The House of Representatives’ poor record on passing legislation is doomed to continue beyond 2014, given that most current legislators have been nominated for re-election next year, a poll watchdog says.
Sebastian Salang, the executive director of the Concerned Citizens for the Indonesian Legislature (Formappi), said on Sunday that based on the provisional lists of legislative candidates submitted by political parties to election organizers last week, some 90.5 percent of the current batch of 560 House members were seeking another term in office.
“Their performance is under criticism and has been deemed poor,” he said.
“They have little discipline and many of them have been implicated in corruption cases. So if they’re re-elected, we can expect their productivity to be just as bad or even worse.”
The current House has set lofty targets for passing legislation since it took office in mid-2009, but has failed to meet any of those targets.
In 2010, the first full year in which legislators were in session, the House targeted the passage of 70 bills but ended up passing just 17. Undaunted, it raised its target for 2012 to 91 bills, and again came up short with just 22 bills passed.
Last year, legislators were eyeing a more modest figure of 64 bills, but passed just 16. So far this year, the House has passed 14 out of a targeted 70 bills.
However, critics point out that the apparent boost in output this year is misleading, given that 10 of the bills passed were on the establishment of new administrative regions, and two were ratifications of international conventions to which Indonesia has for years been a signatory.
Reward & punishment
Sebastian said the underperforming trend would continue because of the ingrained party system that favored a candidate’s loyalty and financial contributions to the party over their performance in initiating and passing legislation.
“Political parties don’t have a reward-and-punishment system in place. They should punish the lazy legislators and the graft-tainted ones by not nominating them for re-election,” he said.
“The active legislators should be prioritized for another shot at the House so that over time there will be an improvement in the House’s performance.”
Based on the provisional lists of candidates, the ruling Democratic Party is re-nominating 133 of its current 148 legislators for the 2014 election.
The Golkar Party is re-nominating 92 of its 106 legislators, and the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) is re-nominating 84 of its 94 House members.
[Parties] should punish the lazy legislators and the graft-tainted ones by not nominating them for re-electionSebastian Salang, Formappi
All 57 legislators from the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) are running for re-election, as are the majority of legislators from the five remaining parties at the House.
The current batch of representatives, Sebastian said, had failed in its three-pronged duty of passing legislation, monitoring government policies and keeping tabs on state expenditure.
“So the question is, exactly who are they representing?” he said.
Problem candidates
Formappi also identified at least five individuals who had been nominated by more than one party.
They include one who was nominated by the National Democratic Party (NasDem) and the People’s Conscience Party (Hanura), and two who were nominated by both Hanura and the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra).
Another candidate has been nominated by both Gerindra and the PDI-P, while the fifth was named on the provisional lists of three parties: NasDem, the United Development Party (PPP) and the National Awakening Party (PKB).
“The registration systems that the parties employ are a mess, so they’re unable to detect every case like this,” Sebastian said.
He added that once the formal verification process by the General Elections Commission (KPU) had identified the problem candidates, the parties in question should strike them from their lists and nominate new ones.
The KPU warned last week that candidates found to be members of more than one extant party would be disqualified for standing in next year’s election.
Hadar Gumay, a KPU commissioner, said his office had already uncovered at least one case of a candidate being nominated by a party while still a card-carrying member of another party.
He said the individual in question, whom he declined to identify, was named on the provisional list of candidates submitted by the National Mandate Party (PAN), but was actually a member of the Reform Star Party (PBR) and currently served as a regional legislator for the PBR. The PBR is not eligible to contest the 2014 election, but the PAN is.
Hadar said that candidates with multiple party affiliations would still be allowed to stand in the 2014 poll as long as they officially resigned from all other parties except the nominating one by Aug. 1.
By: Rizky Amelia
