The controversy over typos in Law No. 11/2020 on job creation should be ended right away. The government and the House of Representatives (DPR) need to immediately take political action.
By
KOMPAS EDITOR
·3 minutes read
BIRO PERS SEKRETARIAT PRESIDEN/LUKAS
President Joko Widodo, at the Bogor Presidential Palace, West Java, October 9, 2020, stated that the Job Creation Law aims to carry out structural reforms and accelerate economic transformation.
The controversy over typos in Law No. 11/2020 on job creation should be ended right away. The government and the House of Representatives (DPR) need to immediately take political action.
The option of legislative review to propose a limited revision of the Job Creation Law is the most reasonable solution. Politically, a revision of the law can be interpreted as a “public acknowledgement” of the presence of errors in the formulation of the Job Creation Law.
There is also the public acknowledgement that when the Job Creation Bill was endorsed on 5 October 2020, not all members of the House had perused the draft. The mistakes were later corrected through the constitutional democratic channel.
With the majority of political power in the DPR, the limited revision of the Job Creation Law certainly will not be troublesome. The constitutional corrective step of revising the Job Creation Law just indicates the political maturity of the government and the DPR. The proposed application of the distribution II mechanism should be carefully considered because it has no legal basis. The distribution II mechanism cannot yet be counted as a state convention either.
Apart from the limited revision of the Job Creation Law, let the Constitutional Court (MK) judge the judicial review suit that aims at its substance. Let unsatisfied labor groups put the constitutionality of the Job Creation Law to the test with the MK. The same is true of the criminal sanction policy in the administrative law that has been criticized by Gadjah Mada University professor Eddy OS Hiariej.
Coordinating Minister for the Economy Airlangga Hartarto handed over the government’s response on the discussion of the Omnibus Law on the Work Creation Bill (RUU) to the Chairman of the Indonesian Parliament Puan Maharani at the DPR RI plenary meeting at the Parliament Complex, Senayan, Jakarta, Monday (5/10/2020).
Besides the judicial review, there is also room for the MK to conduct a formal test on the process of formulation of the Job Creation Bill, including a comparison to ascertain whether there were already significant changes between the draft approved at the DPR plenary meeting and that signed by the President. The controversy dealing with the Job Creation law gives us a reminder of the weak process of lawmaking.
The government seems to need and be short of the presence of legal drafters, who design laws with a comprehensive command of the science and knowledge of legislation technicalities. They do not just have superficial knowledge, but rather possess a detailed understanding of the formulation of articles and paragraphs of laws.
Some kind of law center seems to be required. All the laws to be produced will have to go through this institution, which functions to harmonize and synchronize all products of legislation. It should be determined prior to the signing by the President that a legal product must be clear and clean with no possible errors.
Therefore, professionalism in the presidential office, state secretariat and cabinet secretariat is inevitable. On the other hand, the legislative members assigned to the DPR’s Legislation Body should be those possessing lawmaking technical competency and comprehensive understanding of legal affairs and legislation.
