Don’t stir the giant
possum next door
Back in the 1970s presenters on the Australian Broadcasting
Commission (now Corporation) stations were urged to use a ‘mid-Atlantic’
accent.
This ludicrous instruction was designed to please the plumb-in-mouth
British and the quick-lipped Americans. It only succeeded in annoying
Australian nationalists who wanted their own ‘strine’ recognised.
But like the Greek philosopher Plato’s fabled lost land of
Atlantis, the ‘mid-Atlantic’ was also the place where Australians secretly
wished they lived, close to cousins.
That’s still the sad situation as the Federal election
campaign cranks its way to the 2 July climax when more than 15.5 million
citizens will go to the polls. Australia
is one of 22 nations (the majority in Latin America) that make voting
compulsory. Turnout is usually around 95 per cent; the 2012 US Federal election
had a 55 per cent turnout.
Australia has a bicameral parliament with 12 senators
elected from each of the six states plus two each from the two Territories. The
House of Representatives has 125 seats.
In what has been a yawn-inducing eight-week campaign, candidates
have for the most part stuck to scripts prepared by party bosses.
The first televised clash between Labor leader Bill Shorten
and Liberal Malcolm Turnbull - the current Prime Minister - was a Bland v Bland
show. Veteran political journalist Paul Bongiorno called it ‘the most unwatched leaders’ debate in
its 32-year history’.
At the time of writing most pundits reckon Turnbull, backed
by the rural-based National Party, will win the Lower House by a whisker.
However because this is a double-dissolution election with all Senate seats
contested (normally only half the Senators retire every three years) predictions
are best left to those studying chicken entrails. Minor parties may hold sway in the Upper
House.
Unlike the US presidential contest, foreign affairs are
seldom mentioned as the two major contestants gargle the same chants on
domestic affairs – the sacred trinity of more jobs, less tax and higher growth.
Agreed positions include the ANZUS Security Treaty with
America and New Zealand (wholehearted approval), keeping asylum seekers in
detention to deter others (accept with a tweak here and there), and avoid
upsetting Indonesia. Or as Australians
say – don’t stir the possum.
An exception is the minority Greens Party which wants the
offshore detention centres closed and more refugees welcomed, but so far attracted
little support.
Occasionally a maverick breaks ranks. The most important has been Deputy PM and
Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce commenting on Australia halting live beef
shipments to Indonesia in 2011. He
implied this led to a surge in asylum seeker boats carrying Afghans, Iraqis and
Iranians but coming through Indonesia.
As reported in Strategic
Review on 4 April this year, the exports were abruptly stopped by the
former Labor government when activists published videos of gratuitous cruelty
at Indonesian abattoirs. The ban was imposed a few weeks ahead of the fasting
month of Ramadhan when beef is in much demand, infuriating importers and
consumers.
Indonesia, unwilling to feature in its neighbor’s domestic
disputes, denied Joyce’s suggestion. The
minister’s more disciplined colleagues reheated the usual menu of excuses – the
media misreported, the candidate misspoke, words were taken out of context,
blah, blah. But voters nudged, winked
and connected the dots.
Cattle are once again being shipped across the Arafura Sea
and the slaughterhouses have allegedly stopped brutalising stock. Animal
welfare activists want the trade scrapped, but pastoralists are grinning again
under their broad-brimmed hats. Australia is the world’s largest live stock
exporter, and Indonesia the biggest buyer.
It’s the same with wheat, another market Australia is
desperate not to lose; mature politicians know one perceived slight could
reignite anger. The
most inflammatory issue is likely to be West Papua independence. Although Labor
and Liberal swear support for Indonesian control of the province, some
left-wing unions goad Indonesia by flying the Morning Star flag banned in
Indonesia.
Andre Siregar, the Indonesian
consul in Darwin, has reportedly asked for an outdoor mural of the flag to be
erased. The north coast port is home to activists agitating for separatism.
Siregar’s alleged involvement ensured wide coverage and a reminder of
Indonesian intolerance.
Australians can relate to former Canadian PM Pierre
Trudeau’s famous anxiety about being close to the US: ‘Like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and
even-tempered the beast, if one can call it that, one is affected by every
twitch and grunt.’
Indonesia, a former Dutch colony, is not always friendly or even-tempered.
As it’s not part of the Anglosphere few Australians know what to make of their
huge northern neighbor. Around a million enjoy cheap holidays in Bali every
year but few go further than the Hindu island and into Islamic Java where the
real power throbs.
Last year’s Lowy Institute poll revealed Australians’
feelings towards Indonesia. It said these had fallen to ‘the equal lowest point
in our past decade of polling … This places Indonesia on a par with Russia and
Egypt.’
Only 34 per cent of Australians surveyed regard Indonesia as
a democracy, though the world’s fourth largest nation has had that status since
1999.
In the mid 1990s the acerbic Labor PM Paul Keating went to
Jakarta and said: ‘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.’
Astonishingly Keating, an avowed
democrat, got on well with then President Soeharto whose reputation was already
being shredded by students and activists kicking against the dictator’s corruption.
His decision to step down in 1998
amidst widespread riots was followed by Indonesia’s scorched earth withdrawal
from East Timor. Then came the 2002 Bali
bomb and other outrages targeting Westerners.
Australians started rethinking the
Keating doctrine, noting that a reciprocal view never comes from Indonesia.
‘Indonesia is important’ has become a mantra
uttered by every Australian PM since Keating.
Tony Abbott, the man Turnbull overthrew last year, promised his foreign
policy would be ‘more Jakarta, less Geneva’. It wasn’t, and Abbott’s clumsy and
futile attempts to save two Australian drug traffickers from the death penalty
added angst on both sides.
The routine comments about the
relationship will surely be repeated again by whoever wins next month’s
election. The voters will pay little attention; they fear Indonesia is too complex
to comprehend, too weird to fathom and too unpredictable to trust.
It also remains too close for
comfort – a situation unlikely to change this side of the next Ice Age. That
leaves Australians having to ignore the facts, or accept and adjust. Or as they
say in the vernacular: ‘Get real’.
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(First published in Strategic Review 20June 2016 - http://sr-indonesia.com/web-exclusives/view/don-t-stir-the-giant-possum-next-door )
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