PEOPLE TO PEOPLE LINKS: ARE WE SERIOUS? ARE THEY?

Building mateship, not subs                                               Duncan Graham

Last century American Senator William Fulbright (right), who founded the exceptional international exchange programme that bears his name said:

In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.

A few weeks ago academics William Maley and Bambang Nugroho  wrote in The Jakarta Post that the way back to normality was through leadership of ‘skilled professionals’.

This has been a common theme since Australia’s Ambassador Paul Grigson was recalled following the executions of drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Don’t fret, the argument runs, now the Ambassador is back in his Jakarta fortress the diplomats will get the Indonesia-Australia relationship back on the road again provided, as Prime Minister Tony Abbott says, journalists don’t get in the way.

This is a seriously flawed assumption.

Diplomats follow the policies of politicians who take their cues from the public mood.  They can’t ‘lead’ anything.  I think they helped get us into this mess by misreading the character and philosophy of Indonesia’s new President, the uncompassionate Joko [Jokowi] Widodo.

The path forward won’t come from professionals in bombproof shelters but suburban folk seeing for themselves how their neighbors live, understanding their values and appreciating what’s really happening next door.

Five years ago former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono  (left) asked the Australian Parliament for a more constructive relationship, unaware our spies were eavesdropping his wife Ani’s phone.

His words were described as ‘forthright and touching’, ‘transformative and moving’. His appeal inspired; fresh schemes followed, old ones blossomed.  While officials pondered individuals took action.

Among them was Perth journalist and historian Dr Frank Palmos who has done more than a talkfest of cultural attaches to improve our image in Indonesia.  He’s achieved this by writing Sacred Territory, the definitive history of the Battle of Surabaya and then using his own money to have the book translated into Indonesian.

Around 5,000 copies should be released on 10 November, the 70th anniversary of that nation-defining event, and published by a major newspaper chain. 

Palmos’ determination to help our neighbours get to know their real history instead of the one constructed by the late President Soeharto has earned him enormous respect. Fortunately he’s not alone. 

In 2010 former Western Australian Trade Commissioner Ross Taylor gathered a group of like-minded volunteers to start the Indonesia Institute  offering an alternative tough-love voice to balance the constrained views of government.  It’s become the go-to source for informed comment outside officialdom.

Retired social worker and public servant Peter Johnston (right) initiated the Bamboo Micro Credit scheme in 2007  to offer interest-free loans to small entrepreneurs. It now lends millions of rupiah in three cities and is expanding as ordinary Australians donate small sums to fund the initiative.

There are many other examples – these are just ones I can vouch for personally.  Never underestimate the power of a determined individual.

However a clear-eyed look at the official schemes show they’ve been too few and small for any deep and lasting impact. 

Although the Joko Widodo administration seems to have sidelined SBY’s hopes, both nations need to engage beyond the professionals’ issues of aid, trade and barricade.  These are important, but they’re not the stuff of chats in the bus.

True friendship requires trust and the best way is through talking to people across the street, understanding their quirks and concerns, applauding  their achievements, empathising with their difficulties.

It’s true in my kampong and your suburb; it’s true in our world.

The Australia-Indonesia Bridge School Partnership  is a splendid project.  It started seven years ago and funding ends this year.  So far 112 schools have been involved along with more than 450 teachers.

Certainly not to be rubbished. But put this in perspective; there are about 32 million primary students in Indonesia attending 150,000 schools. Way to go.

The prestigious New Colombo Plan  is another fine idea, this year helping 60 of Australia’s smartest undergraduates learn in locations throughout the Asia Pacific Region. There are many other scholarships.

Top of the schemes has to be the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies driven by a small group of dedicated academics led by Murdoch University’s Professor David Hill. It’s been running for 20 years and has helped more than 1,600 undergraduates get to know their neighbours. 

More than 900,000 Australians are studying at Australian tertiary institutions.  Not all are interested in overseas cultural studies, or Indonesia. Let’s assume just one tenth of one per cent.  That’s 900 – and ACICIS is handling 80 a year.

There are eleven Indonesians for every Australian so there’s a limit to how much one country can do.  But on these figures Australia isn’t even coming within coo-ee of having meaningful contact on any scale.

