the setting up of House
commissions.
House Speaker Agung Laksono said House leaders and factions
would soon discuss the commissions.
He said the number of House commissions would likely be raised
from the nine to 10 or 11 to make room for the additional
legislators.
The House had 500 legislators in the previous session, which
ended on Sept. 30.
According to the law on the composition of legislative bodies,
the number of House seats was increased from 500 to 550.
On his second day in office on Friday, Agung told to
journalists that he would improve the law-making processes in the
House.
"The public must be given every chance to voice their opinions
during the law-making process. We must produce laws that will be
accepted by the community," he said.
Criticizing the performance of the House during the 1999-2004
period, the Center for Indonesian Law and Policy Studies (PSHK)
stated that the legislators rushed the deliberation of bills to
show the public that they had produced a large number of laws.
According to the PSHK, the House was only interested in
quantity, not quality, prompting people to challenge several laws
in the Constitutional Court.
Regarding the poor attendance record of lawmakers in the
previous House, Agung called on the leaders of the House factions
and all House members to work hand in hand to boost performance.
He acknowledged that the poor attendance record of legislators
would be a major challenge.
"We hope that the performance of the House will be better than
the performance of the previous House. Checks and balances can
only be effected if the House does its work well," he added.