Legislators must quickly settle their differences to pass a public service bill within their current standing session, a coalition of civil society groups urged Monday.
The coalition pressured the legislators to pass the three-year old bill amid fear the upcoming elections will force them to again delay the bill, deemed crucial to improve the quality of public services in Indonesia.
The Community Concerned about Public Services (MP3), which includes the Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW), the Indonesian Consumer Protection Foundation (YLKI), the Urban Poor Consortium (UPC) and the Jakarta Legal Aid Council (LBH Jakarta), said the lawmakers must settle any contentious issues among themselves now to pass the bill.
The contentious articles include those on dispute settlement mechanisms and sanctions, in which the latest draft would likely fail to protect the public should it be issued without being revised.
Coordinator of the group Sulistio said in a discussion here Monday that sanctions offered by the bill were still too weak.
“Sanctions are still too weak because the draft proposed by the State Ministry for Administrative Reforms still refers to administrative sanctions. The heaviest punishment is nothing more than a dismissal,” Sulistio said.
“This is barely enough, for example, in cases where a reckless port manager allows an overcrowded ship without safety standards to sail and the ship sinks and the passengers drown, like what has happened recently,” he added.
A series of surveys have shown a deteriorating quality in the country’s public service in recent years, with officials being accused of only getting things done after they received bribes. The recent series of transportation accidents that claimed hundreds of lives have also been blamed on officials’ poor performance.
However, Ermi Ramayani, also from the MP3, said the articles on sanctions could not be further discussed before the House of Representatives finished with the articles on the dispute settlement mechanism.
She said the government and lawmakers of the Commission II, which oversees home affairs, regional autonomy and the state apparatus, and is responsible for the bill deliberation, had not yet agreed upon how the mechanism should work.
The latest draft of the bill, said Erni, suggests that should there be a dispute between a customer and an officer of a public institution, then it is the institution’s responsibility to settle the dispute internally. “We believe the mechanism to be detrimental to customers as most institutions in the country are still dubbed as unnecessarily protective of their staff,” she said.
Another discussed option is the settlement of the disputes through the National Ombudsman Committee.
But, this will not likely benefit customers either, with the newly-endorsed law on the committee
limiting its authority to merely issuing recommendations for disputing parties.
“So we suggest either the ombudsman committee be given additional authority, which could allow it to have executorial functions, or the establishment of an independent watchdog body,” Erni said.
Commission II member Hadi Mulyo of the United Development Party (PPP) slammed the idea of establishing a new body, saying Indonesia had too many bodies already.
“I prefer empowering the existing ones, such as the ombudsman committee,” he said.
Hadi said the commission would discuss the possibility of increasing the committee’s authority and provide more sanctions.
Hadi said the public services bill could be passed before the House enters its next recess on March 7, after which legislators will intensify their campaigning for the April 9 elections.
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