FAITH IN INDONESIA

FAITH IN INDONESIA
The shape of the world a generation from now will be influenced far more by how we communicate the values of our society to others than by military or diplomatic superiority. William Fulbright, 1964
Showing posts with label Lowy Institute. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lowy Institute. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 04, 2020

WHAT'S UWAsia DOING - AND WHY?



The Washington watcher on UWA’s cast-iron balcony


Why is the Perth-based USAsia Centre backed by Australian taxpayers? If this foreign influencer was run by the Chinese or Russians it would be forensically examined.  As a US show it slips past scrutineers.


USAsia appeared at the University of Western Australia in 2012, no major gap identified, no pressing need articulated by outsiders. Not a study centre but another think tank we didn’t know we needed. It seemed to have come out of the blue, but also present were red and white stripes.

It was opened by Hillary Clinton when Secretary of State. It’s been led since by an American, Korean expert Lawrence Gordon Flake.

The founders include UWA, Sydney University’s US Studies Centre and the American Australian Association.

The AAA was set up in 1948 by Sir Keith Murdoch in New York where it’s headquartered.

USAsia is listed as a foreign influencer with the Attorney General’s Department. It’s also a registered charity and an Australian public company.  

The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme (FITS) began in 2018 ‘to provide the public with visibility of the nature, level and extent of foreign influence on Australia's government and politics.’  There are 213 registrants.

USAsia dubs itself ‘Australia's leading think-tank for the strengthening of relationships between Australia, the Indo-Pacific and the United States.’  This role is also the responsibility of the Australian government.

Apart from helping the economy by giving jobs to 14 researchers, publicists, administrators and designers (the website is impressive), there’s no clear reason why USAsia is necessary.  

More than half its $3 million annual budget (2019) comes from the Federal and State governments lightly aided by three corporates:  The Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, the Japanese oil company Inpex, and Australian conglomerate Wesfarmers.

Other donors include the US State Department and the Japanese Consulate-General in Perth. These are the ‘activities’ listed on the FITS register.

Together the corporates toss in only seven per cent, suggesting they’re less enthusiastic about the Centre than politicians.  About 30 per cent comes from ‘program specific grants’.

USAsia’s ten-member board includes two former Labor politicians - Kim Beazley, Deputy PM 1995-96, Opposition Leader 1996-01 and 2005-06, and Ambassador to the US 2010-16.  He’s now the WA Governor.
The second is Stephen Smith, Minister for Foreign Affairs 2007-10, and Defence 2010-13.  He’s now Professor of Public International Law at UWA. The other members are heavyweights from business and academia.
USAsia says it has run 100 conferences in the past six years including some overseas and featured foreign experts.  Last year it hosted 80 across six countries ‘engaging with a collective audience of over 4,100.’  

Many functions sound like echo chambers where well-read audiences hear what they already know.  Although some are open, others are ‘invite only’ or ‘private roundtables’ so we don’t know what information and opinions are flashed back to State’s Harry S Truman Building for forming US foreign policy. 

If a similar centre was run by an authoritarian regime – China, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia loom into view – there’d be questions in Parliament about outside interference.  But the US is a democracy and our great and powerful friend, so misses out.

Though not for want of trying. These questions were sent to Flake and staff but never answered, denting the claim to transparency:

Where did the initiative for the USAsia Centre start?  I’ve read about the Centre’s formation, but interested in the genesis.
Is the Centre duplicating work normally done by professional diplomats at the US Consulate-General in Perth and Embassy in Canberra, watching the region and reporting back to Washington?

Does USAsia have counterparts elsewhere in the world?  

Is the Centre involved in advocacy, apart from ‘strengthening relationships and strategic thinking between Australia, the Indo-Pacific and the USA’ – and how are these aims measured?

Some of the Centre’s activities, like initiating private discussions with ambassadors, could be seen as an NGO usurping the proper role of government departments, particularly the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Your comment?
  
When will the Federal and WA governments' support end?  Is there a guarantee of continuity?
A generalised rationale for the Centre can be found in this 2014 video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mcmKdRDCXY

The personable Flake, 53, went to the Mormon’s Brigham Young University where he specialized in Korean Studies.  He doesn’t have a PhD.  He styles himself ‘professor’ and likes to call colleagues ‘distinguished fellows’.  

