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/

FORTRESS AUSTRALIA: WHAT MESSAGE IS BEING SENT?

Brittle bonds, wary views, slow trade: Rethink required               

Just before Easter Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop opened her country’s latest and grandest Embassy.

The AUD 415 million complex covering four hectares of Central Jakarta is being billed as a marvel of modern technology married to sensitive architecture.  There’s even an embrace of greenery and Javanese beliefs with four transplanted banyan trees.

Building colors represent minerals of the Great South Land. The walls are blast resistant; in 2004 a Jemaah Islamiah car bomber killed nine outside the former Embassy.

Bishop banged a gong and pronounced: ‘This is our largest overseas diplomatic post and will be a symbol of the breadth and the depth and the importance of this relationship between Australia and Indonesia’.

These are familiar lyrics which read well but never seem to catch on. ‘Underlying strengths’ and ‘bilateral ballast’ are other timeworn diplomatic standards, but not Golden Oldies. As Ross Taylor, President of Perth’s Indonesia Institute points out, ballast doesn’t help a ship go anywhere.

Inside the Forbidden City are tennis courts, a medical center, club and 34 four-bedroom apartments. A boon for some of the 500 staff who won’t have to dodge the Big Durian’s waspish   motorcycle swarms, wade flooded streets and share the travel dramas of millions of commuters.

Following a tough day at the keyboard first, second and third secretaries can do lazy laps in the chlorinated pool not far from Ciliwung and its black tributaries which the poor use as laundries and lavatories. 

Sometimes they might get a whiff of kretek (clove cigarettes) blown over the battlements from the mysterious kampongs beyond. Or hear azan, the ancient calls to prayer from mosques nearby.

Is Fortress Australia the right model for overseas engagement in the Internet Age, particularly with the people next door? Big isn’t necessarily better.

The days of translators gluing press clippings have gone the way of the fax and cassette tapes, along with chanceries spiked with aerials. Video conferences miss the subtle messages passed through handshakes, but they’re far cheaper and time efficient.

Professionals in Australasia are no longer tethered to static desks. Mobile offices are a smartphone and laptop hooked into the staffer’s HQ mainframe from wherever a decent coffee is brewed. 

Counsellors and envoys scattered across Jakarta’s sprawl deny terrorists the big targets; the foreigners can mix with the locals, squabble about soccer instead of cricket, and see the view from the street, not the satellite.

Posted for three years, attaches analyse data, massage files and interpret reports.  Their views and advice help craft policy in Canberra. This principally concerns the STD that infects Indonesian-Australian relationships – Security, Trade and Defence. 

As an aside they mention aid, less so since the budget was slashed by 40 per cent, and the amorphous people-to-people relationships.

Last year Malcolm Turnbull popped into Jakarta on his way to Europe and showed how to relate, more by accident than design.  It was his first visit as Prime Minister, seven months after Ambassador Paul Grigson was withdrawn when reformed drug traffickers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumara were executed.

A high point of the stopover was accompanying President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo on one of his signature blusukan through a crowded and chaotic market.  The walkabout delighted Indonesians surprised that a tie-free foreigner was meeting and greeting the wong cilik (ordinary folk).

Cynical Australians assumed the PM was being mistaken for George Clooney; who’d clap a politician they’d never elect?  Sweaty Turnbull yanked off his jacket, grinned a lot and snapped selfies. Security looked hot and bothered.

The trip was a gate-opener for Trade Minister Andrew Robb and 360 business folk clutching order books.  Major deals have yet to be trumpeted.  As the Australians flew home a 1000-strong Japanese delegation jetted in with big construction projects in mind.  They got to meet Jokowi – a favor denied Robb’s Mob.

Before Krismon the 1998 Asian economic storm that toppled President Soeharto’s 32 years of military-backed power, 400 Australian companies operated across the archipelago.  Now there are 250.

Robb wants 750, but the journey will be all uphill.  Australian directors are wary about risking funds in a country where the rule of law is exercised by might and mates. Corruption has deep roots drawing from the nation’s aquifer of graft.  Positions on foreign investments are acrobatic and Jokowi’s mindset hard to fathom.  Indonesians have the same problem.

