DPR Allocates Itself Twenty-Four Hours to Read Seventeen Demands

So I published my first video last night, and the questions came in fast. Am I okay. Does my wife know. Do I need professional help. Apparently the answer to all three is yes, but we are not here to talk about my mental state. We are here to talk about the state of Parliament.

Members of the DPR — the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, which is Indonesia’s House of Representatives — met with student demonstrators yesterday. ^[1] The purpose, by their own account, was to hear the demands from the recent wave of protests that have been filling the streets and the timelines in equal measure. The lawmakers emerged from that meeting and announced, with the calm authority of people who have just discovered the concept of a deadline, that they would convene a meeting of all DPR party leaders today, the 4th of September, to discuss the people’s demands. ^[2]

Today. The 4th of September. Which, if you are following along at home, is exactly one day before the deadline attached to the 17 demands that have been making the rounds as part of a highly popular campaign. ^[3] Twenty-four hours. That is the window Parliament has allocated itself to absorb, deliberate, and respond to a list of demands that has been public, on the record, and growing louder for longer than twenty-four hours.

In fairness, last-minute panic has always been Parliament’s preferred operating procedure. There is a certain elegance to it. Receive the document late. Read the document later. Convene the meeting on the final day. Issue the communiqué just after the deadline passes. It is a workflow. It is, if I may borrow the language of bureaucratic reform, a system that has been optimized — not for the problem, but for the appearance of having responded to the problem.

The students, to their credit, have been remarkably patient. They drafted 17 demands, circulated them, attached a deadline, and showed up to deliver them in person. The DPR’s contribution, so far, has been to receive the demands on the day before the day before the deadline, and to schedule a meeting to discuss the demands on the day before the deadline. The arithmetic is, in the technical sense, extremely tight. In the political sense, it is a familiar pattern of an institution that is technically compliant with the act of receiving a piece of paper while doing absolutely nothing about what is written on it.

Now. The phrase “in fairness” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this segment, so let me be specific about what fairness would actually look like. Fairness would be the DPR reading the demands before the day they were handed the demands. Fairness would be the party leaders’ meeting happening before the deadline, not the evening before. Fairness would be Parliament, in the ordinary course of its work, behaving like an institution that has read any of the documents it has been citing in its own press releases. But we are not here for fairness. We are here for the 4th of September.

And here is the part I find difficult to set down gently. The DPR’s job, in the most basic sense, is to represent the people. The people have, by every available measure, made their position unusually clear. The institution’s response has been to convene a meeting, on the day before the deadline, to discuss whether to convene another meeting about the meeting it is currently convening. This is not a criticism. This is a description. The description will, of course, be met with another meeting, and another communiqué, and another deadline that everyone agrees, in advance, will not be met.

Because if there is one thing you can count on, it is Parliament doing its job. Late, on its own schedule, behind a prepared statement, after the cameras have been told where to stand.

Make of that what you will. Parliament will, presumably, make of it a quorum.