Camelia Pasandaran – The government is bent on demanding a spotless moral track record for anyone aspiring to run for top regional posts, setting the bar even higher for candidates.

Home Affairs Minister Gamawan Fauzi, who last week highlighted adultery as a moral defect that would make a candidate unfit for public office, on Friday said the government had a responsibility to save people from themselves.

He said other vices and sins were also on the list of behavior that candidates should not have engaged in.

"People assume it is only about affairs," he said. But the Regional Governance Law "explicitly includes in its explanation drinkers, gamblers, drug users and adulterers."

The 2004 Regional Governance Law required candidates to be morally clean. But in its second revision in 2008, the requirement was dropped following the argument that morality should be judged by voters and that it was difficult to define good morality.

The government is working on another revision that will reinstate the morality clauses. The revision is expected to be submitted to the House of Representatives in June.

The minister was speaking at a news conference at his office with Denny JA, chairman of the Indonesian Survey Circle (LSI), which has criticized the government's plan to include morality and experience as part of the requirements for regional head candidates.

"In America, to be a president there is a short list of requirements, while here we have 16 requirements for regional head candidates," Denny said. "Morality and experience should be the consideration of the people during the vote, not laid down in government standards."

Indonesia will see 244 regional elections this year. Several entertainers, including Julia Perez, Maria Eva, Venna Melinda and Ayu Azhari, have announced plans to join the elections.

Defending his plan to return the morality criteria and add experience to the next revision of the law, Gamawan said unlike in more advanced countries, access to information and education was still very limited in Indonesia, especially in rural areas.

"How many percent of our people have access to information or read a newspaper every day?" he asked. "This means the public will not be well informed about the track records of the candidates."

Gamawan cited his own case when he ran for governor of West Sumatra. His supporters did not care for his vision and mission statement. "Instead, they asked me to sing. They said, 'Just sing and we will vote for you,'?" he said.

Gamawan said the government needed to intervene until the people were much better educated and there was greater access to information. "We cannot compare Papua to America, or East Nusa Tenggara to America. We're in a transition period and we need to have our feet on the ground," he said.

But Denny said morality was difficult to gauge and stipulating moral rectitude for candidates would be against the principle of equality before the law.

"Moral criteria are related to personal life. We won't be able to expose all of them," he said. "We will never really know which people have moral defects and which people are clever enough to cover them up."

Gamawan said police records would suffice when it came to deciding whether candidates had moral defects. "Adultery is not a legal case," he said. "However, police issue reference letters so they have the track records of people who might have been caught having affairs."