Opportunities abound.  Two-way trade is worth AUD 16 billion a year, less than tiny Malaysia with only 12 per cent of its neighbor’s population.  

Indonesia is hungry for Australian wheat and beef, administrative expertise and smart technologies. But problems are also abundant – the business arena is seldom fair and flat.  White line boundaries are smudged. Spectators and players interchange and the goal posts can be erected anywhere. Or nowhere.

Indonesia ranks 109^th on the World Bank’s ease-of-doing-business list.   Singapore is tops and Australia number 13.

There’s hope a fresh recruit might give the whole show a shake.  Harvard-educated Thomas Lembong is the new Trade Minister recruited last year in a Cabinet shake up that favored technocrats over politicians.  He’s been in Australia claiming the tide of protectionism which has washed deep into the national psyche is now retreating.

If he’s right then foreign funds may start to flow.  They are needed – the growth rate is around 4.7 per cent (Australia’s is three per cent).  The Indonesian figure sounds phenomenal till measured against the World Bank estimate of eight per cent needed to meet domestic demands from 250 million consumers.

Lembong, a former investment banker, has been polishing the idea of a Free Trade Agreement with talks scheduled for later this year.  If fruitful this Indonesian initiative will be some accomplishment.  A similar attempt four years ago collapsed under the weight of misunderstandings, misjudgements and some gross gaffes.

Here’s one story: In 2010 Jokowi’s predecessor Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono gave a speech to the National Parliament in Canberra.  Local media called it ‘forthright’, ‘touching’ and ‘transformative’.  

"Australia and Indonesia have a great future together,” he said. “We are not just neighbours, we are not just friends. We are strategic partners. We are equal stake-holders in a common future, with much to gain if we get this relationship right, and much to lose if we get it wrong.”

The wrong rapidly followed when SBY discovered that his phone and that of his wife Ani had been tapped by Australian spies.  The leader of the world’s third largest democracy was outraged and so were the citizens.  To his credit SBY maintained his Javanese cool and is now a visiting professor at the University of Western Australia.

More blunders followed, like the abrupt halt of cattle exports following reports of cruelty, leaving consumers short. The most recent clanger was authored by former PM Tony Abbott.  Recalling support for the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami he linked this generosity to an unsuccessful plea to stay the firing squad taking aim at Chan and Sukumaran.

Sore from smarting under Dutch rule for 350 years, Indonesians are on 24/7 alert for real or imagined remnants of colonialism, well aware their neighbor once ran a White Australia policy. They started collecting coins to pay back the aid.

The Embassy can’t be blamed for every offence, but some errors have been so stupid and damaging it seems either diplomats aren’t heard or are serving bad advice from flawed sources.

Saying Australia needs Indonesia more than the reverse is a cliché with limited truth. Although politicians on either side of the Arafura Sea tend to focus on parochial and separate interests, the far-sighted recognise that common concerns should prevail. 

China’s military expansion worries both nations. There’s already been one high-sea clash with the Chinese allegedly using force to recover a fishing boat seized by Indonesia. Threats are unlikely to come through the Southern Ocean. Indonesia needs solid friends in the region, as does Australia. 

The ten-member ASEAN (‘One Vision, One Identity, One Community’) should be a backer but has become what Indonesians call a NATO – No Action, Talk Only encounter. It’s neither an Asian version of the original acronym nor the common market and regional powerhouse once imagined.

Apart from foods, fuels, raw materials, tourists and services, what do Indonesians seek from Down Under? According to Allan Behm, former senior public servant turned security analyst and commentator, Indonesians want ‘respect, understanding, support, quiet engagement and constructive advocacy of their growing role as a regional and global player’.

Instead they get a citadel of ballast paraded as ‘a symbol of the breadth and the depth and the importance of the relationship’. 

Three years ago Australian National University Professor of Strategic Studies Hugh White wrote: ‘Australia not only needs a new kind of relationship with Indonesia, but a new way of thinking about foreign policy’.  The needs remain.

