TRUST US, WE'RE THE GOOD FOLKS NEXT DOOR

 NO WORRIES, THEY’RE ONLY PASSING BY            

 

In the early 1960s, the then USSR started building missile sites in Cuba, near enough to Florida for endurance swimmers.  This almost led to the Cold War turning flaming hot. Now Australia is to buy more than 200 US missiles and stage them close to Indonesia.

 

The Arafura Sea is too wide to swim, but the subsonic Tomahawks capable of carrying 450 kg of conventional explosives (or, Absit! nuclear warheads with vastly more destructive power) can clear the distance in under 30 minutes.

 

Whether fired from land or sea (RAN destroyers or submarines), they’ll most likely head north-west, atop the world’s fourth most populous nation.

 

We upset the neighbours in September 2021 when announcing AUKUS. The then PM Scott Morrison allegedly told President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo only after Joe Biden had spoken.

 

Last year PM Anthony Albanese said ‘Australia’s relationship with Indonesia is one of our most important, … ever-deepened by the strategic and economic interests that we share.’ Though not matters of defence. 

 

Are we taking Jakarta for granted again? If so, more distrust is likely. Lowy Institute surveys show a third of Indonesians see Australia as a security threat.

 

Should words turn to launches, the missiles would presumably be seeking warships in the contested waters of the South China Sea, which Indonesia calls the Natuna Sea. (The Chinese mainland is beyond range).

 

Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy reportedly said the Tomahawks ‘would contribute to maintaining a strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific region’. Courtesy of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, Conroy added: ‘Only by deterrence can we promote strategic balance in our region and promote peace and stability as well.’

 

This isn’t just a $1.3 billion trade deal. The US State Department reckons the sale is ‘vital to the US national interest to assist our ally in developing and maintaining a strong and ready self-defence capability’. If so, why does Australia have to buy?

 

The other nations with Tomahawks are the UK and Japan.

 

Last month Australia’s mainstream media got in a tizz when aerial photos showed a RAAF Poseidon flying over a Chinese surveillance ship heading towards Queensland. This was headlined as an ‘encounter’ though other reports used the less-provocative terms ‘spotted’ and ‘sighted.’

 

The ABC  reported  a ‘spy ship monitoring joint military exercises (Talisman Sabre war games) with the US’. There have been no reports of Chinese sailors doing anything more aggressive than peering over satellite feeds and squinting through binoculars from outside our territorial waters. 

 

That didn’t stop Defence officials implying this was something decent folks don’t do, describing the watching as an ‘unfriendly and provocative act’.

 

A useful phrase for Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi to use should the Republic’s citizens spot killer missiles streaking above their archipelago. 

 

Another reason for the absence of angry statements and ambassador recalls is because Indonesian politicians have their eyes on the ground, specifically the 2024 general and presidential elections.

 

Foreign affairs just smoulder on the edges of the campaign where the primary heat sources are domestic issues.

 

Before being made the first woman Foreign Minister in 2014, Retno was ambassador to the Netherlands where she’d earlier been a student. Her President has shown little interest in her portfolio, so she’s largely been left alone.

 

Three big issues she’s faced and failed to either resolve or make any impression remain - Myanmar, the South China Sea disputes and AUKUS. 

 

Less than six months from the February poll there’s negligible speculation about the FM’s replacement. In the Indonesian system, ministerial appointments can be made from civil society. Retno, 60, is a career diplomat. She’s declined repeated requests for an interview.

 

Soon after her appointment she spoke out against academic charges of Indonesia’s ‘narrow nationalist-tinged discontinuity and unpredictability in foreign policy’.

 

 She responded that ‘Indonesia is recognised by outsiders for its successes in democracy, development and stability.’ But no mention of pacts and accords with other nations because of the policy of non-interference.

 

As an aside, Indonesia now has many more toll roads, ports and airfields, and is economically stable. But the boast about democracy is hollow. The US Journal of Democracy reported that:

 

‘Under (Jokowi’s) tenure, free elections have been threatened, civil liberties have declined, corruption fighters and legislative checks weakened, and the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs has grown.’

 

After Morrison called his counterpart  to say, ‘BTW something I meant to mention …’, Jokowi was reported as ‘repeatedly and forcefully’ raising concerns with the then-PM.

 

Retno added her country ‘was worried about the increasing tension between major countries …and the possibility of a cold war. What we all don't want is the possibility of an increasing arms race and power projection in the region.’

