ASIAN CENTURY: WHO'S ON SIDE?

Trade and treaty partners – or friends and neighbours?             

Student Zulino Rizky Hafiz is a bright lad hoping to become an engineer.  His parents in Surabaya are among the new Indonesian middle class, able to find $1300 to send their high school son to Perth’s Tranby College for a fortnight.

He’s been taking part in the Australian government and private BRIDGE programme linking schools on both sides of the Timor Sea.

“I appreciated the informality of teachers and students feeling free to ask for help, though I didn’t like the way teenage boys and girls get so close,” the 17-year old said on his return.

“I never knew we had a neighbour so different.”

Last October Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced Australia’s entry into the Asian Century.  Proposals included developing a new ‘Asia literate’ generation.

Her White Paper also sought the removal of ‘unnecessary regulatory impediments and disincentives to doing business in Australia and moving goods, services, people and capital across our borders.

Despite Keith De Lacy from the Australian Institute of Company Directors reportedly saying the policy was ’a bit patronising’, there was widespread applause – even from Canada. Toronto University’s Professor Irvin Studin called it a ‘strategy of vaulting ambition, with 25 national objectives ranging across social, economic and foreign policy.’

So far, so good.  However as others have written, Ms Gillard’s speech read well, but was more ritual delivery than new direction. Former PMs Paul Keating and Bob Hawke made similar statements about friendship and future.  These were warmly applauded and then quietly forgotten – and not just because the urgings weren’t married to cash.

The observations of young Muslim Zulino, offended by displays of teenage libido, were spot on.  The two countries need more than Canberra-imposed policy to span the gap, geographically close yet culturally distant, requiring huge prolonged efforts and political will to build even the foundations.

Look at the differences:

Australians are mainly big, white, brash, irreligious, pragmatic and well paid.  We live in a nation where powers are separated and the rule of law rules.

Indonesians are generally small, brown, restrained, religious, superstitious, exploited and poorly paid.  They live in a nascent democracy dominated by moneymen and the military. 

We’re eighth on Transparency International’s corruption perception index, with New Zealand number one.  A year ago Indonesia ranked 100.  Now it’s 118.

Our background is as recent transplants, Judaeo Christian, British democratic, colonial now multicultural. Our independence was granted amicably.

Indonesia’s history is ancient with Hindu and Buddhist traditions, feudal, patriarchal and colonised.  Liberal Islam dominates.  Independence was bravely won only after four years of brutal fighting.

The most significant political event in Australia is asylum seekers.  It hardly registers in Indonesia facing an election next year where the concern surrounds quality of candidates.

They tolerate government interference and celebrate community – we praise individualism and personal freedom. In Indonesia inter-faith unions are illegal, de-facto relationships rare. Citizens have to carry ID cards and follow an approved religion. We don’t, and won’t.

For every one of us there are eleven of them. Population growth rate of just one per cent - sounds manageable?  Another baby was born while you read this sentence.

Our friends speak English and live far away in Europe and the US, but we remain in the Anglosphere. Their friends are – well, we don’t really know, but fear they’re in the Middle East.

We speak the international language.  They use a language unrelated to any European tongue and unknown elsewhere

We eat foods based on wheat and milk, and drink alcohol.  Often to excess. Their diet is based on rice and water.

Indonesians are on their own from cradle to grave.  No Centrelink. The welfare system is the family. Our education and health services are free. Theirs are not.

There are more Muslims in Indonesia than the Middle East – and more Christians in Indonesia than Australians in the world.

Democracy only returned in 1999 with minimal bloodshed. But the purge of the old guard was incomplete. Money politics is rampant, widespread and resistant to change.

We do all sports well on excellent facilities. They play soccer badly and practise in the street. So how can such two such radically different cultures intersect peacefully? 

Governments seem to think the way is through trade and aid.  So Australian taxpayers give around half a billion dollars a year to Indonesia. 

There’s no sign kampong folk know of this generosity, or if they did it would enhance their understanding of the people next door.

