Pandaya, Jakarta – Their main job has been to make laws but while they were doing it the House of Representatives legislators often stirred bitter controversies that ended up with the new law landing at the Constitutional Court for review, sometimes in a matter of weeks after endorsement.
When they were supposed to assemble to endorse a bill, very few would turn up, although more than half of the whole membership of the House would have signed up for the plenary meeting. And when it came to corruption, they stood out as major offenders among graft perpetrators.
Controversial legislative products, laziness and corruption have brought the 2004 – 2009 lawmakers' reputation so low that their legacy will no doubt heavily burden their 2009 – 2014 sucessors for the rest of their term.
Transparency Intrernational-Indonesia has ranked the House of Representatives as the most corrupt institution in its 2009 Corruption Perception Index, followed by political parties and then law enforcement institutions such as the police, courts and public services.
They managed to finish barely 190 of the 284 high priority bills that they were assigned under the Prolegnas (National Legislation Project). At the very end of their term, the lawmakers were toiling to finish more than a dozen bills in a back-breaking bid to reduce the shortfall.
This performance has given the outgoing legislators bad marks from pollsters. Indo Barometer, for example, found that only 51 percent of respondents rated the House's achievement as satisfactory compared to 90 percent for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. A recent survey by Kompas gave a much lower rate, at less than 33 percent.
There seems little hope for better performance from the incoming legislators, who comprise people with the same profiles: academics, businessmen, artists, professionals, with 90 percent having college diplomas. Some have totally unproven records but then they have close ties with, or are relatives of, powerful political figures.
A fundamental weakness lies in the the corrupt candidate selection process, which heavily relies on the candidate's popularity and financial clout rather than on actual competence.
Lest we forget this good example, in the April legislative election the public made fun of the National Mandate Party by twisting its hugely popular acronym PAN into "Partai Artis Nasional" (National Artists Party) when it recruited more than 30 celebrities who had no known political track record, as party candidates.
This year's legislative elections became a free market for political adventurers. Money along with cronyism remained a key factor that determined a candidate's opportunity to win a seat. Some candidates publicly admitted they had spent billions of their hard-earned cash buying their political credentials.
Some became "mentally unbalanced" after they lost the election. Other losers did not mind embarassing themselves by trying to literally dismantle the road project they had funded or reclaiming the praying mats they had given out in exchange for votes.
If candidates are eventually elected in these circumstances, the first thing that may come to their mind is how, within the five years of their term, to recoup the huge sum of money they spent treating people in their electoral districts and to help party leaders to get elected.
Many have become power brokers or middlemen in development projects in their constituencies, as the Corruption Court has heard from numerous trials.
The corrupt recruitment system breeds corrupt practices as revealed, again, in graft trials of legislators involved in instances of power brokerage and collusion with businesspeople in development projects.
The House of Representatives' decision-making process is another stumbling block. In most cases, votes are counted on a factional rather than individual basis. This does not encourage individual legislators to have ideas different from those of the political party they represent.
This system explains why legislators' voices become irrelevant to the aspirations of the people that they are supposed to represent, so they simply become the mouthpiece of the political party they are affiliated to.
The lack of attatchment to their constituents makes legislators strangers to the people. So what happened the other day was that when the public wanted to see an all-out battle against corruption, the lawmakers were busy attempting to curtail the key powers of KPK. When people were desperate for employment, lawmakers insisted that what they needed was better morality. So they made the pornography law.
Legislators become loyal to their political parties more than to their constituents because those who dare to step out of line risk punitive action, although the laws protect them from being recalled.
That the major parties, Golkar and the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) plan to join the Yudhoyono's coalition government is another good reason to worry about the performance of the next House.
If every political party joins the government, (regardless of who wins elections) then who else is going to control the government?
The best we can expect is a clumsy, superficial "opposition" because everybody in the Parliament is the President's friend. Activists, academics, the media and the public will have to join forces to control the government.