 

But that’s what’s happening with the Tomahawks. So far any outrage has been contained.  To add to the puzzlement Jokowi neutered his FM courtesy of the New Straits Times: 

 

 ‘We should view the Quad and AUKUS as partners, and not competitors ... ASEAN aims to make the region a stable and peaceful one.’

 

(The Quad is a security talkfest that doesn’t involve Indonesia. It started in 2007, was killed off a year later by PM Kevin Rudd, and was reborn in 2017. Members are Australia, the US, India and Japan.)

 

A decade ago PM Julia Gillard released the White Paper Australia in the Asian Century. It stressed that Australia’s ‘future prosperity and security are inextricably linked to what happens in the region’.

 

That was then. What happens now in the region is being determined in another hemisphere. As veteran journalist John Pilger, 83, has written:

 

‘In my lifetime, the US has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries.’

 

Indonesia’s next President and FM might want to ask some tougher questions about AUKUS, Tomahawks and whatever is next on Australia’s Washington shopping list.

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 24 August 2023: https://johnmenadue.com/tomahawk-missiles-over-indonesia-no-worries-theyre-only-passing-by/

 

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DIY PRIDE

 INDONESIA HAS WHAT WE LACK - A DAY OF UNITY             

     

                   

 

It’s banners and bunting season in Southeast Asia as our neighbours celebrate independence. Singapore finished its wavings on 9 August and Malaysia’s moments of pomp will come on 16 September. Like Australia, both won sovereignty through diplomacy.

 

Next up is Indonesia on 17 August and the 78^th birthday party will be brimming with exuberance we’d consider over the top. 

 

The excessives acknowledge a genuine achievement at a terrible cost, seized by nationalists, not handed back by an exhausted European state.

 

The gaiety is driven from below, not imposed by officials pushing citizens to cheer.  Involvement is universal. Families painting their gates and kerb lines on the asphalt across Indonesia this past week do so in the spirit of gotong royong, community self-help.

 

Government grants are rare - the banners draping fences and forming arches have been handed down like relics from past years, or bought from wandering vendors. Much is homemade and inventive.

 

There’ll be thousands of closed-street parties, an abundance of savouries and buckets of rice, much singing and mineral water, though no grog. 

 

Understanding our giant and much-overlooked neighbour demands more than a splash in a Bali villa pool, and a dabble with Indonesian language  at  junior high. It needs immersion.

 

Australians expect division on 26 January reckoning it’s either an invasion or John Howard’s ‘luckiest thing that happened to Australia’.

 

So we find Indonesia’s razzmatazz and fireworks hard to understand, and not just because we’re fearful of bushfires and distrustful of authority defining eventful moments.  

 

While we puzzle, Indonesia’s celebrations relate with Americans because their histories have been settled.

 

The 4 July 1776 Declaration of Independence at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia established the US as a separate nation. Then came war to secure independence, ending with the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

 

At 10 am on 17 August 1945, the revolutionary leader Soekarno declared the birth of the Republic of Indonesia and the death of the Dutch East Indies after more than three centuries. 

 

War erupted, ceasing only when sovereignty was transferred to the short-lived ‘United States of Indonesia’ at the end of 1949, though West Papua was not included  till 1963.

 

Both nations have settled their past, an essential foundation for accord. Our history has not been resolved for much remains unrecognised.  

 

The latest estimates  from Newcastle University research has more than 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives lost across more than 400 massacres. More happened between 1860 to 1930 than in the 70 years after settlement.

 

The polyglot Soekarno, who became the nation’s first President, is titled Proklamator. He was a great orator, yet his speech is short, dull and devoid of detail:

 

‘We the people of Indonesia hereby declare the independence of Indonesia. Matters concerning the transfer of power, etc., will be carried out in a conscientious manner and as speedily as possible.’

 

British-America epidemiologist and former Reuters journalist Dr Elizabeth Pisani caught the fragility with her essential read, Indonesia Etc. Exploring the Improbable Nation. 

 

The separation statement was read before a microphone and a bunch of blokes on a veranda. The women were in the backrooms, cooking for the safari suits and sewing flags.

 

The humble Jakarta house where it all happened  has since been demolished because Soekarno thought it insufficiently grand for a national monument. 

 

There was little time for crafted eloquence at the proclamation. Two days earlier the Japanese, who’d brutally occupied the archipelago since 1942, surrendered marking the end of the Pacific War, though locally still in control and armed.

 

The Indonesian revolutionaries who’d been planning for freedom since 1908 rushed to seize the moment. Threats by impatient students to kidnap Soekarno and force him into action added to the chaos.  This was no time to discuss specifics.

