Jakarta – Lawmakers are using their policy monitoring right for the political benefit of their parties rather than for evaluating government public policies, experts said Tuesday.

"It has become very easy for our lawmakers to suddenly cancel their initiatives to question government policies. I think they pass around petitions just to promote themselves and their parties," said Bivitri Susanti, a senior researcher with the Center for Indonesian Law and Policy Studies.

She and other experts were commenting on the rejection of the interpellation and inquiry moves in the House of Representatives' plenary session.

In the past four months alone, the House has knocked back three internal petitions. The first, in February, was to summon the government over the Lapindo mudflow disaster. The two others were in June, one to investigate the government's failure to recover trillions of rupiah in Bank Indonesia liquidity support (BLBI) funds, and the other on transfer pricing allegations involving the country's second-largest coal producer, PT Adaro Energy.

The House has accepted one petition on summoning the government over soaring prices for basic commodities. The government is scheduled to answer questions from the House on this issue on July 1.

The House also heard two other petitions related to the fuel price rise policy in June – one to summon the government and the other to form a team to investigate the policy. The House has scheduled a plenary session next week to decide these matters.

Bivitri said all of these petitions were politically motivated. "I think these are all related to the 2009 general elections," she said. She said the lawmakers' monitoring right was good for evaluating government policies, but had been misused for political ends.

Syamsuddin Harris, a political observer from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, voiced a similar argument. "The monitoring functions are only cosmetic. House factions use them for political bargaining," he told The Jakarta Post.

Syamsuddin said the weakest coalitions among the political parties contributed to this phenomenon. "There are no strong political contracts among the parties that support the government. As a result, parties can have a minister in the Cabinet and at the same time oppose the government's policies in the legislature," he added.

Lawmaker Dradjad Wibowo of the National Mandate Party said both the petitions on the fuel price rise policy were good. "I signed both of them. They are important and can be carried out simultaneously," he said.

But Dradjad acknowledged that recently it seemed lawmakers were just playing an endless game of tug-of-war with the petitions. "I am now seeing indications some lawmakers want to halt the inquiry petitions about the fuel price rise policy," he said.

Aria Bima of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle expressed concern that the decisions about the two petitions would be made on the same day. "Based on our experience, petitions tend to fail when the decisions are made in the same plenary session," he said. (alf)