Donny Syofyan, Padang – The newly revised Law on Political Parties has sparked public concern after the House of Representatives recently passed it. The law raises the ceiling for donations to political parties by corporations by 67 percent to Rp 7.5 billion (US$833,000) for individuals to a maximum of Rp 1 billion per year.
House legislators argued that increasing the donation ceiling was necessary since political parties need a lot of money to finance their activities.
Abdul Malik Haramain, a National Awakening Party (PKB) politician and member of House Commission II on legal affairs, said the core argument for the increase was to augment the parties' grassroots capabilities. He said the people had to be educated before the revised law came into effect.
The law is laden with shortcomings.
Although the law requires that all contributions be voluntary and transparent, it does not provide measures to ensure transparency and proper auditing. Neither does it ensure that corporations do not violate the cap.
Transparency seems to have been placed in a corner since the law has no clauses addressing the disclosure of donor identities. It is no secret that some major donors do not wish to be identified, while the General Elections Commission and Election Supervisory Board lack the time to verify donors. Further, the origins of corporate donations are seldom questioned by political parties and may easily come from illegal sources.
The essence of political funding reform is to increase the transparency of political donations. Even if recipients do not properly report donations, they would likely be able to escape criminal liability by filing a revised financial report later. Recipients will only get into real trouble if investigators such as the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) can prove that a donation was unreported due to serious negligence or was made with criminal intent.
To increase transparency, the law should severely punish those who falsify reports on political donations, regardless of whether the acts were accidental or intentional. It is necessary that people found guilty of intentionally making false reports not only face years in prison and fines of hundred millions of rupiah, but also lose the right to run in elections and vote for a specific period.
The law should ban contributions to individual legislators, where contributions are made to a political party before making their way to the legislator's pocket.
Currently, the origin of contributions paid to individual legislators or politicians through a political party or its fund management organ can be concealed, clearing the way for industry lobbies to bribe legislators. To stamp out this practice, the practice of earmarking donations for a specific legislator must be banned. The absence of transparency will easily drive political parties to side with corporations instead of representing the public.
People have already witnessed, particularly at local level, that the government offers protection to corrupt businessmen. Moreover, heaps of legislators are blinded by greed. Legislators often say they need a lot of money for political activities, but they decline to cut spending. Do they need to spend a lot of money holding meetings at expensive hotels or use money to hire women as party companions? The answer is "no."
Political parties have never made public their sources of funding. It is too bad that the revised law does not assign one central body where all the reports are filed in a unified database so that the general public can have easy access to the information. The body could then serve to reduce flaws in the reporting system. Many found that political parties' accounting has always been sloppy. Once the a report has been submitted, no one checks it for accuracy.
Legislators may claim that parties will not risk their credibility by taking money from obscure sources. Yet, it is not impossible for cover-ups and distractions to muddy the waters of investigations which would, in turn, lead politicians into playing a cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement.
The issue of politics and money always boils down to the issue of legal control. But legal control always leaves a way for politicians and lobby groups to exploit loopholes. The proposed law suits wily and cunning politicians, exposing the shady relationship between politics and money.
[The writer is a graduate of the University of Canberra in Australia and lecturer at Andalas University, Padang.]