Indonesia Protests, TikTok Suspensions & What Happens When Trust Breaks w/ Gita Sjahrir - E633

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What sparked the nationwide protests in Indonesia and why did they spread to 33 cities?

Gita Sjahrir 0:00
It's so amazing to see ASEAN, at least the youths, right, doing these very small act of kindness. I'm not one to say that social media is, you know, one hundred percent good, one hundred percent bad. We're just shades of gray trying to do good, sometimes doing bad. Right. It's just hopefully net net at the end you're just doing way more good. So that you're leaving this world a bit better. And I think it was that very small act of uh you know, very small act of connection. You seeing some And then you're not going to be able trying to give something to others. That was pretty powerful for me. And just seeing everybody else in Southeast Asia doing that, that was quite cool.
Jeremy Au 0:33
Welcome to Brave. Learn from Southeast Asia's best tech leaders. Build the future, learn from our past, and stay human in between. No BS unsuccess. I'm Jeremy O, venture capitalist, Sarah founder, Harvard MBA, science fiction nerd, and dad of two daughters. Every week, we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights. Join our movement of over 40,000 members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www.bravesa.com. Stay well and stay brave. Hey to see you. My pasta is a good one. It's live. We were not AI generators, so that had cap got high fingers. So um no, it's good to see a person again and uh I think a lot has happened over the past uh month.
Gita Sjahrir 1:33
That's an understatement. There was this
Jeremy Au 1:35
uh very large protest. And I think what's interesting is that we were actually discussing the last episode, right before the protests happened, talking about how there's a huge trust gap between I think the middle class um and the government. And we said that there were conditions that were just not right. And obviously that has kind of like erupted in street protests and so forth. So but I think maybe from your perspective could you recap what happened?
Gita Sjahrir 2:00
Yeah. Uh so I was in the ground. I was in Indonesia when it all happened. Um and it started out with a series of smaller scale protests. So there was a protest by the labor movement, and there was another protest uh regarding conditions in the economy and trust issues with the government in general due to expansion of TNI or the military involvement in civilian projects or in state sponsored projects. And so there's a lot of pushback. And then there were this um onslaug of uh uh dissatisfaction that was expressed very publicly by multiple layers of society about the DPR, which is our uh parliament, about the DPR's uh increased allowance, especially what was famous is this housing allowance, which will give them about three two hundred, thirty five hundred US dollars a month net uh for housing.
Gita Sjahrir 2:56
you know, for rent or whatever, just FYI, um, G D B per capita of the country is five thousand. So this is way above and beyond a typical average salary of a person. Yeah. Right.
Jeremy Au 3:09
Seven times.
Gita Sjahrir 3:11
That's just housing. It's not the actual salary. So all in, I think all of the salary would have amounted to uh twenty thousand US dollars and it's net. So because they're part of the government, they're not taxed on top of that, right? So people are just, oh, this is twenty thousand dollars a month. Yeah, no no no.
Jeremy Au 3:32
It's two hundred and forty thousand dollars US E.
Gita Sjahrir 3:35
Per year. This is salary plus plus. So like the way it works is you get a base salary and then you get allowances for things. So some of the allowances that people thought were crazy were rice allowance. You get, I don't know, a couple hundred dollars or up to a thousand of rice allowance. And I don't know what you're doing with that much rice per month.
Jeremy Au 3:59
I'm doing the math and I'm like, wait, isn't I mean I was yeah, the G D C P per capita is five thousand dollars.
Gita Sjahrir 4:04
Yes, correct.

How did the disparity between parliamentarians’ salaries and average incomes fuel public anger?

Gita Sjahrir 4:05
That's five thousand dollars not a month, five thousand dollars a year.
Jeremy Au 4:09
So so the average GP per capita of the average GDP per capita of Indonesian is five thousand dollars per year. And the salaries two of
Gita Sjahrir 4:18
parliament members were close to about two hundred ish thousand. Dollars that years.
Jeremy Au 4:23
That would be the equivalent of I guess in Singapore, America, the average GP per capita is about seventy thousand.

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