Despite the fact that the construction industry is rotten with kick-backs much of that money has gone on building 2,000 schools in remote areas in the belief that better educated kids, particularly girls, will benefit all.

It’s hard to argue – unless asking why the Indonesian government isn’t doing the job. 

Indonesia has budgeted US$8 billion on defence this year, including $1.5 million for new military hardware. The nation hasn’t revealed any external threat.  The armed forces are used to put down internal separatist movements, like those in West Papua.  More money goes to the military than any other government agency.

This year Indonesia is spending US$22 billion on subsidies, most of it on fuel, sucking up 20 per cent of the national budget.  Drivers enjoy the cheapest pump prices in Southeast Asia with a litre of standard petrol at 45 cents.

The refusal to scrap the handouts has been widely criticised by the World Bank and Indonesian economists.  They claim the money could be used to build the country’s crumbling infrastructure that’s crippling development.

According to the taxation directorate general, there are 60 million potential taxpayers - but only 20 million are listed and paying taxes. Just half a million businesses are registered out of an estimated 22 million. The government has long promised a massive shake up of the graft-ridden tax system but has yet to deliver.

The Jakarta-based think tank Perkumpulan Prakarsa (welfare initiatives for a better society) reckons the government may have lost half of its tax revenues (nearly USD 60 billion) through corruption and incompetence in tax collecting.

Education and development consultant Robert Cannon has aired some of these criticisms before, but there’s been little reaction.

How the Indonesian government gathers and spends its money is entirely its business. A nation that can’t even dig taxes out of the big miners and stuffs up its defence budget is in no position to point fingers.  But we can select our aid priorities.

Indonesia’s education system is in crisis.  As an Al Jazeera 101-East programme revealed this year, more than half the teachers are underqualified and many don’t always front for work.

The country is at the bottom of the Pearson Study of 40 nations’ schools.  Using aid money to bring top chalkies and administrators to Australia to learn how to teach, write syllabi and run schools would be far more beneficial than paying Indonesian contractors to plaster walls.

And why build schools when an estimated 150,000 classrooms are in urgent need of repair?

The BRIDGE project that helped open teenager Zulino’s eyes to Aussie culture is a splendid initiative that pre-dates Ms Gillard’s statement by four years.  So far it has attracted less than 100 school partnerships.  There are 9,500 schools in Australia.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

We’ve been neighbors since Gondwanaland split. For much of that time we’ve viewed each other with suspicion laced with ignorance and travel warnings, inter-cut with moments of great generosity like our magnificent response to the Aceh tsunami and other natural disasters.

Suddenly we’ve heard that they’ve got money.  That means they must need foods and goods. It’s time to say hello, see what they want and how much they can pay.

Are these the foundations for a good and lasting relationship?

We want to join Asia but does Asia want us?  I haven’t heard anyone in Indonesia talking about the Australian Century.  Hillary Clinton launched the Pacific Century a year ahead of Ms Gillard’s statement.

The ideas in the 320-page White Paper are good.  They are also too few and too limited.  Maybe too late or poorly considered.  Like expanding a scheme to allow 1,000 young Indonesians to wander and work in Australia for a year. Previously the number was 100. In addition there are 500 scholarships for the talented and smart to study in Australia.

Generous? Do the maths: Indonesia has 240 million people. About 44 per cent are under 24.

Uncapped Working Holiday Visas have been available for years for other, mainly European nationals, keen to go Down Under.  What better way to learn of another culture by getting dirt under the fingernails, make friends alongside workmates, and build lasting contacts?

For Indonesians it’s the Work and Holiday Programme.  Note the syntax slip.  For this deal applicants have to pass an English test, be tertiary graduates and approved by their own government. 

The scheme is reciprocal but officials on both sides have nailed up the door. Australians are only allowed to teach English, work in hospitals and tourism.  There are reports of students giving up on the paperwork and going elsewhere.

Though jobs are not restricted in Australia, Immigration demands applicants have at least AUD $5,000.  Fees, insurance and air fares put visas even beyond the reach of the new Indonesian middle classes, defined as those who earn more than US $3,000 (29 million rupiah) a year.  Indonesians rightly claim this restricts opportunities to the rich.

