Thumbs down to DPR

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.