Jakarta – The clock is ticking for current members of the House of Representatives, many of whom will loose their seat in four months, but there is still no sign they will be able to pass a backlog of crucial bills into law by the deadline.

Instead of completing the ratification of crucial bills, such as the corruption court bill and the state secrets bill, the House has been focusing on less important bills, such as the hospital bill.

"The discussion on the hospital bill is nearing its completion. We are confident that we are going to be able to pass the bill into law before the end of our tenure," deputy chairman of the House Special Committee on the Hospital Bill, Hakim Sorimuda Pohan, said Thursday.

"However, we are going to wait for the ratification of the health bill because it covers a broader scope," he added.

The health bill itself is one of the 39 priority bills that the House aims to ratify by the end of its tenure. The bill has been negotiated by the House and the government for the last four-and-a-half years, according to Hakim.

"We only have one different perception from that of the government on the health bill – the government thinks that the family planning program should be managed by the Health Ministry while we think it has more of a relationship to demographic problems, rather than health problems," Hakim said.

"However, we believe that we can settle our differences as soon as possible and finally pass the health and hospital bills into law," he added.

The state secrets bill, another priority, remains under discussion. Theo L. Sambuaga, chairman of House Commission I on Defense, Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, Communication and Information, said he was fully confident the bill could pass into law by August.

"We have held many intense discussions with the defense minister, along with the communications and information minister, on the bill since last October,

"So far, everything looks good and hopefully by the end of June we can submit the bill ratification proposal to the working committee and finally make it into a law by August," he said.

According to Theo, the intense discussions have managed to resolve 90 out of the bill's 270 inventoried issues so far.

Member of the house Bomer Pasaribu said recently that conflicts of interest between legislators and their individual quests to secure seats for another term had distracted them from meeting deadlines. According to Bomer, the House has managed to pass only 157 of its targeted 284 bills in the past five years.

However, Theo denied that conflicts of interest and recent presidential issues had affected his commission's commitment to passing the bills. "Our commission's legislators remain committed to their jobs, even those who have not been selected for another term, such as me," he said.

A legislator from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), Ganjar Pranowo, agreed that the July presidential election had not distracted his party's legislators in doing their job of producing laws.

"My special committee on the legislative bodies composition bill remains focused on passing the bill into law before our terms end," he said. (hdt)