The Opposition is proposing a ‘reverse Colombo Plan’ flooding Indonesia with Aussie undergraduates.  Professor David Hill who pioneered the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies forecast bureaucratic barriers.

He told The Australian: ‘Obtaining a temporary resident permit for study in Indonesia is something that individual students find very, very difficult’.

Australian leaders may be serious about an Asian Century where curious and open-minded youngsters can poke around their neighbor’s culture to erase prejudices.

But it’s clear they haven’t got the Indonesians on the same road, relying on change through symbiosis, not strategy.

 Ms Gillard described the policy as a ‘roadmap showing how Australia can be a winner in the Asian century.’ If so the track is tortuous and potholed, and the GPS is malfunctioning.

Discrimination, incompetence or both?  If implementation of such an easy policy can’t get into first gear, what hope for the rest?

Indonesia needs to stop being fearful of its neighbour.  We’re not all Kuta bar slobs determined to fracture the Unitary State and steal jobs off becak drivers.

Just as they’re not all fundamentalists bombing towards a Southern Hemisphere caliphate.

The Asia Century policy is a gentle shuffle forward and a welcome shift from the drivers of defence and security.  The hype makes it sound like a Southeast Asian version of the open border European Community that’s helped dissolve ancient hatreds and foster unity through people-to-people contacts. 

It’s not. It should be.

(First published in On Line Opinion, 7 March 2013)

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BRIDGE ACROSS THE DIVIDE

‘To get our kids to understand each other’

Last year Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced her Asian Century policy, which included the line: ’All schools will engage with at least one school in Asia to support the teaching of a priority Asian language.’

Fine ambition, tough assignment.  Duncan Graham reports on progress in Indonesia.

Despite her effervescence, teacher Vicki Richardson is surprisingly media shy.   “I’d never dream of approaching a journalist,” she said, “that’s just not me.”

Which is a pity because once cornered by The Jakarta Post in Surabaya the cultural coordinator for Perth’s Tranby College was delighted to tell a good news story about linking with the East Java capital’s  SMA Negeri 5 (State Senior High School 5).

The partnership started in 2009 when the two schools signed up to the Building Relationships through Intercultural Dialogue and Growing Engagement program, less clumsily known as BRIDGE.

The Indonesian section of the program, financed by the Australian government and the private Myer Foundation, has been the most successful with funding guaranteed till 2015.  However similar but more costly partnerships with China, South Korea and Thailand are reported to be floundering, with few contacts and the cash evaporating mid 2013. 

Started four years before Ms Gillard’s announcement the BRIDGE school partnerships ‘provide teachers and students with the opportunity to engage with peers in Asia’ through  face to face visits of teachers spending a week in an Australian school.

 

So far there have been 80 Indonesian engagements, though not all have survived, sometimes because the prime drivers, like Ms Richardson and her SMAN5 counterpart, Abdul Latif (left) retire or move on to other jobs. 

That seems to have been the case with Queensland’s Catholic Aquinas College that partnered with Islamic school Madrasah Aliyah Negeri 3 Malang in 2011. Teachers made visits but there have been no follow-up exchanges.

MAN3 has a new principal, Ahmad Hidayatullah.  “I’ve been occupied with other issues but the school still wants to be involved,” he said. “This is a high priority.”

Teacher Thohir Yoga, who has been to Australia, denied religious differences were the reason for the program stalling.  “We’re 200 per cent behind this and ready to go,” he said. “We have the money; we just haven’t had replies to our e-mails.”

They’re not the only ones.  An attempt to get Aquinas to comment for this story has also been unsuccessful.

There are more than 9,500 schools in Australia. The goal is for 512 teachers and 209 schools to be involved with the BRIDGE program by 2015. 

 “Little steps, little steps,” said Ms Richardson, a self-confessed ‘Indophile’ when questioned about the pace of progress during her tenth visit to Surabaya.  At the time she was on her annual leave.

