Matareum blames rules for slow passage of laws
JAKARTA (JP): Deputy House Speaker Ismail Hasan Metareum blames the restrictive internal rules of the House of Representatives for the slow passage of legislation.
"The regulation that at least two factions of the House must approve the motion before a bill can be deliberated is a psychological constraint," he told a seminar on law development yesterday.
The regulation was initially written to prevent one faction from dominating all the procedures that the House must go through to pass a law, he said.
"The problem is, no faction wants to be considered the second in line to support the draft," he said.
The long process of issuing legislation, as well as the poor productivity of the House and other institutions in preparing and producing laws, were the major points of discussion.
The seminar also focused on the criticism that the House rarely initiates its own legislation.
Metareum and another speaker, Minister of Justice Oetojo Oesman, however, agreed that more laws should be produced in a shorter time to keep up with the rapid changes in all sectors.
"I believe we need to issue at least 40 laws a year," said Metareum.
Metareum also blamed the State Secretariat for taking too long to process the bills before sending them on to the House for final deliberation.
"We are often told by ministers that they cannot submit any draft bills because they are still somewhere at the State Secretariat," Metareum said.
He conceded that the Secretariat lacks enough personnel to study all the drafts.
To rectify the problem, he suggested that the ministries allow their legal experts to be directly involved in the process of preparing legislation at the National Law Development Body (BPHN).
The body, which is directly accountable to President Soeharto, is currently headed by Prof. Sunaryati Hartono.
Only then will the BPHN speed up the process of preparing draft bills to be submitted to the State Secretariat before they reach the House, Metareum said.
Attention
Next, Metareum focused his attention on the BPHN itself, saying that it "must be strengthened in order to enable it to function as the center of law."
The other participants in the seminar, including former chief of the Supreme Court, Purwoto Gandasubrata, supported Metareum's suggestion that every ministry transfer their own legal experts to the BPHN.
At present, drafts from the BPHN undergo several changes at the ministry offices and the State Secretariat before they finally reach the House.
Oetojo said difficulties also arise from the fact that the ministers themselves often have opinions that differ from the legal experts employed in their own legislation bureaus.
"Such differences occur because some ministers do not attend the necessary meetings," he said.
In the discussion yesterday, Metareum denied allegations that the House was inferior to the executive branch in matters of legislation.
He justified his opinion by pointing out that the House does not just docilely accept any legislation submitted to it, and that the legislators do make changes in government-sponsored draft bills.
"For instance, the House made many changes in the draft bill on National Education," he said.
In his speech, Minister Oetojo stressed the importance of transparency in the legislation system. "We need a more open legislation system so that we can better meet the public's rising expectations of the system," he said. (anr)