Raise civil servant salaries

The view expressed by Prof. M. Arsjad Anwar of the University of Indonesia's Faculty of Economics deserves our attention. According to the professor the gap between the salaries of private business employees and civil servants is now so great that immediate measures by the government are warranted. Unless this is done it will be difficult for the civil servant corps to improve the quality of its human resources, which is needed to ensure the proper functioning of the administration. An adequate salary would help establish a clean and authoritative government, he said.

The broad outlines of state policy make considerable demands with regard to the quality of our civil servants, or state apparatus. It aims at ensuring a "clean, authoritative, professional, efficient and effective state administration." True, a high salary is no guarantee that all those lofty demands will be realized. However, it is also true that an inadequate salary poses an unfair constraint.

-- Suara Pembaruan, Jakarta