 ‘It’s taken time for my school and colleagues to recognize the value of this program and the need to understand Indonesia. I deliberately wanted to be involved in Java, to extend knowledge beyond Bali, because Bali isn’t the whole country.

“All the Tranby and SMAN5 students have been involved with the exchanges for three years which is testimony to their ongoing friendships.  This is my personal aim, not sanitised visits and then forgotten.”

Last year Ms Richardson (right), who is fluent in Indonesian, was nominated for an Australian award recognizing her work in improving understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims. 

Hampering her mission to help lift Australians’ understanding of the people next door is the reality that most high school students stop studying languages  two years before graduating to concentrate on topics like maths and science.  Official figures show less than six per cent of year 12 students are tackling an Asian language, and even fewer are studying Asia in other subjects, like economics, history and politics.

SMAN 5 was founded in 1957 and has more than 900 students.  It has established links with schools in Singapore, the US and Germany. Tranby is a fee-paying 1000-student college run by the Uniting Church in a middle class suburb of the Western Australian capital.

Although two SMAN5 students pulled out when they learned Australians keep dogs as pets, Mr Latif hasn’t had problems getting parents to pay up to Rp 13 million (US$ 1,400) for air fares to send a child to Tranby for a fortnight.  They stay free with host families who’ve taken a course on cultural differences, including warnings not to serve their visitors bacon. 

“This is a rich school,” Mr Latif said, “just take a look at the students’ cars in the park outside. There’s a waiting list.”  He realized the advantages of exchange programs several years ago while waiting at an airport and seeing scores of Japanese students heading for the US. 

“Why not Indonesia?” he thought – and set about finding ways to make the idea work.  He also has an infectious enthusiasm for exchange programs that must help sway the sceptical and dismissive.

“I never knew we had a neighbor so different,” said Zulino Rizky Hafiz, 17, one of the few boys who’ve been to Tranby. Most exchange students are girls.

“I appreciated the informality of teachers and students feeling free to ask for help, but I didn’t like the way teenage boys and girls get so close.”

Fajar Sartika, 17, who plans to enter medical school, already speaks high level English. She also found the learning environment easier and subject choice more acceptable.  She doesn’t wear a headscarf but some of her classmates who did were jeered by boys at a seaside town, according to Ms Richardson.

“The Tranby girls robustly defended their visitors’ rights, responding that ‘there’s nothing wrong with Indonesians’,” she said. “Suddenly the reality of racism hit home.”

Australian families sitting down together for evening meals and discussing each other’s activities was also an unusual and pleasing experience; others found the absence of maids and having to share domestic duties a bit disturbing.

“Some teachers think that trying to develop exchange programmes is too difficult,” Ms Richardson said.  “But I’ve always thought this is the best way to get our kids to understand each other.”

(Breakout)

21^st century approaches

Lisa Hayman, senior projects manager at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Education Foundation said the BRIDGE project, which it’s helping develop, was “all about breaking down stereotypes and discovering our neighbors.”

The AEF ‘enables educators to develop Asia literate young Australians’ and provides teachers with resources to teach about Asia’. It’s been running for 20 years pushing mainly monolingual Australians to become ‘Asia literate’.

Ms Hayman’s colleague, former Indonesian language teacher Deryn Mansell, agreed that it was often just one person in a school who became the driving force in a BRIDGE project.  However support of principals and the whole school was important if a project was to survive.

Ms Hayman stressed that although student visits were ideal the cost put these beyond the reach of many.

“We’ve got to look more broadly than just physical exchanges,” she said.  “That’s a 20^th century approach – we can’t keep flying around the world.

“It’s time to use 21^st century information and communication technology, such as setting up Skype sessions between schools and students using Facebook and smartphones.

“This is already happening, including with some of the 2,000 schools built by Australian aid. Every partnership is different.”

Though not all contacts will be substantial or enduring, supporters say partnerships provide opportunities to learn about other cultures and lifestyles. 

The four-year AUD$4.2 million (Rp 42 billion) program is funded through a private/government partnership. There’s no contribution by the Indonesian government.