He was previously executive director of the Washington-based Mansfield Foundation which seeks to ‘promote understanding and cooperation among the nations and peoples of Asia and the US’.  It has also published three of his books.

He occasionally gets called to comment on Korean issues but hasn’t become the media’s go-to for boundary-breaking views.  Talking sense on Asia is tough in Perth, not helped by having a tabloid local press more interested in AFL drunks in Kuta than anti-Muslim laws in India.  

However USAsia is getting traction elsewhere, becoming the WA Government’s preferred guide to the region.   Departments are said to be funding the Centre’s advice, by-passing Asian business councils with decades of on-ground experience and key contacts on speed-dial.  According to one source it’s “an issue that simmers quietly beneath the surface”.

Strategically any Asian ‘think tank’ would be better based in Jakarta, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi or Singapore where staff would get a direct daily feel for local politics, sniff the smoke and hear the grumbles.  Then their reports would have grunt.

However postings where the US isn’t a favoured guest don’t attract staff wanting Western lifestyles and salaries.  Keyboarding behind blast-proof walls and being continuously monitored is only tolerable if the promised next stop is Geneva or Helsinki.

The justification for locating in comfy Perth is that it’s closer to the target area than Canberra.  This excuse had little validity even before faster long-haul jets.  Two hours more snoozing in business class is now less of a burden.

Then there’s the silly reasoning about Perth sharing the same clock as Denpasar.  Bureaucrats and business folk who can’t handle timezones need an introduction to the Internet.

Power still resides around the nation’s south-east however much the south-west wishes otherwise. Perth doesn’t offer a “unique vantage point” as Flake claims. Westralians bathe in the Indian Ocean which laps Indonesia and India but that doesn’t make them any more conscious of their neighbours than Sydneysiders.  

Tropical Darwin is a more logical fit for Asia watchers who prefer to peer from afar. Tagalog, Indonesian and Tetum are as common as Okker in Smith Street cafes.  This is the place to garner gossip on what’s really going on in Manila, Jakarta and Dili.

USAsia’s lavish reports are useful backgrounders but none come within coo-ee of the punchy research from Sydney’s Lowy Institute.  

There’s no evidence that USAsia’s work has stirred and startled, so little chance it will jolt politicians and shift policies Down Under.  Washington may be another matter.  

Wanting to strengthen relationships is meritorious.  If USAsia was dinkum it would be confronting the ignorance about Asia revealed by Lowy surveys with vigor, advocating understanding, stirring the possum.

If there’s a strong case for maintaining a publicly-funded Asian research centre better it works on behalf of Australia, not a ‘foreign principal’.   
##
 
 First published in Pearls and Irritations, 4 March 2020

https://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-the-washington-watcher-on-uwas-cast-iron-balcony/

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

THE ABC OF INDIFFERENT TV



Normal service will not be resumed                       

If you’re a French, Russian, Japanese, Singaporean, American, British, German or a Middle East citizen in Indonesia, then lucky you.  Most nights you can turn on your TV and be proud that your homeland is broadcasting professionally and showcasing its culture.
Missing from the list is the big nation next door.
Once Australia looked out to the world.  Now it looks in. 
Last year its overseas TV channel formerly known as Australia Plus, and before that Australia Network, switched its name to ABC Australia. This was the fifth change in 25 years, bemusing viewers and corroding the brand.
The ABC is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, an independent government-funded public service modeled on the British BBC.

In a just-released report titled A Missed Opportunity for Projecting Australia’s Soft Power the Lowy Institute claims ‘international broadcasting is one of the most effective forms of public diplomacy, if managed properly.’


