Reporting from afar with mining
models
The Australian Associated Press closure in June will shut
Australians out of much domestic journalism. Courts, councils and commissions
whose workings underpin democracy will often go unreported. Margaret Simons commented in The Guardian: ‘We are lurching down a slippery slope. At
its bottom will be a nation that doesn’t know itself’.
How about knowing the people next door? AAP closed its Jakarta bureau in 2017. The few remaining Australian newsrooms are
shrinking and struggling, their bosses scratching to save.
One try is to rebadge Australian journos as ‘Southeast Asia
Correspondent’ which is how The
Australian’s Amanda Hodge is titled. From a wee office in the region’s largest
city she’s supposed to cover the doings of 655 million people spread across
eleven disparate nations. Don’t ask what
she does in her spare time.
The Age and Sydney Morning Herald Indonesia
correspondent Jewel Topsfield was replaced in 2018 by James Massola. He now has
SEAC on his lanyard tag.
Millionaire philanthropist Judith Neilson’s Institute for Journalism and Ideas has given AFR the cash to do its duty. Although stationed in Jakarta Emma Connors is another SEAC.
Anne Barker is labeled the ABC’s Indonesia Correspondent but
gets by-lined as SEAC when it suits, this year covering the Malaysian political
crisis from Jakarta.
Meanwhile in Melbourne the
ABC has an Asia Pacific Newsroom filing stories about Indonesia (and
other states in the region) reportedly using more than 40 reporters and
producers.
Some, like Erwin Renaldi a Muslim Indonesian (his words) and Melbourne Uni masters graduate, are native speakers. They read and watch from afar, pick up leads, make calls and file copy without having to leave Southbank Boulevard. There are substantial savings on translators and office rent overseas.
This media model
is a bit like Rio Tinto’s Pilbara mine ops where driverless trucks are steered
by mice palmed by screen jockeys in Perth
1,200 km to the south.
The other dollar-saver is Fly In – Fly Out reporting, another pinch from the mining industry. FIFO is the marriage-fracturing system that avoids remote housing expenses by keeping partners apart.
FIFO, aka ‘parachute journalism’, means dropping a hack into a foreign spot to file and flee.
The latest example is The
Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan giving us his insights after a
short stay in the Big Durian ‘as part of a delegation of editors with the
Australia Indonesia Institute’.
This sounds like a benign NGO but it’s an
Australian Government agency run through the Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade.
Travelling under that rubric helped score ‘several
exchanges’ with Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi. The former Ambassador to the Netherlands is
the source for much of the Australian’s commentary.
Apparently
Marsudi is ‘reliable, steady, personable, across everything.’ Unfortunately Indonesia’s
first woman FM is also a dot-and-comma controller demanding questions in
writing before any interview with local-based scribblers.
We’re
not told if her visitor had to labour under similar restrictions. It’s
immaterial because the bland comments he captured are thick in her local press columns:
‘We
appreciate Australia’s
support for ASEAN’s concept of the Indo-Pacific’ may comfort diplomats but
leaves others unmoved. Likewise: ‘We see IA-CEPA (the Indonesia Australia
Closer Economic Partnership Agreement ratified this year) as strategic
co-operation.
‘We
want it to build strategic trust between the two nations. We understand that we
need each other. Australia
realises that you are part of Asia.’
That
fine sentiment is sadly shattered by Lowy Institute surveys showing stratospheric
levels of ignorance and distrust. This
unnerving discovery seems to be moving Australian and Indonesian authorities
not one meaningful whit.
Indonesians
outnumber us ten to one, so staying friends is a practical necessity along with
a moral responsibility. Fortunately advocates for a caliphate are currently
hibernating.
Most
locals see us as a rich, white European outpost, referencing kangaroos and
bushfires above free trade deals. Strong
nationalists – and there are plenty - remember our role in the 1999 East
Timorese referendum which damaged the ‘Unitary State’.
Film
festivals and cultural exchanges are fine and worthy, but we’ve built a
Trump-style ‘beautiful wall’ of visa restrictions unlikely to be bashed down
despite personal pleas from President Joko Widodo.
Sheridan’s FIFO analysis
has 12 mentions of ‘strategic’. They
include his claim that the two countries ‘co-operate on a host of issues, not
least development in the South Pacific’.
Independent
analysts believe Indonesia’s
wooing of nation states far outside the Republic is to neuter groups backing Melanesian
demands for independence in West Papua.
The
province remains closed to Western journalists keen to probe allegations of
human rights abuses by the army, despite Widodo claiming all is open. (This writer’s application made a year ago still
moulds in someone’s in-tray.)
Sheridan’s other
confidante was a ‘senior Indonesian.’ About 20 million over-65s fit that category
including my mother-in-law. A fine lady,
though I wouldn’t pad my stories with her opinions.
There
are some useful observations on Indonesia’s
reliance on Chinese imports and Indonesia’s
labour costs, but the Australian’s findings lack the substance keyboarded by his
colleague Amanda Hodge.
However
nothing comes within a bull’s roar of veteran Kiwi journalist John McBeth. Formerly with the prestigious Far Eastern Economic Review he now
writes for the Asia Times, lives in Indonesia and
doesn’t need government guides to open gates.
His commentaries are rich with insights denied others and deserve syndicating.
If
FIFO analyses and remote reporting are the new way of telling Australians about
the world’s third largest democracy then we’ll stay clueless. The compensation is that we’re getting better
informed about the US
electoral system delivered effortlessly in English-language packages, warm,
fresh and ready to swallow.
Sorry
FM Marsudi, you’re wrong. We’re not part
of Asia.
We live in the Anglosphere.
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