First published in The Jakarta Post 6 March 2013

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COMMENT ON EUREKA STREET ARTICLE

Response to Ruby Murray's article 'Invisible Indonesia'
http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=25441

The fault is not wholly ours. Indonesians have much work to do before their country becomes a safe destination. Most people are friendly and welcoming though rip offs are prevalent. The rule of law doesn't operate. Nationalism is growing and it's hostile to outsiders. Corruption rules everywhere, city pollution is a serious threat to health, poverty is gross - particularly outside the cities. Education standards are the lowest in Southeast Asia. As the travel warnings say - Indonesia is not always a safe destination. Far from struggling daily with asylum seekers the evidence shows Indonesian officials have been actively helping these people take the dangerous journey to Australia. Careful visitors who are well prepared can have rewarding experiences in the archipelago, but the hazards are real. Let's be frank about Indonesia - it's our resource-rich neighbour and critically important in defence and trade. It could become a major and stable player in world affairs, but it's also on the cusp of collapse if the government doesn't deliver the promises of democracy. That includes ensuring safety for visitors and locals - particularly those in minority religions.

Posted 19 March 2011

There’s a disquieting Pollyanna tone in many comments that do a disservice to Indonesia – and the original story. The debate needs to be lifted above ‘lovely people’ and ‘developing nation’ responses from people who’ve had only superficial contact with the archipelago, - some hiding their identity and further devaluing the credibility of their observations.

Indonesia was born in the ashes of World War 11 along with modern Japan and the European Community, and had the potential to equal them. Instead the great natural wealth and talent has been squandered by decades of corruption, oppression and mismanagement, a tragedy for the people whose health, education and lives have been blighted by evil administrators.

Now the lawmakers are allowing thugs to commit serious crimes in the name of religion and abuse the Constitution. This is creating widespread concern about future directions – and warping the nation’s image.

Australia can and should help by providing thousands more scholarships so young Indonesians can build their skills and see for themselves that Western democracy is not a nest of godless vipers. At the same time more Indonesians (particularly Javanese Muslims) in Australia should help lift local ignorance, provided they’re made welcome.

Posted 20 March 2011

AID DOLLARS BEING SPENT UNWISELY

Better ways to help Indonesian kids.

In February Opposition Leader Tony Abbott proposed cutting Australia’s overseas aid budget to pay for the Queensland floods, rather than impose a levy on taxpayers.

Specifically highlighted was the $AUD 400 million allocation to build schools for Indonesian kids. Many commentators found this abhorrent, stressing that education is critical to lift standards in Indonesia. However the benefits are more imagined than real – there are no figures available showing how many children are going to school who would otherwise have stayed home as a result of the aid programme.

Nor is there any information on the curricula being used in these schools – that’s something that Australia cannot control.

Of course education is important, and as an advanced nation Australia has a duty to help its neighbours. But building schools is a totally flawed policy.

It’s the Indonesian government’s job to care for its citizens; the responsibility is in the Constitution. That means providing the teachers, buildings and equipment.

If Australia does the job that releases local administrations to divert funds to other less worthy causes. These tend to be opulent government complexes, officials’ mansions and lavish places of worship.

There’s no way Australian agencies can control cash used for capital works which require suppliers, manufacturers and builders. The opportunities for graft are limitless, meaning Australian taxpayers’ money will fuel corruption.

The idea that the locals will recognise Australian generosity and change their attitudes is naïve. It assumes people will notice a plaque acknowledging AusAID and consequently stop despising unbelievers. On the contrary – the fundamentalists will use these programmes as proof that the West is trying to ‘Christianise’ Indonesians.

Far better to use the money so teachers can study in Australia, boost their skills and expand their horizons. There are some scholarships – but too few. When the teachers return they can push their governments to build better classrooms and equip these with modern technology. They can also tell their students that the West is not peopled by the devils conjured up by the narrow-minded ill-educated people who often run pesantren.

(First published in East Asia Forum 26 February 2011)