BREAK UP IMPOSSIBLE - GEOGRAPHY HAS FIXED THAT

                                Divorce impossible – so tolerate

Many  button lips for fear of arousing wrath, but here’s the truth: The neighbours aren’t part of the Anglosphere.  They  don’t understand or trust us nor we them.  This must change as our  great and powerful friend turns insular. As the plague retreats comes the chance to address anxieties and reboot the relationship.  As the PM says.about flattening Covid-19’s curves – we’re all in this  together.

The Lowy Institute’s 2019  survey shames still:  Almost 60 per cent of Australians polled didn’t know Indonesia is the world’s third largest democracy – its status for two decades.

Before Covid-19  more than a million Aussies lazed on Bali beaches every year. Few have been James Cooks exploring  the country they’d invaded and navigating its mysteries.

Lowy’s long-term polling demonstrates ‘the wariness with which Australians and Indonesians regard each other.’  Only one per cent thinks of Indonesia as Australia’s best friend.   That place belongs to NZ.

This year the Singapore-based Institute of Southeast Asian Studies ran another survey.   Get ready to squirm:  Fewer than four per cent of Indonesians feel confident that  Australian leadership could ‘maintain the rules-based order and uphold international law’. 

Only ten per cent would choose Australia as a strategic partner to replace the US.  Almost a third would prefer the European Union and another third Japan – the country that brutally plundered the archipelago and starved its people during World War II.

How can ve be on the nose when we know we’re nice?  Our biggest Embassy in the world in Jakarta is full of busy bureaucrats running arts and grants galore showcasing our goodness.  Sadly few reach into the villages and kampong where most Indonesians live.  

When Covid-19 starts fading there’ll be opportunities to offer testing and tracing services, particularly in the Eastern islands where most aren’t celebrating Ramadan.  In the meantime we can stocktake the hangups and dump those past their use-by date.

 

The differences between us are wide, long and deep on every register from religion to rights, but as Hamlet told his old mate Rosencrantz: ‘There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’

Thinking the best has been frustrated by many small stupidities  on all sides and three big events: The 1999 East Timor referendum which ousted Indonesian control, the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2015 executions of drug runners Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.  

These wounds still weep; they need dressing and addressing, but can’t be allowed to fester, poisoning our joint future.

Decades ago Murdoch Uni’s Professor David Hill helped start the non-profit Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies.  It still puts Australian students into Indonesian unis where they savour the country and its quirks first hand.  It’s been a splendid though small success, a great model of an achievement by visionaries.

For much of this century Hill and other academics have been baying at the moon-minds  in Canberra, telling them a 40 per cent plunge in Indonesian studies enrolments is bad on every measure, including national security. Six universities closed their Indonesian programs.  The rot continues.  Maybe time for the unis and schools to DIT – do it themselves.

Hill wants Indonesian language and culture teaching restored to its 20th century level. Then we were more curious and less suspicious, encouraged by Paul Keating’s urgings to ‘live in the region ... and find our security in Asia.

‘No country is more important to Australia than Indonesia. If we fail to get this relationship right, and nurture and develop it, the whole web of our foreign relations is incomplete.’  

The credibility of the then PM’s convictions was corroded by his closeness to the despot president General Soeharto.  Yet Keating’s mantra is still chanted by his successors, though with little enthusiasm.  Here’s a product needing the marketing skills of a ScoMo.

With education and social issues too complex to handle, governments on both sides have turned to the STDs – security, trade and defence.  All valuable and necessary but not getting through to the pubs in Sydney and warung (roadside foodstalls) in Surabaya where attitudes harden.

This coming 17 August marks the 75th anniversary of founding president Soekarno’s proclamation of independence from the Netherlands.  If Covid-19 hadn’t barged into the tent the celebrations would be wild, heartfelt and prolonged.  The archipelago’s 270 million do ra-ra patriotism almost as well as the Americans.

The Embassy planned to join the cheer and remind that we (and particularly the trade unions) did much to frustrate the Dutch demanding return of their colony after WWII.  It’s a fine story; if better known on both sides of the Arafura Sea it could build a bridge.

This August’s flag-waving will enthuse them and bemuse us.   We know little of the Merdeka!  (freedom) ideology and the emotions that power policies in Jakarta.  Among them is a determination to maintain the ‘unitary state’ and a suspicion of foreigners’ intentions with aid and trade.

Indonesia must also cop blame for the distrusts that foul confidence.  Soeharto could have created another Singapore after he ripped power from the Reds’ friend Soekarno.  He had the chance to be a statesman and nation-builder.  Instead he turned kleptocrat, allegedly stealing an estimated US$35 billion.  

If that was OK for the first family, which still enjoys the fruits of his plunder, then why not the rest?  For the 32-years of Soeharto’s rule KKN – (Korupsi, Kolusi, Nepotisme) thrived and does so today, negating the positives.  

As Australia-Indonesia Business Council President Phil Turtle told a Parliamentary inquiry, the deterrent for Australian investors is “corruption, corruption, corruption.”  Some NGOs argue graft undermines human rights.  They need support.  .

Trade still follows the flag. Turtle’s lobby group has been cheering the completion – after ten years of G-to-G negotiations - of the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement.

Corporates saw the agreement providing profit from an expanding middle class and little else. This free trade deal includes visas for Indonesians similar to those given to European backpackers. Now there’s a chance to try altruism.

Like David Hill, historian Dr Frank Palmos a former foreign correspondent in Jakarta, believes that along with education the best way to stamp out xenophobia is through personal contacts. 

He wants Javanese farmers on work permits to show us how to get the best from our northern waters and soils.  “The naysayers will ultimately admit Indonesians are wonderful workers and accept the merger of humour and hard work for which they’re famous,” he said.

Before the pandemic which has so far killed 720 and probably hundreds more as there’s minimal testing, Indonesia – like the US - had the opportunity to boost its health services. It dropped the ball.

Stand back from Covid-19 stats for a moment and glance here: WHO figures show every day about 180 Indonesians die from TB – a preventable disease – and a further 300 from diabetes which can be controlled.  Sicknesses linked to smoking reportedly kill more than a thousand a day.

In these public health areas Australia has an excess of expertise to share.  Some projects are already underway.  There’s room for hundreds more.

When the borders are eventually opened we need floods of Indonesians coming to Australia as visitors, students and backpackers, unconstrained by onerous visa rules not imposed on Malaysians and Singaporeans.  This discrimination  has been attacked long and hard  by Perth’s Indonesia Instutute and its president, Ross Taylor.

And when Australians start flying into Denpasar‘s Ngurah Rai airport again we can use that hub to explore far beyond Bali, discovering strikingly different worlds where we can spread our swags of mateship.  

First published in Pearls 7 Irritations 29 April 2020: 
https://johnmenadue.com/australia-and-indonesia-relationship-by-duncan-graham/