Batal Demi Hukum; Ketidakabsahan Perjanjian Kerja yang Bertentangan dengan UU Ketenagakerjaan dan UU Cipta Kerja
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JAKARTA, H OS LAW FIRM - President Prabowo Subianto's statement promising to crack down on illegal logging after the Sumatra floods sounds firm, but it feels late and paradoxical. When the disaster had already claimed victims and left giant logs floating down the river, the state was busy crafting a narrative of action. In fact, illegal logging is not an incidental event, but a long-standing practice that has flourished under lax state supervision—or deliberately loosened for economic interests.
Ironically,
amid the discovery of neatly cut large logs, a statement emerged from a
Forestry Ministry official, Dwi Januanto, who said the wood came from naturally
fallen trees. This claim not only contradicts the logic of the field, but also
reveals the tendency of state officials to suppress the facts rather than
expose them. When industrial timber is simplified as a “natural phenomenon,”
what is taking place is not scientific clarification, but the normalization of
ecological destruction.
This
permissive attitude does not stand alone. It is intertwined with the head of
state's view of forests and plantations. President Prabowo previously stated
that oil palm plantations are the same as forests because they are both green
and produce oxygen. This statement is not merely a conceptual error, but a
denial of the ecological function of natural forests as life support, water
regulators, and protectors of biodiversity. Equating forests with monoculture
plantations means reducing nature to a mere visual and economic commodity.
A
similar perspective can be traced back to a past statement by President Joko
Widodo, who expressed his willingness to prepare thousands of hectares of land
for anyone who needed it. In the context of the climate crisis and
deforestation, this statement reflects a mentality of unlimited expansion, as
if Indonesia's ecological space is still empty and free to be divided up.
Instead of tightening forest protection, the state is acting as a provider of
cheap land for investment, which often leads to agrarian conflict and
environmental damage.
President
Prabowo's call for the public to “not be afraid to plant oil palms” further
highlights the inconsistency of environmental policy. On the one hand, the
government claims it will crack down on illegal logging, but on the other hand,
it encourages the expansion of a commodity that has historically been one of
the main drivers of deforestation, land degradation, and hydrometeorological
disasters. In this context, the crackdown on illegal logging appears to be more
of a political cosmetic than a paradigm shift in development.
Even
more problematic is the Forestry Minister's admission that twenty companies
have been identified but not yet investigated, revealing the classic face of
environmental law enforcement in Indonesia: tough in rhetoric, soft in
implementation. The secrecy surrounding the names of the companies and the slow
pace of legal proceedings reinforce the impression that the law is still blunt
at the top and sharp at the bottom. Local communities suffer from flooding and
loss of living space, while corporations suspected of destroying forests
continue to operate in a legal gray zone.
The
government is once again stuck in a reactive pattern—moving after a disaster,
rather than preventing damage before it occurs. Promises of reform will lose
their meaning if officials' statements contradict each other: on the one hand,
they talk about law enforcement, while on the other, they deny the damage,
equate forests with plantations, and roll out the red carpet for land
expansion.
If
the state truly wants to stop illegal logging and prevent ecological disasters,
then it is not only the chainsaws in the forests that need to be regulated, but
also the mindset of policy makers. As long as the environment continues to be
positioned as a secondary variable in development, and public officials are
more concerned with defending economic narratives than ecological facts, then
floods, landslides, and forest destruction will continue to recur. Promises of
reform will ultimately be buried—along with mud and logs—in a cycle of
disasters created by the state itself.
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