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residential ticket Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Uno attacked the economic achievements of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s administration on Friday, saying the government relied too heavily on debt while failing with tax reform.

In a prelude to the presidential debate season that will begin next week, the Prabowo-Sandiaga campaign team said the country’s major economic problems stemmed from its low tax revenue that had left it dependent on income from fluctuating commodity sales and debt funding from volatile capital markets.

Campaign team member Rizal Ramli, who served as coordinating minister of maritime affairs in the early years of the Jokowi administration, said Indonesia’s tax ratio was low at 9.5 percent in 2018.

“Our tax ratio is lower than in the years when I was in the government,” he said during a press briefing at the campaign team’s headquarters, referring to the year 2015, when the tax ratio was 10.7 percent.

Successive governments of Indonesia have been criticized for the country’s relatively low tax ratio.

For comparison, the International Monetary Fund said a country should achieve a tax ratio of 12.5 percent to secure sustainable development.

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani once said she was ashamed to find out that the country’s ratio was below 11 percent when she returned home in 2016 after serving as World Bank executive director.

To address the problem, Rizal said a Prabowo-Sandiaga government would cut corporate and income tax rates to between 5 and 8 percent. Currently, Indonesia’s corporate tax rate is 35 percent, and income tax can be as high as 30 percent.

“The rates are too high, creating opportunities for hanky-panky. Our rates are the highest in the region, and now we have to lower them,” he said.

He added that Indonesia needed to be more progressive in tax reform, especially in its bureaucracy, by creating an integrated tax system that would make the process more transparent. Ramli expressed support for the idea to separate the taxation body from the Finance Ministry, as with the United States’ Internal Revenue Service.

Prabowo’s campaign team presentation on its fiscal plans was the first serious attempt by the opposition to challenge the government on its economic policies ahead of the presidential election in April.

Earlier, Prabowo, Sandiaga and their campaign team often made headlines for controversial or unfounded remarks on the country’s economic conditions, soaked in nationalist sentiment.

In October, Prabowo said the government had been running “economics of stupidity” that he called “worse than neoliberalism”.

Maybank Indonesia economist Myrdal Gunarto said Prabowo-Sandi’s fiscal plans were positive, but added that many things should be questioned about those plans.

Commenting on the proposed tax cut, he said it should be compensated by encouraging other revenue sources like value-added tax and non-tax state revenue, which was not easy to do given the current structure of the economy.

He added that Indonesia’s government debt was still manageable because of the low debt-to-gross domestic product ratio at 29.9 percent, but because Indonesia’s economic structure was driven by commodity industries, the country needed to redevelop the industries that added value.

“So that with the portion of debt, mainly foreign debt, like now, we are not too easily affected by external shocks,” he said.

Hendrawan Supratikno, a member of the Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin campaign team, said none of Prabowo’s ideas were new, since they had been executed by the government.

The idea to separate the taxation body from the Finance Ministry, for example, had been stipulated in the National Medium-Term Development Plan 2015-2019, but its implementation depended on the General Taxation System Law, and the rate cut had also been discussed in the ministries.

“It’s easy to only create a wish list and dreams without clarity on how to achieve it. Even my grandmother can do that,” he said.

Center for Indonesia Taxation Analysis executive director, Yustinus Prastowo, said the government had proposed reforms similar to those offered by Prabowo-Sandiaga, but they had not been realized since this required amendments to tax laws.

The government had proposed to the House of Representatives a bill on general tax provisions as the first of three tax laws planned to be revised as early as 2016, but the draft had remained on the shelf. (ggq)