So why does Australia bother to telecast to the Asia-Pacific? Why not yield the space to the Chinese keen on using the media to expand their influence?
Unfortunately for ABC management focusing on domestic audiences, the Corporation’s charter requires it to broadcast overseas
Then there’s the moral reason: Australia once proclaimed a responsibility to assist other nations to learn more about the country, its people and values. 
Till recently Australia took these ideals seriously. The service seemed adequately funded and curated for the markets.  No longer.  Programs are just relayed with no concern about time differences.
If Jakartans and others want to watch Australian current affairs when current they need to dash home early.  The flagship 7.30 Report is telecast in Australia in that peak post-dinner timeslot.
 In Indonesia it should be re-titled the 3.30 Report. Unfortunately that’s traffic jam time when expats are picking up the kids from school or heading to meetings to catch public servants before they head for the exits.
Australia is retreating from the region when its academics, business leaders, journalists, NGOs and politicians on all sides consistently urge better education, improved communications and closer contact to build enduring relationships. 
These voices have become louder as the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement gets closer to ratification.  The IA-CEPA is a free trade agreement signed off in 2019 and now waiting for a tick by the Indonesian Parliament.
Australia’s media presentations to the Asia Pacific were once different.  
Thousands developed their English skills through Radio Australia shortwave, particularly during the 1960s and 70s.  Many elderly Indonesians recall relying on the service during the Soeharto New Order dictatorship to open their world. RA was a trusted source at a time when facts were scarce.
This gave Australia great kudos.
Australia Television International began transmission in 1993.  Nine years later it became ABC Asia Pacific. In 2006 the then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer announced another name - Australia Network, with funding from Foreign Affairs and Trade plus advertising.
The claims were extravagant: It would reach ten million homes and 200,000 hotel rooms in 41 countries; maybe one million sets of eyeballs a month.
Downer said the ABC would offer ‘high quality programs about Australia and its engagement with the region.’   He included a homely metaphor:  ‘A key requirement of the service is to provide a credible and independent voice through programs that present a 'window' on Australia and Australian perspectives of the world.’
By then Indonesians and other Southeast Asians had new windows to peer though. BBC World, France24, Al Jazeera, NHK (Japan), Deutsche Welle and other international telecasters were offering vistas grand using serious money.
The French Government is reported to spend US$117 million a year on France 24 while Russia’s RT channel is believed to have an annual budget of US$300 million.   Now China is expanding its overseas reach with China Central Television (CCTV).
The Voice of America budget is US$218 million, all from government funds. It broadcasts and telecasts in more than 40 languages, including Indonesian.
When the Australia Network was turned off, the then Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said it ‘had failed to deliver a cost-effective vehicle’ but no facts to back the claim. The then ABC managing director Mark Scott said the decision:
…runs counter to the approach adopted by the vast majority of G20 countries. Countries around the world are expanding their international broadcasting services as key instruments of public diplomacy.
It sends a strange message to the region that the government does not want to use the most powerful communication tools available to talk to our regional neighbours about Australia.
Because the ABC Charter forces it to be an international broadcaster the gap had to be filled. The result was Australia Plus with a $20 million budget for three years partly bolstered by ads.  Few materialized.
In Indonesia three pay-to-use cable services carry the rebadged ABC Australia. They get it free, but the consumers don’t, meaning Australian taxpayers are subsidizing overseas commercial distributors.
The ABC says its programs are ‘available to three million people in Indonesia’ meaning that’s the number who pay for access to cable networks each offering 50 or more channels.
ABC Australia programs are almost all in English. Those from Nat Geo are subtitled in Indonesian.  Likewise the History Channel, Animal Planet, Discovery, BBC Earth and many others, including crime and food channels.
The Lowy Institute claims: ‘Australia is explicitly competing for global and regional influence, yet Australia’s international broadcasting has been weakened through a combination of government inconsistency and neglect, ideology-driven decisions, budget cuts and apparent ABC management indifference.’
The report suggests the Australian Government fund international public broadcasting and does the job properly.   Based on reforms to date Indonesian and ex-pats will have a long wait. 
Better use the remote and click onto an overseas service which treats the world’s fourth largest nation seriously.
(First published in Indonesian Expat, 26 February 2020)






Tuesday, February 27, 2018

AUSTRALIAN FM NEEDS GPS


Where’s Ozzie - down here or up there?

This month Foreign Minister Julie Bishop spoke at the Menzies Research Centre in London on Australia’s Foreign Policy White Paper published three months earlier.

Her theme circled around getting ‘rules-based order’ into Asia, just like Europe where she says nationalism has subsided.
Dr Euan Graham (no relation), Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program, wrote in The Interpreter that the address was ‘probably Bishop’s most important foreign policy speech since her Fullerton lecture in Singapore (to the International Institute for Strategic Studies) last March.’

However its inconsistencies whizzed past the media obsessed with the Barnaby Joyce affair, bewildering those trying to understand Australia’s political location and Facebook likes.  

