Home Minister agrees with plan to move capital

Home Minister Gamawan Fauzi says he agrees with a plan to move the capital from Jakarta.

However, he proposed it was only the administration which needed to be moved. “Many say that [moving the administration activities] it will be much cheaper,” Gamawan said at the State Palace in Jakarta on Thursday as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.

Speaking after attending a meeting between President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and media owners, Gamawan said all the options had been discussed, especially to help settle the problem of increasingly acute traffic jams in Jakarta.

The first option is to maintain Jakarta as the capital and resolve all the city’s problems, he said. The second option is to move the administration away from Jakarta, but retain it as the center of trade, like in Malaysia.

The third is to move the whole capital, both as an economic and an administrative center, such as in Brazil, the Netherlands and Australia.

The minister said the President had established a small team in charge of assessing the establishment of a new capital in line with peoples’ expectations.