 

The 31 words get read at every Independence Day event and are so pedestrian that only the flag-raising, usually performed by strutting teens, arouses emotion.

 

Although there are questions about the flag’s origins, these don’t cleave society.  One tale has it inherited from the red and white striped emblem of the Majapahit Era (1293 - 1527), Java’s Golden Age.

 

A probably fabricated version has a youth ripping off the blue section of the Netherlands tricolour after climbing a hotel flagpole in the East Java capital of Surabaya, which is where most of the red was blood.

 

The British arrived at the port at the end of October to reinstate rule by The Hague, but by then the pemuda (headstrong youth) had seized Japanese weapons to defend their new nation against mainly Indian Army infantrymen.

 

The one-sided Battle of Surabaya is remembered every year on 10 November. The most important account has been written by Australian journalist Dr Frank Palmos.

 

During the fighting, an estimated 2,000 Allied troops and 16,000 Indonesians were killed. The survivors fled south and started a guerrilla war against the returning colonialists. This lasted four years, taking Indonesian casualties up to 100,000 deaths.

 

The late American-Australian historian Dr Merle Ricklefs wrote that the Indonesians’ determined resistance ‘galvanised the nation in support of independence and helped garner international attention.’ 

 

Internationally it confirmed that the Republic had popular support. Later Britain, Australia and the US through the United Nations forced the Dutch to abandon their colonial ambitions.

 

While we’re still debating our flag and whether 26 January is the appropriate day (maybe the Voice could advise), Indonesians have no doubt their choice is right.

 

Though divisions in the Republic are distressing, sometimes violent and usually involving religion and ethnicity, they’re absent on 17 August, the day of unity.

 

January 26 marks unfinished business. The new Australia Day could be the day we pass the referendum.

 

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 16 August 2023: https://johnmenadue.com/indonesia-has-what-we-lack-a-day-of-unity/

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HELPING INDONESIAN EDUCATION - - AID OR TRADE?

 

 

 

 

AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES RUSH  TO “EDUCATE” INDONESIA

 

Despite a lack of solid results, a growing number of Australian universities are rushing to set up in Indonesia to teach locals

 

The new intake lines up as the sun rises. They’re nervous, silent and focused. The scene is monochrome, with black strides or skirts and white shirts with most women wearing black jilbab (Islamic headscarves).

 

They stand in shadeless carparks. Marshals bark names and places. When long wait times cause fidgets, they order push-ups. All obey. The cohort is late teens.

 

This is not a military parade ground but a major public university campus in Malang, Central East Java. Apart from a gathering to study, this scene has no relationship to an enrolment week in Australia where the assured and ambitious come in colourful gear, flaunting their individuality.

 

Students in multicultural Australia come from different ethnicities. Their ages cover all decades. Many have worked for years and travelled widely, gaining what New Zealanders call ‘OE’ - maturing through overseas experience. They can sit alongside kids barely out of puberty.

 

That exciting mix is not found in Indonesia’s learning culture.

 

Regimented tertiary education is just one of the many awkward differences to be faced by Australian universities going offshore. As the terms pass, the Indonesian students start to assert themselves, but the stamp of authority remains.

 

Three Australian universities plan branches in Indonesia after Jakarta stopped banning standalone foreign campuses in 2018. There’s been no rush as the outsiders had to be high-ranked or invited by the Ministry of Education. Hopes they’ll make money and lift education quality are problematic.

 

The ventures are exploring niche markets for the few with cash. The total cost for a 72-credit point Australian Master of Business Innovation degree in Jakarta is AUD 33,000. The average annual income for a worker in the capital, Jakarta, is a third of that fee, and far less in the regions.

 

Almost ten per cent of the national population of 275 million lives below the poverty level of AUD 55 a month. Indonesia is now unhappily ranked as the sixth country with the greatest wealth inequality in the world. That’s according to Oxfam International: ‘The four richest men in Indonesia have more wealth than the combined total of the poorest 100 million.’ 

 

The Australian offerings to its neighbour are not a rounded education for all, but a handful of specials for the few. Whatever the websites claim these are risky commercial investments, not foreign aid programs.

***

In 2015, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop (now Chancellor of the ANU) cut aid to Indonesia by 40 per cent, crippling the Australia-Indonesia Education Partnership programme. This was building schools and training teachers in the poorest parts of Indonesia, mainly the East Nusa Tenggara province.

 

Professor Andrew MacIntyre, (right) president of an already established Jakarta branch of Monash University, said policies in Canberra had shifted across the years from seeing Indonesia as an aid recipient to a market.

