Thumbs down to DPR
The House of Representatives ends another working session today after three months of what appeared to be a busy and hectic work schedule, but one in which it delivered very little in terms of substance.
Let the record -- on what the House has done, or more importantly it has not done -- speak for itself.
The House completed the deliberation on four bills (at least as of Wednesday) out of the 24 that it started when it began its working session in January. This achievement falls far short of the targeted 11 that House Speaker Akbar Tandjung promised when he opened the session. The four include the long-awaited bill on money laundering, and the less urgent ratification of a treaty on the exploration of outer space.
The House missed out on its promise to pass the bills on broadcasting, power and other legislation that would have helped this nation, long held back by endless crises, move forward. This begs the question of where the House's priorities lie, and whether or not it has any sense of crisis at all.
The delay on the deliberations of the bills means that there will be a huge backlog of bills to be debated when the House returns to work in May after the long recess. Let's not forget, besides the 20 or so bills left pending, new legislation has meanwhile been drafted and submitted; all of them demanding the House's immediate attention.
The just concluded three-month working session was not without its share of controversies. The biggest of all is the detention, and now the trial, of Speaker Akbar on corruption charges. But such is the power vested in his post, and the power of the Golkar Party which he chairs, that he is under no obligation to step down, or even step aside, from the speakership. The way things stand today, the nation's supposedly inviolable House of Representatives is led by a man who is in detention and on trial for a crime. Guilty or not guilty, this episode has taken its toll on the performance of the House, and its image.
Akbar's case is a sequel to Buloggate which saw the House, under his own leadership, flexing its muscle to push then president Abdurrahman Wahid out of office in July. In Akbar's case today, he is being accused misusing Rp 40 billion of funds belonging to the State Logistics Agency (Bulog).
Some factions tried to initiate a House inquiry, aptly called Buloggate II, against Akbar, but with the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), the largest faction in the House, wavering, the issue was deferred. Although Buloggate II has taken so much of the time and attention of the House's members these past three months, they still could not make any decision on whether or not a House inquiry was needed.
Ever since it succeeded in bringing down a president last year, the House has been really intoxicated with its new found power in controlling the government. We have seen this power being used (or abused) time and again when the House blocked or delayed many of the government's economic programs, including when it intervened in the privatization of state companies.
And there was the blunder that the House committed this week which could potentially void most of the legislation it passed in the last three months. When the House endorsed the bill on money laundering on Monday, the plenary session was attended by 49 members, well short of the half of the House's 500 members required for a quorum. Yet, the House endorsed it without any qualms, arguing that what counted was the attendance list, and not the physical presence of the members.
Such behavior of our elected representatives is unacceptable. Apart from the question of where they goofed off to during the plenary session, it raised the question about the constitutionality of the bill once it becomes law. It did not help the matter when some DPR members contended that many previous bills were also endorsed in the same way in the past.
So much has happened within the confines of the House of Representatives building complex these past three months, but it has achieved little. We are simply not impressed with the House's performance. The public expected more from their representatives, most of whom were elected in the 1999 general elections on the platform of reform. If this nation has stalled or is making very little progress on political, economic and social reforms, we know who the culprits are.