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ndonesia is blessed with a President who calls for a new mindset. Two words that are searching for a new mindset are province and governor. These words were captured by an old mindset in the newly-passed law on regional government.

The old mindset gives two hats to governors, one as heads of autonomous provincial regions and the other as representatives of the central government to the regions.

The old mindset also has a specific interpretation of the article of the Constitution which says that the unitary state of Indonesia is divided into provincial regions and provincial regions are divided into regency and city regions.

This old mindset interpretation is that the territory of Indonesia is divided into provinces and the territory of provinces divided into regencies and cities. But that is not what the article states. It says the state of Indonesia is divided into provincial autonomous regions and these autonomous regions are further divided into regency and city autonomous regions. It does not refer to cutting up the land, but to the structure of the state and the organization of its citizens.

Successive laws on regional government have regulated conditions for the creation of new regions, but have not answered a basic question: why would the nation and the citizens of somewhere in it want to create a new province?

This question is significant. Eight provinces have split into two in the last 15 years, creating 16 new provinces with the people behind each split having different motives. But a dominant theme has been the power and position of the elites of one of the pair of new regions and related financial incentives.

The new way of thinking would be that the Indonesian state has a noble purpose in being divided into provinces and a noble purpose for dividing provinces into regencies and cities. The national purpose would be to provide services and maintain the rule of law.

In the new way of thinking the citizens would have a noble purpose in having their regency or city within a province and that would be to assure justice and equity.

In the new way of thinking, regency and city governments would have a noble purpose in belonging to a province in which they act collectively in the interests of their citizens without having to lobby a distant central government on their own.

The logic of this new mindset and reinterpretation of the Constitution leads us to understand that there is no need for special provisions for governors to represent the central government in the regions because that is embedded in the concept of the province.

The central government has not just the governor, but the whole of the provincial government and the provincial council to represent it because that is in the mindset of the way in which the state is structured.

Provinces would be responsible for creating, maintaining and overseeing the autonomy of their own regencies and cities, in accordance with national policies made specifically to assure that provinces did it the right way.

And the leaders of the provinces, both government and council, would be accountable to the nation for the implementation of their own autonomy and the autonomy of their regencies and cities.

The governor'€™s core task would be to assure that the whole government within its territory is implementing the law on behalf of its citizens.

The provincial council, made up of members from different parties elected from regencies and cities, would be organized both according to party committees (fraksi) and into electorate (dapil) committees, so that the interests of each electorate are considered in council deliberations.

Under this order of things, it would make sense to elect governors and provincial councilors at the same general elections as national representatives and the President in 2019. These would be national elections.

Then the newly-elected governors would assist the new President to prepare his policies for regional development, which would then form the basis for campaigning for local elections '€” regents, mayors and local councilors '€” a year later. Not only would there be great savings in election costs, there would also be larger savings from consistency of policy and plans from the national level to the local level across the whole country.

This is not entirely a new idea. A similar concept was developed by a committee of the Regional Representatives Council (DPD) in 2008-2009, and further developed by another committee in the DPD in 2010-2011.

But the idea did not progress further when the House of Representatives accepted the government'€™s draft of the new law in 2011. Perhaps now is the time to bring the idea forward again, for the idea can flourish under the new law if it is implemented with the right new mindset.