 

He told Declassified Australia that he felt, ‘very confident that our campus is making a very clear and strong contribution to the further success of Indonesia.’

 

Monash is an Australian pioneer but it’s not alone. Chinese universities are exploring the field. Likewise, the British. The French and the Dutch are already in place as partners with local unis. Also, some Asian institutions are involved.

 

If all Australian universities thrive, they’ll cater for an estimated total of fewer than 10,000 students.  Monash hopes to lift its current enrolment of 220 students to 2,000 within eight years. There are almost 3.4 million in state universities and 1.3 million in those with religious links. Most are Muslim.

 

Since Australian aid for Indonesia has been slashed university senates in Australia are being pushed by the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement to expand exports beyond bulk grain and beef and sell specialised services like education.

 

The three-year-old IA-CEPA free-trade accord that took ten years to negotiate, has ‘yet to deliver much’, according to Indonesia expert Professor Tim Lindsey of Melbourne University.

During negotiations an Australian Parliamentary Committee on Treaties was warned by international trade experts of potential hazards, particularly different expectations and ways to resolve disputes.

After the signing two ANU academics claimed foreign investors avoided Indonesia because of ‘institutional quality and regulatory uncertainty.’ 

Further proof that the deal isn’t thriving comes from the one-day Sydney meeting in July between President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo and PM Anthony Albanese. The communique told their foreign ministers to ’renew the plan of action’ for the IA-CEPA, though giving no reasons why.

 

A favourite Australian sales pitch has Indonesia fertile with opportunities while growing into the world’s fourth-largest economy by 2050 as the workers move from farming to factories.

 

Rarely reported is that this shift is threatened by the lousy level of education of the workers needed to make the transition.

 

World Bank research in 2020 shows that more than half of Indonesian school leavers are ‘functionally illiterate’ (meaning they can’t understand what they read), compared with 20 per cent for countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development:

 

‘Student learning levels and learning inequality are major challenges. Most students do not meet the national learning targets Indonesia has set itself.’

Hoping for a brighter future

 

The sickness spreads beyond classrooms. The UN Population Fund in Indonesia reports investment in youth is ‘critical for the present and future prosperity of Indonesia… policies that address youth needs, diversities and disparities will enable young people to claim their rights and fulfil their potential ’.

 

Australian universities operating in this needy environment should help achieve some of these worthy goals, though only at the margins. That’s because the ventures are too small and exclusive, and flogging courses that draw individuals but won't satisfy Indonesia’s national needs.

 

The demand in Indonesia is for engineering graduates, unmet by the Australian newcomers. Nor will they explore the liberal arts so avoiding problems with asserting freedoms of expression in a nation where these principles are under attack by religious zealots.

 

To get nutritious brainfood, learners will have to leave the country and feast on higher learning elsewhere. Almost 13,000 are in Australia. On their return to Indonesia they often find opportunities restricted, pay low and ‘skills mismatch’ so head overseas again. Singapore has benefited from this brain drain.

 

The Indonesian university year is already underway with hundreds of thousands of hopefuls expecting that tertiary education will be little different from school. Lecturers dictate, pupils transcribe and there’s little questioning, as this writer knows from teaching and observing.

 

There are deeper issues facing Australian academics abroad. The heart of Western campuses is the library, usually the biggest building. In Indonesia, the centrepiece is the place of worship, mosque, church or temple.

 

Although the Indonesian Republic is constitutionally secular, religious instruction is compulsory at all levels of education; citizens’ ID cards must state that she or he is a Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist or Confucian.

 

There are private faith-based universities in Australia but public schools and unis are secular under the Constitution.

 

A few years ago, Professor Gavin Moodie, an expert observer of overseas education and formerly with RMIT in Melbourne, warned that:

 

‘International branch campuses are one of the biggest reputational and financial risks universities take…They rarely repatriate great financial or academic riches to their home campus.’

 

Currently, at Toronto University, he took a more optimistic position, updating this story by saying that ‘Australian universities now have considerable experience in managing these risks.

 

‘This suggests (they’ll) invest in campuses in Indonesia for broader intellectual, cultural and foreign relations benefits beyond financial cost-benefit analyses.’

 

But will they? Monash, which has been in Malaysia since 1998, opened in Jakarta in 2021 offering courses in business, management, data science and public policy.

 

Idealists inspired by Winston Churchill’s declaration that ‘the first duty of a university is to teach wisdom, not trade; character, not technicalities,' won’t find much traction in Indonesia whether the campus is local or an import; the purpose is practical, not philosophical.

