Ezra Sihite, Anita Rachman & Ulma Haryanto – Presidential spokesman Julian Aldrin Pasha acknowledged on Monday that the government still had much work to do on law enforcement and other issues in the wake of a new survey that showed public trust in anti-corruption efforts was at an all-time low.
"There are a lot of cases that haven't been resolved, and there are others that are still lacking," Julian said. "I haven't reported the survey in full to the president yet," he added.
Of the 1,220 people questioned by the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI) last month, only 44 percent said they were satisfied with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's corruption eradication efforts, the lowest in the past five years.
The survey blamed long-unresolved cases and the KPK's declining reputation for why public trust had eroded. Only about 38.5 percent of respondents said they believed the KPK was corruption-free. The National Police, the Armed Forces (TNI) and the president were deemed more "clean" than the KPK by respondents.
Lawmaker Ahmad Basara of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) called the survey "a portrait of reality."
"If you want to evaluate the government's performance, the worst is law enforcement, both in prevention and prosecution," he said. "The [survey] result is reasonable, legal development [in the country] is sagging and this is because of the president who hasn't done much."
Febridiansyah, the legal coordinator for Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW), agreed that Yudhoyono had not made progress on the graft front. "He may have issued various instructions regarding certain cases, but the implementation on the field is very weak," he said.
For example, he added, there was the police bank account scandal. "The president urged transparency, but even after the Public Information Commission ruled for the police to open up their internal investigation on the accounts, they never obliged."
Lawmaker Benny K. Harman, head of House of Representatives Commission III which oversees legal affairs and a member of Yudhoyono's Democratic Party, defended the president.
Law enforcement officers, he said, should not put so much stock in "perception." "They have to work according to the procedures and take perception [of others] as reflection or feedback," he said. Nevertheless, he added, the survey "was an input to the government, like a vitamin."