Yet this worrying situation could be vastly and easily improved:  Not through spending big money - but by eliminating barriers.

Australia has agreements with 31 nations to offer visas allowing young people to wander and work in Australia for up to a year.  Many Australians will have met European and East Asian backpackers under this scheme and made lasting friendships.  All now have a better appreciation of each other’s cultures.

Such encounters are not surprising as last year almost 240,000 visas were issued. They’re commonly known as Working Holiday visas, - though the official term  is Working Holiday Maker; to further confuse there are two classes – Working Holiday class 417 and Work and Holiday class 462. 

This latter group includes Indonesia and caps the number at 1,000.  This visa requires applicants to have functional English, have completed two years undergraduate study and – these are the curly ones – AUD 5,000 [Rp 53 million] and ‘a letter of home government support’.

These restrictions do not apply to applicants from the Working Holiday class countries.

Last year only 436 Indonesians were successful. Anecdotally they find the financial and government approval fences too high to leap. The visa costs AUD 420 [Rp 4.4 million] and chest x rays aren’t on long weekend specials.

 So the applicants Australia needs and who would benefit most, the smart but poor, the incandescent visionaries with no friends in Jakarta’s high places or fathers in the army, these kids aren’t getting to see the country next door and the chance to erase myths and hang-ups.

The visa scheme is reciprocal, but unbalanced. Eighteen months ago a seminar co-sponsored by the government-supported Australia Indonesia Youth Association   heard that between 10 and 14 visas had been issued to young Australians, though many had applied.  It seems the kids are keen, but the bureaucrats are not.

The irony is that these walls, topped by broken glass, have been built by governments saying they want more people-to-people contacts.

Tourism is supposed to expand the mind with rich experiences helping the traveller better comprehend the world’s complexities.   To visit Australia Indonesians must answer 52 questions on a 17-page visa application paper form.

In June Indonesian sculptor Ono Gaf (left) spent time in Perth visiting galleries and fellow artists.

Australian friends raised money for his travel and other expenses.  The total was AUD 865.   The biggest expense was not the airline tickets but the visa. It cost AUD 408.

It would have been less if Ono hadn’t applied through an agent or had his first application rejected; his sponsor’s letter guaranteeing accommodation and ensuring he used his pre-paid return ticket was deemed insufficient security.

No appeal allowed.  No correspondence.   Your money has gone.  Start again.

Earlier he’d visited Singapore on a similar mission.  No visa required yet that nation state is just as paranoid about public safety - and has even experienced Indonesian terrorists bombing the city during first president Soekarno’s Konfrontasi venture. (left)

Had Ono been a citizen of Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania or 33 other countries his visa would have been free.

Last year 150,000 Indonesians arrived as tourists. Double that number came from Malaysia, and even more from Singapore.  Citizens of both nations apply for visas on line and pay AUD 20 [Rp 210,000].

Our priorities are not advancing arm-in-arm, but buying arms. We are planning to spend at least AUD 36 billion on new submarines, maybe ready for 2030. If they are ever built they may protect us against enemies yet to be imagined – though it seems the government has read the Murdoch Press which has Indonesia not a friend but a potential threat -  ‘armed and dangerous’.

By comparison, next to nothing is being spent on improving relationships in the here and now.  Back to the words of the late Senator Fulbright and the submarines – the greatest security comes when we understand each other.

The business of creating that understanding isn’t just the task of ‘skilled professionals’, or governments.  It’s your job, it’s my job, it’s our job.

(This is an edited version of a paper presented at the Indonesia Council’s eighth open conference held at Geelong’s Deakin University in early July.  Australian author and journalist Duncan Graham lives in East Java. He’s been contributing to The Jakarta Post for the past decade.)    

This paper has also been published in New Mandala:

http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2015/07/07/building-mateship-not-subs/

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NO P FOR PLAN IN P TO P

Getting more students into Indonesia                              

At last Australia has got a guernsey, as we say, meaning we’ve scored a place in the Indonesian presidential debate, albeit late and brief.

