JAKARTADAILY.ID – Deputy Minister of finance Suahasil Nazara said that in the energy sector, leaders must be able to see short-term goals to protect the community, but not give up the long-term perspective to make an energy transition.
“Protect the people in the short term and protect the people in the long term. Both are for the welfare of Indonesia,” said the Deputy Minister of finance at the Pijar Foundation's Global Future Fellows (GFF) 2022 Program held in Nusa Dua, Bali on Thursday, September 29, 2022.
In the short term, the Undersecretary of the Treasury explained that many countries are turning to fossil fuels, as the United States is doing. Germany has also restarted its coal-fired power plants for the winter.
Indonesia has also done the same thing by increasing fuel subsidies.
"We choose to do that so that the community's recovery can last as long as possible after more than 2.5 years we have no economic activity," said the Deputy Minister of finance in a press release on Friday, September 30, 2022.
However, not everything has to be paid for by the state budget. The Deputy Minister of finance said that burden sharing was needed because the price of Indonesian petroleum and diesel fuel was too cheap compared to international prices.
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For this reason, the government has diverted the fuel subsidy with the aim of making the subsidy more targeted and equitable.
"The choice of policy is not easy, but you can't give up. Even though we increase subsidies and compensation, even though we increase the volume of subsidized pertalite, we increase the volume of subsidized diesel fuel, but we are still talking about the energy transition," said the Deputy Minister of finance.
The energy transition is a long-term goal carried out by the government to achieve the National Determined Contributions (NDC) and Net-Zero Emissions (NZE) targets.
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"Even though we are in the midst of Covid, when we get the opportunity to revise the Tax Law, we introduce a carbon tax.
We introduce that carbon can be assessed, there is a price, and there is an economic value. We introduce that when the Indonesian government issues bonds, more and more green ones are being issued,” said the Deputy Minister of finance.
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