YOGYAKARTA- Parliament’s proposal to provide aspiration house funds amounting to 200 million rupiah for each House member is seen as not effective. Currently, Parliament members have been stuck on the issue of physical infrastructure in building political communication with the community. In fact, the important thing to do is how to organize political communication more effectively.
"Parliament is currently trapped on the development of physical infrastructure. In fact, the important thing is how this communication procedure can be created well," political and government analyst of Faculty of Social and Political Sciences UGM, Ari Dwipayana, said at UGM, Tuesday (3/8).
He added that two most important things in organizing the procedures of political communication are how to build political communications between the legislative and constituents and how to build political communication between the stakeholders in the regions and legislative members representing particular electoral areas.
"Those main things rather than the houses need to be built. The construction of houses will be taken wrongly," he said.
On that occasion, Ari proposed three mechanisms to build political communications with the community more effectively. First is initiating meeting between members of the DPR, DPRD in the regions and with local government (Governor/Regent/Mayor) regularly. Second is creating forums for stakeholders on the website. Third is making a kind of public accountability forums.
"So the principle is to build communication of members of Parliament with community/constituents of electoral districts collectively rather than personal ones," he explained.
Therefore, he hoped that the communication established can be designed more orderly and less costly. In Ari’s view, the concept of aspiration house is like the concept of "Regional Offices of the House of Representatives" in the regions that wastes much money.
"The proposal is going to be quite a debate after the previous proposals of aspiration and village funds. The aspiration house would only seem to be the "Regional Office of the House of Representatives" in the region,” Ari said.
It is also expected that in building political communication with the community, especially during recess, members of the House can do it collectively, not basing it on their own party.
As it is known, after failing to propose aspiration and village funds, the House has also proposed aspiration house funds of 200 million rupiah or 112 billion rupiah for the 560 Parliament members. Vice Chairman of the House's Budget Unit, Pius Lustrilanang, explained that this budget has already been endorsed to be disbursed in 2011 totalling 3.3 trillion rupiah.
Pius delivered that the proposal is the realization of the House's comparative study abroad and already regulated. If there is no problem, aspirations houses will be built next year