Both candidates made inoffensive statements about the relationship between an over-populated archipelago and a near-empty continent during their third debate.  Joko Widodo (Jokowi) said the issue was trust, which is true.  This is a fragile quality that has to be earned, not bought, or even wished into existence by a politician.

Prabowo Subianto said Australians suffer from Indophobia, which is also correct - though the more appropriate word migh be ‘Islamophobia’. News about Indonesia frequently opens with the line ‘the world’s most populous Islamic nation’ so ‘Indonesia’ and ‘Islam’ are regularly conflated in the electorate’s mind.

Either way the zephyr from the Great South Land that’s been rustling the leaves in Menteng was a sigh of relief, not a climatic event.  Neither candidate had used the moment to start a fresh round of Australia bashing. 

Unless an Aussie druggie gets executed before 9 July, West Papuans land in Darwin seeking asylum or spies are caught bugging cellphones, it seems relationships between Jakarta and Canberra will be too far down the candidates’ lists to warrant spending further breath.

The debate could not have given a clearer example of the differences between the two nations.  In last year’s Australian election campaign Liberal leader Tony Abbott declared his foreign policy would be “less Geneva, more Jakarta.”

Before he’d had time to sink back into the leather of the Prime Minister’s limo he was deplaning at Soekarno-Hatta. At the time stopping Indonesian-flagged asylum-seeker boats was the boiling issue in Australia, though tepid for most Indonesians.

Now the presidential candidates, having already canvassed issues as diverse as the weight of military tanks through to encouraging animation, have got around to discussing their wary neighbor and the need for mateship.  Sadly neither man has offered any firm ideas on meeting these laudable hopes.

Last year former Australian PM Julia Gillard announced her Asian Century policy.  This included encouraging young Australians to study in Southeast Asia so the next generation won’t suffer from the phobias articulated in the TV debate.

Now Ms Gillard is political history only remnants of her policy remain.  Welcome the New Colombo Plan which offers scholarships and grants of up to AUD $5,000 (Rp 57 million) for undergraduates to study in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia.

It’s a fine idea though so far a total of only 300 grants have been offered.  Just five of the 40 full scholarships announced so far will be used in Indonesia.  More will follow and the number of countries will expand in what Australia likes to call the Indo-Pacific Region.

Australian academics report their students are keen on Indonesia, but frustrated by cumbersome visa procedures.  Applicants are treated as workers needing a Kartu Izin Tinggal Terbatas (KITAS Limited Stay Visa).  Their cases are handled by the Department of Manpower. 

This means a humble undergraduate seeking to bolster her language skills in a cramped Yogya classroom is handled like a foreign CEO wanting to run a multinational atop a Jakarta high rise and needing to persuade authorities that a local can’t do the job.

Last year more than 17,000 Indonesians were enrolled in Australian teaching institutions. The imbalance is appalling: Though the numbers are inching up, fewer than 500 Australians are studying in Indonesia, against 2,000 in China.

Professor David Hill, director of the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies (ACICIS), said it takes up to four months “and a very substantial bureaucratic effort” to get a visa.

"This makes it difficult for students wanting to negotiate their own way into Indonesian schools and universities, he said.

During the detail-free TV debate Jokowi talked about prioritizing diplomacy “through education and culture.”

Have the candidates’ back-room policy wonks got no creative proposals?  How about reversing and going beyond Australia’s commendable, though tiny, New Colombo Plan by offering unlimited student visas to young Australians willing to enrol in Indonesian schools and universities – and fast track the procedures?

In the archipelago they could learn their neighbor’s culture and language, tuition that’s getting harder to find in their homeland as enrolments tumble and courses close.

Two years ago Professor Hill told the Australian government that if the decline in teaching Indonesian continues, expertise in Indonesia will be extinct within ten years. Where better to study the language than in the Republic?

Jokowi talked about “P to P” relationships.  Presumably P = People and not poultry or potatoes, though in politics any interpretation is possible.

Here’s P for Plan - a chance for Indonesia to seize the initiative, kick aside the bureaucratic barriers and invite Australians to study here. Imagine - Indonesia as an income-earning education destination, not a departure lounge. Wouldn’t that build trust and help eliminate the phobias?

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