M. Taufiqurrahman, Jakarta – A lack of bureaucratic reform was to blame for the poor quality of public services in Indonesia, development experts said here Tuesday.

World Bank senior advisor for governance Joel Hellman said that the government had had problems implementing its numerous reform plans because of the weaknesses of the public service.

"The country has made so much progress in many areas of reform, democracy and media freedom, but one area that Indonesia has remarkably made little success in is civil service reform," Hellman said at a seminar jointly sponsored by Jakarta-based Habibie Center think-tank and the London-based Institute for Social and Ethical AccountAbility.

He said it was ironic that the least progress had been seen in bureaucratic reform, which should serve as a foundation for all other reform.

"It's like a marathon race, people always say that it's too long, I can't run this race. I've got an election in two years and nothing is going to change in two years, and as a result civil service reform keeps getting off the agenda," he said.

The number of civil servants currently on the government payroll is a staggering 3,995,000. The country's civil servants are frequently regarded as corrupt and lazy. The government has repeatedly stated its intention to start reforming the public service, but a new move to recruit more civil servants has hampered this. Few incentives are provided to local governments to reduce their civil servant numbers.

Roy Salomo, a public administration expert from the University of Indonesia, agreed with Hellman. He said that despite sweeping changes in the past eight years, the state of the country's bureaucracy remained as it was under the New Order regime of former president Soeharto.

"In most local administrations, the structure of the bureaucracy has been extensive as a result of the decentralization policies which transfer civil servants to the regency level," Roy said, adding that the extensive bureaucracy had also used up the budget allocated for the public service.

He warned that unless swift action was taken to reform the bureaucracy, the country would be in a much deeper crisis in 20 years. "Unless no action is taken to start reforming (the bureaucracy), we will be down in a hole," he said.