(First published in Strategic Review 4 April 2016,  See: http://sr-indonesia.com/web-exclusives/view/what-next-for-indonesia-and-australia )

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EMPTY WORDS PLACATE

Bland words to save face   

                                    

It’s taken nine months to produce just 311 words that are supposed to create an ‘understanding on a code of conduct’ for security cooperation between Indonesia and Australia following spying revelations.

Note this is not a code of conduct, but an ‘understanding on’ a code of conduct’.  Not even an ‘understanding of..’ This isn’t English, its bafflegab.

With an output of just over one word a day, authors would have been sacked by their publishers; newspapers employing journalists with this level of productivity would have collapsed.

But this much heralded slice of bureaucratise signed last week (28 Aug) by two foreign ministers, Marty Natalegawa for Indonesia and Julie Bishop for Australia, was never going to be a Lincolnian call to higher purpose.

Its purpose was twofold - to save face, and let outgoing President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) retire next month (Oct) with grace having recovered his pride,  clearing the scrub for an academic position in Australia.  

Last year former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden - brave whistleblower or despicable traitor, depending on your perspective - revealed in The New York Times that Australia had been spying on its nearest neighbor.

Not just eavesdropping suspected bomb-makers but also the phones of SBY -  “a dear and trusted friend” according to Ms Bishop - and his wife of 38 years Kristiani Herawati.   The excuse? It was rumoured she’d been plotting to keep the presidency in the family.

Imagine the fury if we’d found that Indonesia’s intelligence agencies had been listening to Margie Abbott’s intimate chats with her spouse to learn about Liberal pre-selections.  We’d be expelling the Indonesian ambassador and half his colleagues.

Unsurprisingly Indonesians were not amused, yet their reaction was surprisingly restrained. Ambassador Nadjib Riphat Kesoema was withdrawn from Canberra and cooperation in some areas was put on hold. There were small demonstrations outside the Jakarta Embassy, but ambassador Greg Moriarty stayed put.

When authoritarian General Soeharto ruled Indonesia, Australian tourist flights to Bali were turned back when a 1986 newspaper article offended the president. That hurt.

Seasoned observers in both nations agree the August signing changes little; earlier demands for an Australian apology have not been met.  The Jakarta Post editor Meidyatama Suryodiningrat wrote that the document “presents little new other than to smooth over a political rift without really reducing suspicions or even furthering the trust between the two neighbours.”

However he did concede that the ‘joint understanding’ made it easier for president elect Joko Widodo (Jokowi) to start afresh in relations with the Republic’s southern neighbour.

The document has two clauses:

·                    The Parties will not use any of their intelligence, including surveillance capacities, or other sources, in ways that would harm the interests of the Parties.

·                    The Parties will promote intelligence cooperation between relevant institutions and agencies in accordance with their respective national laws and regulations.

What does this mean? Who defines ‘harm’ and how is it measured?  It’s a subjective term. What interests?  Clearly it’s an agreement a lawyer’s clerks could shred.  If it had been a tin of beans shoppers would be demanding a refund having found the can empty.

There are references back to the 2006 Lombok Treaty, a ten-point agreement tagged as a ‘framework for security cooperation’. 

Despite the grand title this is another pedestrian paper. It gives either party opportunities to create their own meanings of open-ended phrases like ‘endeavouring to foster’ and cooperation ‘within the limits of their responsibility.’  If there’s a dispute the English text prevails.

Despite the flaws this is probably as good as it gets when it comes to negotiating agreements between two such radically different nations, cultures and political agendas.

A hard-nosed Indonesian negotiator might have pushed for no spying or trade sanctions would be imposed.  Australia needs Indonesia far more than the reverse. But that was only going to happen with a new administration in Jakarta keen to display its machismo.

SBY, constantly lauded as the best Indonesian president Australia has had, was not inclined to be assertive, wanting settlement before his compulsory retirement after two five-year terms. 

The Indonesian electorate’s interest had also swung to other issues in the wake of the contested presidential election result.

This ensured Australian hands stayed on the keyboard for the word-a-day essay. If there are any Indonesian fingerprints on the page they’re not visible to the naked eye.

First published in On Line Opinion on 2 September 2014 http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=16642