New DPR: A new broom or just the same old crowd?

Stephen Sherlock, Jakarta

In this long interregnum between the election of the new House of Representatives (DPR) in April and its swearing in at the end of September, it seems timely to raise the question of how clean and effective the new legislature will be when it finally begins its work.

The current DPR has become notorious for slowness in passing bills, poor attendance by members and general inattention to work. Like other institutions of state in Indonesia, it is seen by the public as prone to corruption. Will the new DPR be just the same?

In terms of membership at least, the new DPR will be quite different from that elected in 1999. The most obvious feature is the very large influx of new members. Of the 550 members, 400 (73 percent) will be entering the DPR for the first time. This is partly because the DPR was increased in size from 500 to 550 (a 19 percent increase) and because 38 seats for unelected representatives from TNI/POLRI were replaced with elected members.

But in addition to the effects of this institutional change, the 2004-2009 assembly will be very different from the previous DPR because there was a very high turnover of members. Of the 462 elected members of the old DPR, only 150, or 32 percent, were re- elected.

The influx of new members could have its good side and bad side. On the negative, the new members will be inexperienced in terms of legislative procedure, including the process of passing laws. Indeed the legislative process has just been changed in a new law passed in May 2004, so even returned DPR members may be unfamiliar with procedures.

The demanding work in commissions and special committees often requires a great deal of technical knowledge that cannot be acquired overnight. The absence of such knowledge in the 1999 DPR was one of the reasons for its poor performance.

Thinking positively, however, it is to be hoped that amongst the new arrivals at Senayan will be a large number of people with a real policy agenda and a sense of mission and service. This would be a refreshing change from the ethos of self-interest that seems to motivate many members now.

This will only happen if the parties learn from the experience of the electoral losses suffered by Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and other incumbent parties and show real determination to discipline their members. But will this actually happen when the processes for selecting DPR candidates within most parties have been so variable in quality?

Of course, the influx of new members is not uniform across the parties and this raises many questions about what this might mean for the DPR. For example, all but three of the members from Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) are new to the DPR.

The PKS has gained a reputation for tight discipline and a clean record, so all eyes will be on the party to see if its members act more cleanly, conscientiously or effectively than other members. And, if so, will that make any difference to the overall character of the DPR?

All 57 of the newly elected members from Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's Democrat Party are new, but the way that this party will operate in the DPR is a much more open question, particularly if Susilo becomes President.

What of National Awakening Party (PKB) and United Development Party (PPP)? The great majority of their members are new because most of the members of these parties were not re-elected. Was this because of their incompetence and corruption, or just because they fell out of favor with the party bosses?

The party with the largest number of experienced members is Golkar. 62 of its 128 members in the new DPR serve in the current legislative assembly and will therefore represent the largest pool of experience and corporate knowledge. And it was Golkar that was by far the most effective political organization in the 1999 DPR.

It seems likely that the new DPR will be even more dominated by Golkar than was the old. PDI-P, despite its huge losses, has 47 experienced members from the 1999 DPR. But will this party prove itself to be any more effective than the factionalised, poorly organized and coordinated body that it was in the old DPR?

A legislature must have the power to legislate. This seems so obvious that it hardly needs to be mentioned and, indeed, article 20 of the 1945 Constitution was recently amended to state specifically that the DPR has the power to make laws.

But the same Article also says that the President and the DPR must reach "joint approval" (setuju bersama) before a bill can become law. And Article 37 of the new law on the DPR's legislative procedures states that a bill must receive "joint approval" before it can be sent to the President for his/her signing.

This clearly gives the government the capacity to stop any bill from being passed through the DPR unless the government approves it. This is an effective veto at the bureaucratic and/or ministerial level, long before the question of presidential veto ever arises. The DPR is still not an independent legislative body.

A legislature must have sufficient financial resources and organizational independence to do its job. The DPR, however, is still a relatively impoverished institution, even though some of its members may be very rich indeed. The DPR today receives only slightly more funds to act as a democratic, accountable and representative institution as it received when it was a rubber stamp under the New Order.

No democratic legislature in the modern world can operate without a large amount of information, support and advice from in-house expertise. But the DPR has a paucity of such resources and what is available is poorly organized and managed.

The DPR Secretariat requires a complete organizational overhaul, but the secretary general does not have the final say over hiring and firing of staff and the terms and conditions of their employment. The Secretariat is still ultimately under the control of the government bureaucracy, yet another legacy of the DPR's subordination to the President inherited from the New Order.

But internally, the DPR itself still operates with procedures that are designed to keep its members from being held accountable to the electorate. A basic principle of democratic decision- making is voting, a procedure which, in the case of a legislative, ensures that every member's voice is counted and every member's intention is clear.

A vote forces a member to take a clear public stand on an issue. Records of the votes of members and their parties are a key part of holding members accountable to the people.

In the DPR, however, votes are rarely taken and decisions are made by so-called consensus (musyawarah), a process that allows parties and politicians to hide their actions from the people. Key decisions about legislation or about issues involving the oversight of executive government are held behind closed doors.

The public can never know what stand their representatives took. Most consultations with outside interests, such as private corporations, NGOs or lobby groups, take place in closed session and with no detailed records kept.

Soon a new DPR will convene and the great majority of its members will sit for the first time. If those members are to become agents of reform and not obstacles to change, they will need to tackle some basic questions about the power, independence and performance of the DPR.

Dr Stephen Sherlock is a senior governance consultant at the UN Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery (UNSFIR), a joint BAPPENAS-UNDP project. The views expressed here are his personal opinions and are not the official position of UNSFIR.