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Golkar offers free love to big business The Jakarta Post, Jakarta Despite the looming 2009 elections, Golkar turned the age-old script of how to get business backing on its head Wednesday, putting the begging bowl away and instead using a meeting to ask invited businessmen what the party could do for them. "Usually if a political party invites businessmen, they wonder what's behind the invitation, or think about how much money they might have to donate this time. But that is an old song, even though it still happens sometimes," Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who also chairs the Golkar Party, told businesspeople at the Indonesian Entrepreneurs' Forum. "This time I am telling you that we don't want anything from you, instead we would like to ask you, what do you need from Golkar?" he said at the gathering organized with the Young Entrepreneurs' Association. Kalla added that the party would not ask for donations this year, but added "it is up to you if you want to donate next year," provoking peals of laughter from the audience. Kalla added that a nation can only get respect from the international community if it develops its economy as China and India have. He said that businessmen were the ones capable of encouraging economic development, meaning Golkar needed to hear suggestions from them about what the party could do to improve the business climate. "We can develop Indonesia only if the government, legislators and businesspeople work together in harmony," he said. He added that if there was a group of people who needed to think about long-term goals, it was businessmen, because they put everything into their investments. "Businessmen are the people who think about today and 10 years ahead at the same time, while often having to act without enough time to think," Kalla said. "That's what makes businesspeople different from others. Besides, if we spent too much time thinking, people could go hungry before we made any decisions," Kalla said. Kalla said he could not deny that businessmen were always looking out for their own interests, but that this was not necessarily a bad thing. "They have to get profit in order to increase the number of their employees," he said. "So there is nothing wrong with a businessman turning into a government official," he said, provoking more laughter from the audience. This statement came as an indirect challenge to the opinions of former Golkar chairman Akbar Tandjung, whose recent doctoral thesis at Gadjah Mada University argued that Golkar had become a party dominated by business, leading it to be unresponsive to the needs of the majority of Indonesians. Akbar told detik.com Wednesday that, on top of his own opinions, his thesis was based on a number of sources, including a newspaper article by Dr Dirk Tomsa, at political scientist at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He added that, according to Tomsa, Golkar was made up of three components: a structural component comprising its National Organizing Committee; the traditional component comprising organizational groups; and a business component comprising Kalla, Surya Paloh, Aburizal Bakrie, Agung Laksono and Fahmi Idris. "Tomsa said Golkar was a very authority-oriented party and that Kalla was chosen to be the chairman not because he had a convincing concept of leadership but because he had authority," Akbar said. The head of Golkar's advisory council, Surya Paloh, has asked Akbar to clarify his statements. (05) printer friendly Post Your Comments Comments could also be sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
