Taxing Staple Foods: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Indonesia’s VAT Reform

Since the early 1980s, tax experts have developed a “remarkable consensus” around tax policy and reform under economic globalisation (Jenkins, 1996, p. iii). In developing and transition countries, this consensus has been strongly shaped by the Bretton Woods institutions (Stewart & Jogarajan, 2004). Despite extensive scholarship on the diffusion of this consensus, its discursive dimension remains under-explored. Discourse plays an influential role in policy processes: it shapes how policy problems are understood, how power relations and ideologies are reproduced, and how particular knowledge claims come to appear objective and authoritative (van Hulst et al., 2025). Against this backdrop, this paper critically examines Indonesia’s 2021 Value Added Tax (VAT) reform. The reform package included a proposal to extend VAT to staple foods, which were previously exempt from taxation as “basic necessities needed by the general public”. While the proposal appeared provocative to the broader public, it was presented by the government and defended by Indonesian tax experts as inevitable, reflecting the broader tax reform consensus discussed above. This paper asks: how was Indonesia’s 2021 VAT reform legitimised, contested, and negotiated through discourse, and what ideological assumptions were embedded in these discourses? To answer this question, the study adopts Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as its central analytical framework. Following Fairclough (2003), the analysis treats discourse analysis as more than linguistic analysis. It moves between close reading of specific texts and the broader ‘order of discourse’, examining how texts draw on and combine different discourses, genres, and styles within wider social and institutional practices. The analysis draws on 29 documents, including IMF and World Bank reports, government white papers and press releases, official speeches, parliamentary transcripts, and statements from the People’s Consultative Assembly. The paper makes two main contributions. First, it contributes to critical policy analysis and the politics of taxation by showing how tax reform discourse can operate as “meaning in the service of power” (Thompson 1984). It demonstrates how the discourse depoliticises a distributive choice about who should bear the fiscal burden. Second, the article advances debates on how reform ideas promoted by the Bretton Woods institutions, and framed as universal, neutral, and technically necessary, are in fact value-laden and ideological.