Unsurprisingly the FM focused on China, ‘a crucial economic power and partner to our region and the world.’
Keep moving, nothing to see here.  What is surprising is that our giant neighbor Indonesia didn’t get one mention in Bishop’s 2,400-word delivery.  Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam were pinged along with the big powers, but not the world’s third largest democracy where, unlike the FM’s Europe, nationalism is on the rise.
This was not a clumsy press scrum but an address to an elite audience so would have been forensically checked..  To ignore Indonesia is not just a slapdown of the world’s most populous Islamic nation, it also kicks aside the tradition - repeated in the White Paper - of stating that Australia’s relations with the Republic are of top importance.
Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s 2013 election pledge to focus on Jakarta ahead of Geneva was a revoicing of long-standing bi-partisan policy. Abbott did go to the Merdeka Palace before the Palais des Nations, getting on well with then President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
After Abbott was dislodged by Malcolm Turnbull in 2015 the new PM made a brief Jakarta stopover to meet the new President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo; the Indonesian leader’s first official visit Down Under was in 2017.
Not much more; Jokowi, who will seek a further five-year term at a general election next year, knows that getting close to the Ozzies won’t win local votes.
The lingering public dislike stems from our role in the 1999 East Timor referendum.  There’s little fermenting hostility though this can change in a flash as touchy Indonesians over-react to real or imagined slurs by culturally clumsy Australians.
Indonesians are proud of helping create the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967 with four others (Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore) as an anti-communist block; they’re the heavyweight and don’t like criticism.
ASEAN is now ten strong and better known for what it doesn’t do than its successes. Neither a Common Market as in Europe, nor an alliance like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, it’s a weird mix of military dictatorships, an authoritarian sultanate, communist states and various forms of democracies. The glue is geography and being ‘Asian’.  
We may see ourselves as multi-ethnic, but to Indonesians we are European-white, waving a colonial flag. Forget facts - just having the Queen’s head on our currency is proof enough.
Australia’s approach to ASEAN has been ambivalent, though in Sydney next month ten leaders will gather for a summit on business and security ties - the first time we have hosted the group.
Last year’s White Paper trumpeted the upcoming event ‘(which) will reinforce our Strategic Partnership with ASEAN as we advance shared interests. The Summit will demonstrate our elevated commitment to ASEAN and our enduring ties with the countries of Southeast Asia. 
The FM stayed in tune with her Singapore address, enthusing that:  ‘ASEAN should never underestimate the moral force it can exert in the form of collective diplomatic pressure on countries that might think or behave differently.
Yet in London she went off-key, saying ASEAN is as an example of regional multilateral institutions that do not impose obligations or commitments on … members who are free to negotiate their own arrangements.
This is a reference to the ASEAN non-interference policy which allows countries like Myanmar to allegedly persecute Muslim Rohingya without fearing sanctions by member states.
According to Graham the FM’s London speech ‘arguably damns ASEAN with faint praise … (which). leaves the distinct impression that, in Canberra’s view, regional multilateral institutions play a marginal role in upholding the rules-based order.
As a curtain-raiser to the summit Australian Strategic Policy Institute journalism fellow Graeme Dobell has been nudging the idea that Australia and New Zealand should slowly seek to join ASEAN.
Dobell’s ASPI paper Australia as an ASEAN Community partner reasons that ‘as the geostrategic and geo-economic pressures build in Asia, ASEAN, as a middle-power grouping, needs the extra middle-power heft offered by Australia and NZ.
He acknowledges this would face ‘huge degree-of-difficulty handicaps’ and notes no public enthusiasm in the key countries. A Twitter straw poll showed Indonesia and Australia averse, though Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand are in favor.
So where does all this leave Australia? Still fumbling to find its right coordinates. Bishop claims the Great South Land is in the Indo-Pacific, a term not heard in Indonesia which places its neighbor further away in Oceania.
Many Indonesianists want Australia in Southeast Asia while others see the island continent as part of the Anglosphere and the Commonwealth - a view hardened by Bishop’s London speech.
Perhaps she’ll have a different version for the ASEAN leaders’ conference.
First published in Pearls and Irritations 27 February 2018:  See http://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-wheres-ozzie-down-here-or-up-there/