DPR Commission VIII Comparative Study – Australia

I’ve never been a big fan of the House of Reps, mostly because I hear more of their shenanigans more than any other body of government. The whole “porn in the middle of a session” thing even made headlines here in Australia. However, since the arrival of Commission VIII of the DPR in Australia, my distaste, to put it lightly, of our government representatives has grown overwhelmingly. Due to my  active participation in the Indonesian Students Association Australia (PPIA) I’ve come to learn many things of the so-called “comparative study” Commission VIII conducted to learn about Australia’s poor/unemployed population and legislation.

As many news outlets have reported, the Indonesian students in Australia -which make up a considerable amount of the total Indonesian population here- acted under the PPIA banner to inquire as to why Australia is an ideal place to conduct a comparative study for developing legislation to alleviate poverty. To do this PPIA sent an open letter, available for everyone to read, to the head of Commission VIII, Mr. H. Abdul Kadir Karding, requesting a Q&A session for us students to attend. Though I personally could not attend the session, there are recordings and videos online showing what happened in the session. A synopsis of the proceedings is also available.

Let’s get right to the point, from what I’ve seen and heard from the recordings, I can honestly say that nothing is good is going to come from this visit. I came into the review of the meet with a little hope that it was a productive meeting, but apparently our elected officials seem to not understand the concept of properly answering a question. One particular example is when asked about the legislation and the procedures in eliminating poverty, the answer provided by one of the officials (recording only, I couldn’t tell who it was) was instead the different categories and levels of poverty. Though it does address the question -i.e. to eliminate poverty, one must categorize and ascertain the different levels- the answer did not provide specific measures in lowering the poverty level.

There were many aspects of this field trip that were wrong to begin with. The cost of this trip was estimated to be around just under 1 billion Rp, explained by the amount of people the Commission was bringing, which was around 20 people with some members bringing their spouses and children.

I guess the most unbelievable thing about this paid holiday was not that nothing would come from this, that much was predictable, but it was how nonchalant, almost arrogant, these members were about what they were doing here. It’s as if they consciously did not care how they are seen in the eyes of their voters, and willingly, and without remorse, stick their heads up their asses.

Sources:

• Tempo article
• PPIA Open Letter
• PPIA Q&A Session Evaluation (with links to recordings)
• Synopsis 1
• Synopsis 2