The parliament (DPR) finally passed Boediono as new governor of Bank Indonesia. Contrary to the DPR's response to the previous candidates, Raden Pardede and Agus Marto, the ‘fit and proper test’ for Boediono ran smoothly. Forty-five out of 46 members of the Komisi XI gave their votes for Boediono. The only rejection came from PAN’s Dradjad Wibowo, who questioned Boediono’s credibility due to his involvement in the BLBI case when he was working for the central bank as a director.

In my point of view, Boediono will hardly deliver improvements to the central bank’s performance. His school of thought, as I observe, is even more conservative than Burhanuddin Abdullah, the current Governor of BI. Therefore, he is not the right figure to lead the central bank in times of crisis like now. What we need is a more progressive person, who can offer us breakthroughs to avoid the impacts of the coming global financial turbulence.

I remember a conversation between Boediono and the economist Joseph Stiglitz in a seminar in Jakarta (I wrote an article about it in IndoPROGRESS [link]). At that time, Boediono as a coordinating minister for the economy said that Indonesia’s policy is purely based on pragmatism, not ideology. Stiglitz, the nobel laureate, subsequently responded that economic policy cannot be always pragmatic. Ideology is crucial because it will define what the government does, how and for whom.

I agree with Stiglitz, economic policy is not and will never be ‘neutral’ as the neoliberals say. Unfortunately, the Governor elect of BI does not think so.