 

Monash Jakarta President Andrew MacIntyre told Declassified Australia that he had ‘sympathy for your critique of what at least some university educations are and are not. Indonesia does have an array of undergrad arts-type programs from its leading universities that do provide opportunities for the more rounded type education.'

 

But these don’t match the quality of Western inquiry and independence according to Indonesian scholars at Melbourne University, claiming a lack of academic autonomy:

 

‘(This) encompasses the capacity to produce good quality knowledge, exchange ideas, and take a critical stance against the interests of the state and market. And this is where Indonesian universities are struggling.’

 

Before the 1998 overthrow of President Soeharto’s 32-year authoritarian reign, ‘political controls over academic life in Indonesia were among the most intrusive in the world,’ according to a Human Rights Watch report.

 

The quality of tertiary institutions is measured by the British-based company QS World University Rankings. Monash at 42 is a smart catch for Indonesia where the two top in Indonesia are Jakarta’s Indonesia University (237) and Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta at 263.

 

There are 43 universities in Australia but so far Monash is the only one in the ‘elite eight’ prepared to invest heavily in Indonesia.  The start-up cost was AUD 60 million for a campus in a new prestigious area 35 km south of central Jakarta.

 

Western Sydney (375), expects to open next year in Surabaya, the capital of East Java, with an eventual enrolment of 2,500. Victoria’s Deakin (233), - in partnership with Britain's Lancaster Uni (122) - is planning a campus in the West Java capital of Bandung.

 

Central Queensland (590) offers business courses in partnership with a private university linked to the Bakrie and Brothers group, a massive conglomerate owning the Brisbane Roar soccer team and in Indonesia it’s involved in mining, plantations, manufacturing and the media.

 

Investor risks are substantial, particularly where corruption is well embedded. The Indonesian Corruption Eradication Commission reported that:

 

‘Corruption in Indonesia has threatened all aspects of social, national, and state life. Corruption has also brought enormous material losses to state finances regarding economy, society, and culture.’

 

When Jokowi leaves office in 2024, ‘Indonesia will likely be a more corrupt nation than when he moved into the presidential palace a decade earlier,’ according to a Jakarta Post report into the latest research.

 

That suggests a lack of political will in tackling the curse because many Indonesian oligarchs are allegedly involved.

 

There’s also insecurity: Next year’s 14 February presidential election will see a total clean-out of ministers; as the political system doesn’t have an Opposition shadow Cabinet, there’s no knowing who might be the next Education Minister.  Recruitment outside political parties is frequent.

 

Some newcomers may want to clamp down on foreigners working in the Republic, an evergreen policy for arousing populists.

 

So why not stay comfortable in Australia? Prestige, getting international recognition and expanding, as universities are expected to be commercial, competitive and innovative. Professor MacIntyre, believes the two neighbours should see themselves as peers.

 

Poll fever is rising ahead of the 2024 vote and infecting the populace. Student activists helped end the 32-year autocracy of the Soeharto autocracy; most dissidents against his regime were reportedly from the humanities.

 

Another quicksand is free thought, a fraught concept in many countries. Last year the Indonesian Caucus for Academic Freedom reported to the UN alleging:

 

‘Since March 2017 the Indonesian government increased pressure on higher education institutions to punish and silence dissent, inquiry, critical thinking, overall, and academic freedom as an integral part of freedom of speech.’

 

So far, these arguments haven’t impacted. The protesters' best hope for a leader who might listen would-be presidential candidate Dr Anies Baswedan. He’s a US-educated former university rector and later a reformist minister for education who got the President’s boot in 2016 when his ideas and methods clashed with traditionalists.

 

The polls show he’s trailing his main rivals. The leaders so far are from the military - former General Prabowo Subianto - and civil administration - Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo.

 

Says Monash Professor MacIntyre: ’I very much welcome the three new Oz unis coming, and have tried to be of assistance to them. I believe this is good for Indonesia and good for Australia.’

 

Though only if they stay afloat. If that means jettisoning education values inherited from the Greek philosophers and held high across the ages, then the purpose is to open wallets, not minds.

 

The late Adnan Buyung Nasution who founded the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute reportedly said: ‘I think it is (second president  1968-1998) Soeharto's worst crime that he has made Indonesians afraid to think, afraid to express themselves.’

 

It will take many brave academics from inside and outside Indonesia to fix that damaging legacy.  But some are trying.

 

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 First published in Declassified Australia 10 August 2023:   https://declassifiedaus.org/2023/08/10/australian-universities-rush-to-educate-indonesia/