Governors, district heads and mayors will soon get a pay increase, but cost-cutting measures will remain in place to keep regional bureaucracies from getting bloated, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said on Thursday.
Also at Thursday’s event, Vice President Boediono said Indonesia needed to emulate Singapore when it came to running an efficient bureaucracy. He said the Singaporean civil service worked because it was not seen as a cash cow by its people.
He added that he had sat in on a speech two days earlier by Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong before the city-state’s parliament, during which the issue of state officials’ pay was discussed. Boediono said the essence of the speech was that civil servants should be paid a fair amount and no more, a principle that he suggested the Indonesian bureaucracy should adopt. Full story
